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

Social Research, Fall, 1999 by Mahmood Mamdani

A century earlier, direct rule had been the mode of colonial rule. It had embodied the claim to a civilizing mission, the flipside of which was a wholesale condemnation and dismissal of local "tradition" and "custom" as backward. From this point of view, to civilize was thus to erase tradition, and to modernize was to Westernize. As the civilizing mission ran into resistance, the colonizing power--in particular, Britain in 19th century India--was compelled to seek local allies. Thus began a protracted process of thinking through "tradition" analytically, of separating its authoritarian from its popular strands. The construction of a "customary" law, whereby authoritarian strands in tradition would form the building blocks of a legal regime disciplining "natives" in the name of enforcing "tradition," began in India, not in Africa.(5)

In India, though, this measure came late, mainly in the aftermath of the great 1857 rebellion, too late to affect the form of land tenure in the colony. Defined in a religious ideom, the scope of the "customary" was thus restricted to personal law. In Africa, however, its scope was broadened, most importantly to include land. While the starting point of differentiating the "civil" from the "customary" lay in earlier colonial experiences, its culmination into a full-blown bifurcated power really happened in the equatorial African colonies in the 20th century.

Not surprisingly, indirect rule came to be the form of colonial rule. While its basic features were sketched in the colony of Natal over five decades in the second half of the 19th century, it was really elaborated by the British in equitorial Africa in the early part of the 20th century--by Lugard in Nigeria and Uganda, and Cameroon in Tanganyika--then emulated by the French after World War I, the Belgians in the 1930s and finally the Portuguese in the 1950s. At the same time, indirect and direct rule, customary and civil power, ceased to be thought of as alternatives. While indirect rule became the mode of governing the countryside, towns were subject to direct rule.

Indirect rule was mediated rule. It meant that colonial rule was never experienced by the vast majority of the colonized as rule directly by others. Rather, the colonial experience for most "natives" was one of rule mediated through one's own. As Jan Smuts, the South African Prime Minister, emphasized in his Rhodes lecture at Oxford in 1929 (Smuts, 1929, pp. 76-78, 92), "territorial segregation" would not solve the "native problem"; "institutional segregation" was needed. For the colonial order to be stabilized, the "native" would have to be ruled not just by his own leaders but through "native institutions." Indirect rule was grounded less in racial than in ethnic structures. Through the combination of a state-sanctioned and ethnically-defined "custom." enforced by a state-appointed and ethnically-labeled "customary" (Native) Authority, the colonial power attempted to salvage and to build creatively upon the authoritarian strand in "native" tradition. As such, it tried to fragment the subject population from a racialized majority to several separate ethnicized minorities. Thereby, it tried to dissipate a growing racial contradiction into an ethnic one.