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

Social Research, Fall, 1999 by Mahmood Mamdani

Direct rule was based on the presumption of a single legal order. That order was formulated in terms of received colonial ("modern") law. Its other side was the non-recognition of "native" institutions. The social consequence of direct rule depended on the size and the significance of the settler population. Where this size was small, as in the French colonies in West Africa in the early part of the century, direct rule involved the exclusion of "natives" from civil institutions alongside a permissive neglect of "native" lives, which continued to be organized through their own institutions. But where there was a significant settler population, as in the Cape Colony in 18th and 19th century South Africa, the social pre-requisite of direct rule was rather drastic. It involved a comprehensive sway of market institutions: the appropriation of land, the destruction of communal autonomy, the defeat and dispersal of "tribal" populations. In such a context, direct rule meant the reintegration and domination of "natives" in the institutional context of semi-servile and semi-capitalist agrarian relations.

In contrast to this, indirect rule came to be the mode of domination over a "free" peasantry. Here, land was turned into a communal--"customary"--possession. The market was restricted to products of labor, only marginally incorporating land or labor itself. Peasant communities were reproduced within the context of a spatial and institutional autonomy. Its leadership was either selectively-and ethnically--reconstituted as the hierarchy of the local state, or was freshly constituted and imposed if none had existed as in the "stateless societies." Here, political and civil inequality were grounded in a legal dualism. Alongside the received law was implemented a customary law that regulated non-market relations, in land, in personal (family) and in community affairs.

In a colonial context, direct rule was necessarily unstable. Its claim to a single legal order and an equality of rights in a multiracial context was premised on a massive exclusion of "natives" (the "uncivilized") from the regime of civil power and civil rights. For those excluded, direct rule was a centralized despotism. The exclusion reproduced amongst them an identity that highlighted the basis of the exclusion: race. But a racial identity in a colonial context was also a majoritarian identity. The tendency of direct rule was to unite--and not to divide--its victims. In contrast, indirect rule was premised on a mode of inclusion of this colonized majority in a regime of "customary" power whose very point was to refract the identity of race through several ethnically-defined identities. The very basis of incorporation was a fragmented identity. There were now two steps, and not just one, in the formation of political identity. While the first, an exclusion from the regime of rights, tended to generate a unified racial identity, the subsequent incorporation into a regime of culture fractured it into several ethnic identities. Anchored in so many local states, each the seat of an ethnically-defined Native Authority, "customary" power spoke the language of tradition, not of rights. It took the vast majority of natives, those hitherto excluded as a single racialized mass, and disaggregated them into so many ethnicities, each brought under the thumb of its own Native Authority. For those incorporated in the regime of "customary" power, indirect rule turned out to be a decentralized despotism.