Political Order and Political Decay (49 page)

The thinness of the European presence in Africa during the height of colonialism is truly astonishing.
Table 3
gives the number of administrators for select regions, showing that the ratio of administrators to population ranged from a high of 1 for every 18,900 in Kenya (where a large white settler population required greater attention), to a low of 1 for every 54,000 in Nigeria and Cameroon.

TABLE 3.
Density of European Administrators in Africa

The extreme thinness of the European presence virtually guaranteed that the colonial administration would have to rely on a hierarchy of chiefs, village elders, headmen, clerks, translators, and other black officials to do the actual work of government. Treasuries in the metropolitan capitals were not interested in subsidizing their impoverished territories; in the words of Earl Grey, “The surest test for the soundness of measures for the improvement of an uncivilised people is that they should be self-sufficient.” As many observers have pointed out, indirect rule was less a novel policy than simply a recognition of the reality of British administration on the ground. These facts alone suggest that the institutional legacy of colonialism would not be strong, centralized states, since Britain was setting something of the opposite—the preservation of customary law—as its explicit policy goal. It was, as historian Sara Berry describes it, “hegemony on a shoestring.”
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THE SEARCH FOR “NATIVE LAW AND CUSTOM”

There was something superficially appealing about indirect rule in the British colonies. In contrast to the French, whose objective was assimilation of their colonies into a single homogeneous French empire, Lugard's theory had a moral component. He argued that rather than trying to turn Africans into second-rate Europeans, they ought to be ruled under their own laws and customs through traditional sources of authority. This was in line with the practice of many earlier empires, which realized that they could not export their own institutions to people of very different cultural backgrounds. The aspiration to recover local tradition led to a scramble to uncover what was termed “native law and custom.” Whatever else one might say about the search for tradition, it gave a tremendous boost to the new field of anthropology, where colonial governments promoted the work of researchers such as Charles Meek and E. E. Evans-Pritchard who sought to identify “authentic” legal traditions.
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This was far easier said than done. European colonial officials assumed, according to Berry, “that African communities consisted of mutually exclusive sociocultural units—tribes, villages, kin groups—whose customs and structures had not changed very much over time.”
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This was appropriate for certain parts of Africa like Northern Nigeria (where Lugard had direct experience), whose Muslim emirates actually had written laws and established administrative systems. But it didn't work for much of the rest of Africa, where tribal identities were overlapping and in constant flux. In many regions, colonial officials were hard-pressed to find a tribal “chief” to whom they could delegate authority, and in such situations they created one, sometimes by simply elevating the houseboy or aide of the district officer. Indeed, following the belief that “every African belonged to a tribe,” the colonial authorities created tribes where none existed, “working through a mishmash of ethnic affiliations to create ‘purer' and clearer tribal identities as the basis for tribal authorities.”
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This “invention of tradition,” in Terence Ranger's words, was based on a profound misunderstanding of African society:

In comparing European neo-traditions with the customary in Africa the whites were certainly comparing unlike with unlike. European invented traditions were marked by their inflexibility. They involved sets of recorded rules and procedures—like the modern coronation rites. They gave reassurance because they represented what was unchanging in a period of flux …

Almost all recent studies of nineteenth-century pre-colonial Africa have emphasized that far from there being a single “tribal” identity, most Africans moved in and out of multiple identities, defining themselves at one moment as subject to this chief, at another moment as a member of that cult, at another moment as part of this clan, and at yet another moment as an initiate in that professional guild.
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The effect of indirect rule, then, was not to achieve a modernizing objective in terms of the development of indigenous institutions but to freeze in place an imagined set of power relationships.

Mahmood Mamdani has gone further, to charge that the tyrannical postindependence Big Man was largely the product of the “decentralized despotism” created by indirect rule. The British had two long-term economic policy objectives that indirect rule was meant to serve. First, they sought to convert customary land tenure into modern property rights, at the behest of both commercial agricultural interests and white settlers. Modern property rights are formal, freely alienable, and held by individuals or by legal entities operating as individuals. As elaborated in Volume 1, customary land tenure is a complex informal system of private property rights, sometimes mistakenly said to be communal in the sense of a Communist collective farm. Traditional customary property is intimately connected with the kinship system and heavily entailed by kin obligations; individuals usually are not free to alienate their holdings.
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The chief in particular does not have any right to alienate land. While customary property in this sense once existed in barbarian Europe, the feudal property rights that prevailed in the European Middle Ages were more modern in the sense of being formal, contractual, and individual. Moving from a customary to a modern land tenure system was therefore much more revolutionary than the shift from feudal to modern land tenure in Europe; it involved huge changes within the authority structure of the kin groups involved. When colonial authorities sought to buy land from customary owners, they found no one actually in charge who had the authority to alienate property. One reason to create a subordinate tribal chief under indirect rule was to empower an African equivalent of a European feudal lord who had the authority to alienate communal property into a modern property rights system.
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A second reason for empowering indigenous chiefs was to serve as tax collectors. All colonial governments established poll or capitation taxes on each male in the colony to raise revenues so that the colony could pay for its own administration. But they served another purpose as well: by making subjects pay a tax in cash, they were encouraged to move out of the bush and into the cash economy where they could serve as a labor force for European commercial agriculture. The chief function of the new native authorities thus came to be tax collection, which they could enforce much more effectively when given modern weapons and backed by threats of coercion from colonial armies. The Europeans were thus imposing their own models of political authority on societies organized very differently.

Mamdani argues that the new chiefs were as a consequence far more despotic than true traditional authorities. Tribal societies tend to be consensual and egalitarian, with plenty of checks on the power of the Big Man. He quotes an exchange in 1881 between the Cape Commission on Native Laws and Customs in South Africa and the former Zulu king Cetshwayo, leader of a society long held to be the most absolutist in Africa:

As the king of the Zulus, was all power invested in you, as king, over your subjects?

—In conjunction with the chiefs of the land.

How did the chiefs derive their power from you as king?

—The king calls together the chiefs of the land when he wants to elect a new chief, and asks their advice as to whether it is fit to make such a man a large chief, and if they say “yes” the chief is made …

Is a man killed for trying to kill a king?

—He is simply fined cattle, and is talked to very severely …

What is the punishment for a man deserting from his tribe?

—If the chief of his district had given him any property he would be asked by the chief to return that property, and then he would be at liberty to go.
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According to Mamdani, the new chiefs established under British indirect rule were far more authoritarian than the Zulu king, having the powers associated with a modern European state: the power to unilaterally take title to land, the power to extract taxes, and the power to make formal law and to punish crimes. Thus while central colonial governments may have seemed extremely weak, they set up a far more dictatorial system on a local level, one that was freed of the checks and balances that existed in truly traditional African societies. They also established a bright line between citizens and subjects: the first were white settlers (and occasionally mixed-race or Asian populations) who were given access to modern legal systems, with their attendant rights and privileges, while the latter were subject to invented customary law. Legal pluralism masked the fact that the rights of white settlers would be protected much more carefully than those of black Africans. And Africans were never given leave to truly apply their own law as they wished. Customary law had to be in accord with European morals, which barred certain practices as repugnant (suttee, the burning of widows in India, was perhaps the most famous case of this). The ultimate expression of this double standard would be the apartheid regime in South Africa.
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The views of Ranger, Mamdani, and others on the malign effects of indirect rule and invented tradition have been sharply debated. Thomas Spear argues that the ability of European officials to manipulate African society—in effect, creating dictators, tribes, ethnic identities, and the like where none existed before—has been greatly exaggerated. New traditions, in order to be accepted, had to be based on something actually already existing in the culture. Nor did they simply freeze things in time; there was a constant process of adaptation between rulers and ruled that generated “unresolvable debates over the interpretation of tradition and its meaning for colonial governance and economic activity.” While some new tribal chiefs acted like dictators, others tried to soften European demands, faking tax rolls or shielding individuals from colonial justice. In order to exercise authority, local agents had to seek legitimacy, which generally means trying to incorporate the interests and wishes of the ruled. It was not just chiefs but also interpreters and personal aides who mediated between the white district officer and local populations. Social-engineering efforts that sought to combine, move, or separate different tribes often failed. Far from manipulating African societies, it was the Europeans who were often manipulated by Africans. Administrators seeking to understand “customary” rules were told stories that benefited particular African power holders or interests, and they were too naïve or ignorant to know better. In the words of Karen Fields, “Indirect rule was a way of making the colonial state a consumer of power generated within the customary order. It did not transfer real power from the Crown to African rulers. Just the inverse: Real power issued from the ruled.”
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The truth in this debate probably lies somewhere in between: the colonial authorities were able to impose their wishes in certain cases, while Africans were able to exert agency in resisting it in others. Compared to the Europeans who conquered the New World, however, the overall institutional imprint of colonialism was much shallower.

This complex process is evident in Kenya, a country that has been racked in recent years by bloody ethnic conflict. Today's ethnic groups—Kikuyus, Kalenjin, Luo, etc.—did not really exist as such before the territory was taken over as a British protectorate. The colonial authorities clearly came to use ethnicity as a means of controlling Kenya's population, but they did not “create” ethnic identities out of whole cloth. What they did was set in motion a process of slow economic modernization that created identity on a broader basis, and then formalized ethnic identification as an instrument of rule. The gradual absorption of rural Kenyans into a market economy demanded social relatedness at higher levels of aggregation. Thus two Kikuyus from different segments meeting in rural Kenya might regard each other as strangers, but would see themselves as co-ethnics when meeting in Nairobi and rubbing up against a Kalenjin or Luo.

In the end, then, the legacy of indirect rule was mixed. It did produce local despotisms, misrule, and injustice, but on a local level as well as on a central one the power of the colonial state was not strong enough to achieve routine compliance with the state's wishes. By trying to adapt to local conditions, the colonial authorities got more buy-in from local populations. But they also frequently misunderstood what those local conditions were, and failed to understand that many Africans wanted to acquire modern property and participate in the broader market economy.
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Indirect rule had no application in the growing urban areas of Africa, where new sources of identity like ethnicity and class were taking shape. As a result, the Europeans were taken by surprise by the new nationalist movements that suddenly appeared in the 1940s and '50s, which did not want a return to tradition but sought to move forward to independence and national sovereignty. Today, Northern Nigeria, the region where indirect rule was invented, is significantly poorer than the southern half of the country, which was more exposed to modernizing forces.