This article is focused on a magazine called Jambo, which was published by the British East Africa Command for troops in its employ between 1942 and 1945. Jambo was an agglomeration of political articles, general interest stories, propaganda, cartoons, crosswords, and more, with many of its contributions authored (or drawn) by men serving in the Allied forces. Here, I use Jambo to consider notions of the “colonial” and “imperial” during the Second World War, exploring how the realities of racial segregation in the colonies fit awkwardly with imperial service. Jambo also permits us a window into the views of some hundreds of British servicemen, who wrote extensively about the Africans with whom they served, revealing the complexities and shifts in British perceptions of African peoples during the conflict. Jambo is unique in another respect: it also provided a forum for African troops. In few other publications—and even fewer with such wide circulation—could educated (but nonelite) African peoples reach thousands of British readers. Though their published letters and articles were few compared to those written by Jambo's British authors, African writers used the venue to critique the conditions of their military service, argue about the sort of social ordering they desired in their home communities, and create an alternate narrative of the war. Like most colonial publications, Jambo had intended audiences, but also voracious, additional, alternate publics that mediated the articles which appeared in its pages. All this suggests that we might think of the colonial public sphere as both local and global, inward and outward looking, personal and communal, and situated along a continuum between colonial and imperial contexts.

本文的重点是一本名为《Jambo》的杂志，该杂志由英国东非司令部在1942年至1945年之间为其士兵提供服务。Jambo是政治文章，一般兴趣故事，宣传，漫画，填字游戏等等的聚集，其许多贡献是由在盟军中服役的人创作（或提取）的。在这里，我使用詹博（Jambo）考虑了第二次世界大战期间“殖民”和“帝国”的概念，探讨了殖民地种族隔离的现实如何与帝国服务尴尬地融合在一起。詹博还允许我们了解数百名英国军人的观点，这些军人广泛地描述了与他们一起服务的非洲人，揭示了冲突期间英国人对非洲人民的看法的复杂性和转变。詹博在另一个方面是独一无二的：它还为非洲军队提供了一个论坛。在其他一些出版物中（甚至发行量如此之少的出版物中，甚至更少），可以教育（但不是精英）的非洲人民接触到成千上万的英国读者。尽管他们发表的信件和文章与詹博撰写的信件和文章相比很少非洲作家的英国作家，非洲作家使用该场所来批评其服役情况，争论他们在自己的家乡社区中所期望的那种社会秩序，并为战争另辟na径。像大多数殖民地出版物一样，詹博既有目标受众，也有贪婪的，其他的，替代的公众，他们对网页上的文章进行了调解。所有这些表明，我们可能认为殖民地公共领域既是本地的又是全球的，向内和向外看，是个人的，也是公共的，位于殖民地和帝国背景之间的连续区域上。