Historicizing Power and Responses to Power: Indirect Rule and Its Reform

Social Research, Fall, 1999 by Mahmood Mamdani

Like ethnicity, race too was an identity of power and of resistance. As political identities, both were structured by contradictory moments, power tending to social control and resistance to social emancipation. And yet, this does not mean that one only need separate moments of resistance from moments of control, so as to identify what to embrace and what to reject. Rather, ethnicity and race need to be problematized, not just as identities of power but also as identities of resistance. I shall underline this lesson through an analysis of post-independence efforts to reform the two faces of colonial power, on the one hand a racialized regime of rights, and on the other an ethnicized regime of custom. My point is to underline the tension generated by a context in which power is defined in the singular while the population subject to it is defined in the plural, a context in which civic power is defined as racial but civil society is multiracial and where customary power is legitimized as ethnic but the population it governs is multi-ethnic. To the extent the contours of resistance generated in these contexts reproduced the contours of power as so many birthmarks, one would need to ask: what is the unintended consequence of a racialized resistance against civic authority, and an ethnicized resistance against Native Authorities?

The Trajectories of Post-Independence Reform

It is striking that every nationalist government in post-colonial Africa had roughly the same core agenda: the de-racialization of civil society. Independence deracialized the state, but not civil society. From the nationalist point of view, civil society harbored ill-gotten racial privilege. Those racially victimized began to look to the newly deracialized state as the only effective vehicle to carry forward the struggle for justice. Not surprisingly and in tempo, racially-associated privilege tried to shake off the stigma of race and to defend itself in the language of civil society, calling for a color-blind defense of institutional autonomy and individual rights. The struggle for justice took two forms: nationalization in the "radical" states, and privatization ("Africanization") in the "conservative" states.

Conservative Reform and "Customary' Power

Whereas de-racialization turned out to be part of the agenda of every post-independence regime, the same could not be said of de-ethnicization. Here, there was a clear difference between two regime types: the "conservative" and the "radical." In conservative states, the hierarchy of the local state apparatus--of chiefs who enforced "customary" law in the Native Authorities--continued after independence as before it. It was reproduced unproblematically, as part of tradition. The chief remained the enforcer of this peculiarly authoritarian version of tradition, his powers still a clenched fist, fusing as one its legislative, executive, judicial and administrative moments. In this context, even if the central state was reorganized as a representative parliamentary democracy, the local state continued to function as a decentralized despotism. The same peasants who could elect their representative in parliament had little choice about who would be their chief wielding despotic power on the ground.