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

Social Research, Fall, 1999 by Mahmood Mamdani

In this paper, I focus on race and ethnicity as political identities reproduced by particular forms of power. While the context of my argument is colonial rule in (mainly equatorial) Africa, and post-colonial efforts to reform it, its significance is of broader interest. Race, I argue, was reproduced as an identity of beneficiaries, and ethnicity as an identity of victims. The dilemma of colonial rule was simple, but hardly superficial: its beneficiaries were never more than a small minority, and its victims the vast majority. How to rule the majority was the dilemma that faced every colonial power.

To this dilemma, called the Native Question, there were two answers. The first was called direct rule. It aimed at creating a native elite that was granted a modicum of "civilized" rights in return for assimilating the culture of the colonizer. The second was called indirect rule. While direct rule was premised on assimilation, indirect rule was premised on autonomy. In spite of its claims to being a more benign form of rule, one that tended to reproduce "native custom" in a permissive fashion, indirect rule was the more hegemonic assertion of colonial power. Unlike direct rule, it aimed at changing the preferences of the mass of the colonized, not just of a narrow elite. We shall see that indirect rule was born of the crisis of direct rule. And yet, indirect rule never entirely displaced direct rule: the two co-existed as two faces of power, direct rule a regime guaranteeing rights to a racialized citizenry and indirect rule a regime enforcing culture on an ethnicized peasantry.

Indirect rule sought to reproduce two connected political identities: race as an identity that unified its beneficiaries as citizens, and ethnicity as an identity that fragmented its victims as subjects. The contrast between these two political constructs, race and ethnicity, was the sharpest where beneficiaries constituted a sizeable resident population. This, naturally, was in colonies with substantial settler populations. It is in this sense that I argue that apartheid South Africa, with its racially-defined democracy alongside its ethnically-demarcated Native Authorities, should be seen as the generic form of colonial rule in Africa, rather than as an exception to it.

In Lieu of Analogy-Seeking as History

Mainstream Africanists tend to begin with an idealization of a single system of power, that of the modern state framing civil society, and then turn it into a universal norm against which to measure all performances. All practices that do not fit this norm are then presumed to be deviations, and these deviations are in turn explained as the result of a lag, either a cultural residue ("tradition") or a cultural lag. Clientelism in state practices is thus understood as a manifestation of "patrimonialism,"(2) and patrimonialism is, in turn, understood as rooted either in survivals of tradition or as both cause and consequence of a weak civil society.

One can follow two lines of critique against this method of understanding historical phenomena through analogies with a universal. One is to historicize the norm (the universal), while the second is to historicize the exception (the particular). To historicize the universal as a particular is to follow the critics of socialism in an era just gone by, a line of inquiry increasingly pursued by critics of idealized theorizations of civil society. The link between the two arguments should be obvious: the idealization of civil society reminds one of an earlier discourse on socialism. In both cases, the claims are more programmatic than analytical, more ideological than historical. As such, they call for a historical analysis. Just as critics of socialism called for an analysis of "actually-existing socialism," so the critics of civil society focus on what we may call actually-existing civil society. The critics of Habermas (Habermas, 1991), for example, have tried to disentangle the programmatic from the analytic strand in his work on the public sphere,(3) by relocating this movement in its historical context. Geoff Eley (Eley, 1992) argues, for example, that the "public sphere" was from the very outset "an arena of contested meanings": while "different and opposing publics maneuvered for space" within it, "certain "publics" (women, subordinate nationalities, popular classes like the urban poor, the working class, and the peasantry)" were "excluded altogether" from it.