Authorising the ‘Natives’
Authorising the “Natives”
Governmentality, dispossession and the contradictions of rule in colonial Zambia
Tomas Frederiksen
University of Manchester
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Oxford Road
Manchester M13 9PL
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POST PEER-REVIEW version of Frederiksen, T. (2014).Authorising the “Natives”: Governmentality, dispossession and the contradictions of rule in colonial Zambia. Annals of the Association of American Geographers
The final published version can be found here:
Abstract
British colonial rule in Africa in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries straddled a contradiction between promoting radical social transformationand maintaining politicalorder. This article explores the relationship between changing techniques of rule and the stability of rule; In particular, the proletarianisation and dispossession of African populations and production of an extractive economy in colonial Zambia. The 1920s saw the transition from Charter rule by the British South Africa Company to the Colonial Office and the end of widespread rural unrest. Using archival and secondary sources, two key interventions marked a new mode of governing and spatial reorganisation of power: Indirect Rule through Native Authorities, and the constitution of Native Reserves. These interventions sought to re-work the political landscape and align relations between 'men and things' in ways which furthered the aims of both extractive capitalism and colonial rule. The consequences and limitations of these new forms of intervention are examined by bringing together Marxist ideas of dispossessionand the contradictions of colonial rule and Michel Foucault’s work on governmental power. In the final sections a wider set of relations and processes beyond the state that worked to produce economic forms of subjectivity are explored before arguing that the hallmark of techniques of rule which became widespread in British colonial sub-Saharan Africa is that they stabilised dispossession and worked to resolve central contradictions of colonial rule.
Key words: colonialism, dispossession, Zambia, power, governmentality
Introduction
For British colonial authorities in sub-Saharan Africa,rule was a particularly challenging exercise in managing contradictions and difference. With violence aimedat producingpeace, traditions overhauled for ‘stability’ and relocations enforced to produce stable tenure, the aims, techniques and results of British rule in sub-Saharan Africa were riddled with paradox. John Comaroff describes this as
“The essential paradox of colonial governance: its capacity to be ordered yet incoherent, rational yet absurd, violent yet impotent; to elicit compliance and contestation, discipline and defiance, subjection and insurrection. Sometimes all at once" (1998, 340).
The central paradox faced by colonial rulers of sub-Saharan Africain the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries was that they sought radical social change while maintaining order, to stimulate ambitious individualism while preserving communal values(Berman and Lonsdale 1992, Berry 1992). In order to be successful, colonial enterprises required cheap labour and the basic trappings of a market economy - capitalist relations of wage labour, a cash economy and exclusive property rights. The introduction and intensification of extractive forms of capitalism saw widespread dispossession and political instability that was a constant threat to the success of both commercial enterprises and colonial rule which depended on political and social stability.[1] The success or failure of colonial rule in achieving its aims depended on its ability to manage these contradictions, an ability which was deeply related to the techniques and institutions deployed. The better these techniques resolved these tensions and contradictions and managed diverse populations, the more stable colonial rule.
In this article I explore the relationship between the techniques and stability of rule through an examination of the changing modes of colonial administration in sub-Saharan Africa.[2] In particular, I examine the proletarianisation and dispossession of African populations and production of an extractive economy in Northern Rhodesia across the transition from Charter rule by the British South Africa Company (BSAC) to the Colonial Office in Northern Rhodesia in 1924.[3]The 1920s saw the end of widespread rural unrest in Northern Rhodesia and the introduction of decades of comparative rural peace and associated commercial expansion.[4]In this pivotal decade new institutions and political structures realigned the exercise of power and reshaped the political landscape of Northern Rhodesia,providing a window into the political and economic conditions under which the dispossession associated with the introduction and intensification of capitalist relations could be politically stabilised. This was not a given. In the next section I situate the new forms of intervention introduced by the Colonial Office in the 1920s in a discussion of Marxist ideas of dispossession, proletarianisation,the contradictions of colonial rule and Michel Foucault’s work on governmentality. I describe the BSAC’s attempts at rule through coercion before examining two key interventions which bear the mark of this new mode of governing and spatial reorganisation of power: Indirect Rule through Native Authorities, and the constitution of Native Reserves. These policies all sought to achieve three ends: Enhance the welfare of the population; entrench the relations of capitalism; and, facilitate the process of rule through producing new forms of subjectivity. I then examine the consequences of these policies in Northern Rhodesia and the limits of colonial power.In the final sections I explore a wider set of relations and processes beyond the state that worked to produce economic forms of subjectivity before considering the ways in which different techniques of colonial power stabilised dispossession and worked to resolve central contradictions of colonial rule. Understanding the processes and relations which stabilise dispossession offers wider insights into the nature of colonial rule in sub-Saharan Africa and, I would argue, the stabilisation of contemporary processes of dispossession.
Colonial rule, dispossession and governmentality
A key aim of colonial rule in Northern Rhodesia, and elsewhere on the continent, was the production of a steady stream of labour for European enterprise. In Northern Rhodesia this focused on labour for the mines. For the British South Africa Company, as we shall see,ittook the form of forced entry of people into capitalist wage relations through disrupting previous modes of production. This process is instantly recognisable to Marxist scholars as a relatively straightforward case of ‘primitive accumulation' or, ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (Harvey 2003, Glassman 2006). Capitalism requires for its functioning the creation of a working class, a proletariat (Marx 1990). This proletariat is initially produced through “brute force” which alienates producers from the means of production – dispossessing people of their land and other productive assets – and thus forcing them to sell their labour to survive (Marx 1990, 915). Perelman argues that this process has two blades:
“The first blade served to undermine the ability of the people to provide for themselves. The other blade was a system of stern measures required to keep people from finding alternative survival strategies outside of the system of waged labour” (2001, 7-8).
Study of this process in colonial Africa has a long tradition with many Marxist scholars examining this new working class, its formation and its struggles with European capitalists (Crisp 1984, Parpart 1983, Perrings 1979, Van Onselen 1976). Yet, the coercive edge of primitive accumulation that cleaves societies along capitalist lines rarely cuts the tethers to previous economic and social forms at first strike. Coercive taxation was a "blunt-edged" knifefor, much as colonial officials imagined there might be, there was no linear relationship between taxation, wage labour and labour migration (Henderson 1975, 34). Force alone is not enough to construct and stabilise capitalist relations and produced resistance that had to be managed if accumulation and rule was to continue.
Many studies of alien rule in sub-Saharan Africa fail fully to problematise this tension (e.g. Macpherson 1981, Mamdani 1996, Parpart 1983, Van Onselen 1976, Perrings 1979, Luchembe 1992, Vail 1977). For most of the Marxist studies mentioned above, and others from across the continent, coercion was enough to secure domination. If resistance was to be managed, then it was secured through violence and ‘buying off’ local elites to work as proxies for the colonial state (e.g. Mamdani 1996). There is truth to this account but it is a limited analysis that denies “colonized people any history but that of oppression, any ambiguity to the ways they might confront and appropriate the intrusions of colonizers” and is thus fundamentally unsatisfactory (Cooper 1994, 1542).
More recently, a series of studies have attempted to understand colonial rule beyond its violent means and economic aims, frequently by drawing on the work of Michel Foucault. In these studies the cultural and discursive aspects of colonial power are often emphasised with attention drawn to the organising role of modernising colonial power and the ways in which it produced and maintained categories of life, behaviour and meaning, in particular the racial boundaries upon which it was founded (Comaroff 1998, Said 1978, Mitchell 1990, Helliwell and Hindess 2002, Hindess 2001). This near-exclusive focus on image, text and ideology has been roundly critiqued as an equally unsatisfactory account, providing greater insight into the mindset of the colonisers than the actual practices and effects of colonial rule (Harris 2004, Comaroff 1998, Scott 1995). While Foucault’s work on governmentality (discussed below) has been taken up widely, it has, until recently, only intermittentlybeen used to analyse techniques of colonial rule and rarely colonial Africa (Li 2007, Scott 1995, Bonneuil 2000, Redfield 2005). David Scott’s pioneering work on colonial governmentality, though schematic and focussing on Sri Lanka, usefully highlights the changing governmental rationalities and its shift towards disciplinary techniques of power (1995). Peter Redfield consciously attempts to export Foucault to ‘the Tropics’ but, conversely, focuses on the usefulness of the metaphor of the Panopticon in penal colonies(Redfield 2005).Megan Vaughan too, explicitly set out to explore the limitations of Foucault’s ideas of biopower in a non-European setting making great use of his concepts to explore the production of colonial subjectivities through a medical discourse and practices of ‘biomedicine’ while concluding that the colonialknowledge/power regime is fundamentally different to that described by Foucault (Vaughan 1991). In these studies, like many inspired by Foucault,questions of political economy, space and the efficacy of different techniques of power all take a back seat despite their centrality to Foucault’s thinking.[5]
Accounts of colonial rule in sub-Saharan Africa that engage with both political economy concerns and draw upon post-structural notions of subjectivity and discourse are even scarcer (Comaroff 1998, Stoler and Cooper 1997). One stand out study that does is Mahmood Mamdani’s Citizen and Subject (1996), but here while the racialised nature of rule and its relations to the political economic demands of colonialism are at the fore, Mamdani locates the totality of power within a bifurcated state apparatus and has a near exclusive emphasis on the use of coercive power by the colonial authorities. Further, studies which choose to use Foucault’s understandings of subjectivity to understand the production of colonial subjects focus on their production as racialised political subjects (Stoler 1995, Stoler and Cooper 1997, Mamdani 1996, Vaughan 1991). This, I would argue, often generates an analysis that highlights the coercive and restrictive elements of colonial power. Colonial subjectivities were clearly political and racial, but they were also economic. Understanding racialised colonial subjects as also economic offers greater insight into the enabling, less coercive aspects of colonial power. Aspects that were very important indeed.
A small but growing stream of research by geographers around ideas of colonialgovernmentality and biopolitics frequently manages to engage with both questions of discourse and political economy and ground these in a discussion of space. The focus here varies and each study draws on Foucault’s work to emphasise different aspects of the arts of governance and the exercise of power in colonial contexts. Central to all these projects is an understanding that Foucault’s unapologetically Eurocentric work cannot be simply exported to other contexts without modification (Legg 2007, Duncan 2007). For Matthew Hannah the emphasis is on “unambiguously national” level discursive tools for understanding and administering populations and territory in North America(2000, 9 emphasis removed), for Brenda Yeoh and Stephen Legg, the production and contestation of urban space (as a distinctive project) in Asia are the focus of enquiry(Yeoh 1996, Legg 2007).[6] For all of these, the idea of governmentality as producing economic as well and political and racial subjects is present but of secondary interest. Cole Harris uses ideas of governmentality to understand the production of ‘native space’ in colonialCanada focusing on the legal production of colonial subjects and space in a context of scarce land rather than labour(Harris 2002). James Duncan examines the explicitly economic topic of implantation of extractive tea plantations in rural Sri Lanka challenging the urban focus of previous studies, but in his choice of scale and topic focuses once more on the coercive aspects of capitalism, an ‘authoritative governmentality’ as he terms it (2007). As we shall see, colonial governmentality varied markedly over timeand space with the institutional and geographic context of sub-Saharan Africa producing a very different picture (Legg 2007).
In this article I draw on Foucault’s work on governmentality and the ‘art of government’ to understand the links between the stability of colonial rule, its techniques of power and the political economy of colonialism in sub-Saharan Africa. I first turn to Michel Foucault’s concept of governmentality as an initial explanation before drawing on more recent analyses of governmentality, economic subjectivity and power in the later discussion. As I am using Foucault’s work as a provocation rather than a template and there is no "single, consistent definition of governmentality" (Foucault used the term to mean multiple things himself), I do not intend to offer a full account of Foucault’s thinking here but rather draw attention to facets relevant to the following discussion of colonial rule(Walters 2012, 38).[7]Foucault developed his most well known theories of rule through studies exploring the changes in states and institutions in Europe since the Enlightenment period. In these, Foucault identified a movement from ‘sovereign’ forms of power with direct, immediate and highly-visible methods of coercion, violence and obstruction (which he saw as the power deployed by feudal monarchies) to more efficient liberal ‘government’ which emphasised techniques of power which are subtle, pervasive, granularising and heterogeneous (which he saw as the forms used by ‘modern’ states since the late eighteenth-century.(Foucault 1991a, Foucault 2003). With this shift in forms of rule, there is a shift in the aims, targets and techniques of power to efficiently optimising relationsthat create "the right disposition of things" to produce increased welfare for the subjects of power: 'the population' (Foucault 1991b, 93, Foucault 2007). Governmental rule sought to reshape the conditions of life and change the rules of how individuals and populations conduct their lives (famously described as working on the ‘conduct of conduct’[8]), to realign social – and socio-environmental – relations to produce self-regulating, self-improving subjects through more efficient disciplinary techniques of power, shaped by what Tania Li (2007)calls ‘the will to improve’. These techniques of power are "radically heterogeneous" but, there are three facets worth highlighting here (Foucault 2003, 36): Firstly, they are techniques of power which work to both close down options and possibilities but also by enable and encourage certain aptitudes, behaviours, and ways of thinking - seeking to shape the desires of subjects; Secondly, key techniques for producing new behaviours of self-regulation and desired aptitudes includenot only coercion but also surveillance and education; Thirdly, many of these techniques of power are decentralised and individualising, producing the effects of power through multiple, small and dispersed actions and outcomes (Foucault 2003, Dean 2010). The mechanisms which produce the effect of power, then, are found in a complex apparatus which produces an alignment of institutions, processes and forces – termed ‘dispositifs’. Not only did the shift to greater, though not exclusive, emphasis on disciplinary techniques of power reshape political space, it was important for governing economic space too in two ways: its granularising individualising effects and, through working on self-regulating subjects, its efficiency. For Foucault, exclusively monarchic forms of power hindered the functioning of capitalism by being "excessively onerous" and fundamentally predatory, operating as an "economic subtraction" and obstacle(Foucault 2007, 159). Secondly, these forms of power were "very discontinuous… the mesh of the net was too large, an almost infinite number of things, elements, conducts and processes escaped the control of power" (Foucault 2007, 158). Thus modern capitalism and government are understood to be “completely bound up with”multiple dispersed forms of power focussed on optimising the relations between 'men and things' within a given political rationality(Foucault 2008, 67). Foucault’s work allows this analysis to engage with the multiple arts of governance and relations of power required to produce and stabilise new forms of colonial subjectivity and economic activity.Broadening the lens of techniques of power brings into focus the ways in which colonial authorities and, importantly, wider structures, worked to enable the expansion and stabilisation of relations of capitalism in the colonial context by enabling certain forms of behaviours as much as they sought to constrain others.
In the next section I elaborate the failings of the BSAC’s strategy of relying primarily on coercive techniques of power before moving to focus on two interventions introduced by the Colonial Office after 1924 which bear the hallmark of governmental modes of rule - Native Authorities and Native Reserves policies. The subsequent sections explore these interventions before discussing the limits to colonial power. In the final sections I set these state-led interventions within the context of a wider array of actors and powers seeking to reshape Africans as ‘modern’ economic subjects before using more recent analyses of rule and the spatiality of power to reflect on the effectiveness of different techniques of power in stabilising colonial rule in sub-Saharan Africa.