Authorizing the “Natives”: Governmentality, Dispossession, and the Contradictions of Rule in Colonial Zambia

Abstract

British colonial rule in Africa in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries straddled a contradiction between promoting radical social transformation and maintaining political order. This article explores the relationship between changing techniques of rule and the stability of rule; in particular, the proletarianization 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 reorganization of power are examined: indirect rule through Native authorities and the constitution of Native reserves. These interventions sought to rework the political landscape and align relations between men and things in ways that 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 dispossession and the contradictions of colonial rule and 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 that became widespread in British colonial sub-Saharan Africa is that they stabilized dispossession and worked to resolve central contradictions of colonial rule.

十九世纪及二十世纪初, 英国在非洲的殖民, 横跨促进种族社会变革和维繫政治秩序之间的矛盾。本文探讨演变的治理技术和治理的稳定性之间的关係; 特别是在赞比亚殖民地中, 非洲人口的无产阶级化和掠夺, 以及搾取型经济的产生。1920 年代见证了从英国南非公司的特许治理到殖民政府的变迁, 以及广泛的农村反抗的终结。本文运用档案及二手资源, 检视两个标示新的治理模式与权力的空间重构的关键介入: 藉由原住民统领者进行间接统治, 以及成立原住民保护区。这些介入, 企图以同时推进搾取型资本主义和殖民统治两大目标之方式, 重构政治地景以及人与物的排列关係。本文透过共同带入马克斯主义有关掠夺和殖民统治的矛盾之概念, 以及傅柯对于治理权力的研究, 检视这些新形态的介入所造成的结果和限制。本文将在最后的段落中, 探讨生产主体性的经济形式的一系列超乎国家层级的广泛关係及过程, 随后并主张, 在撒哈拉以南非洲的英国殖民地中普遍的统治技术之特徵, 是它们稳定了掠夺, 并解决了殖民统治的核心矛盾。

El manejo colonial británico en África a finales del siglo XIX y comienzos del XX hacía malabares para enfrentar la contradicción entre promover una radical transformación social y mantener el orden político. Este artículo explora la relación existente entre las cambiantes técnicas de gobernar y la estabilidad de las normas; en particular, la proletarización y desposesión de las poblaciones africanas y la producción de una economía extractiva en la Zambia colonial. En los años 1920 concurrieron la transición de la normatividad institucionalizada de la Compañía Británica del África del Sur a la Oficina Colonial, y el final de la agitación rural generalizada. A través de archivos y fuentes secundarias, se examinan dos intervenciones claves que marcan un nuevo modo de gobernar y la organización espacial del poder: el gobierno indirecto a través de autoridades nativas y la constitución de reservas nativas. Con estas intervenciones se buscaba rediseñar el paisaje político y alinear relaciones entre hombres y cosas por medios que fortalecieran los propósitos tanto del capitalismo extractivo como del gobierno colonial. Las consecuencias y limitaciones de estas nuevas formas de intervención son examinadas a la luz de ideas marxistas sobre la desposesión y las contradicciones del gobierno colonial, conjuntamente con el trabajo de Foucault sobre el poder gubernamental. En las secciones finales se explora un conjunto de relaciones y procesos de mayor amplitud más allá del estado, que fueron instrumentales para producir formas económicas de subjetividad, antes de argumentar que el distintivo de técnicas de gobierno—que se extendieron por todo el ámbito colonial británico del África subsahariana—es que éstas estabilizaron la desposesión y trabajaron para resolver las contradicciones centrales del gobierno colonial.

Key Words:

• colonialism
• dispossession
• governmentality
• power
• Zambia.

• 殖民主义
• 掠夺
• 治理术
• 权力
• 赞比亚。

Palabras clave:

• colonialismo
• desposesión
• gobernabilidad
• poder
• Zambia.

Notes

¹Burdened with expectations of fiscal self-sufficiency, the colonial state's success depended largely on revenues from extractive commercial enterprises (Berman and Lonsdale 1992).

²The colonial name for Zambia.

³This article draws on research conducted at the British National Archives (Kew), Rhodes House (Oxford), the Institute of Mining, Metallurgy and Materials (London), London School of Economics, the National Archives of Zambia (Lusaka), and the archives of Zambia Consolidate Copper Mines—Investment Holdings (Ndola) between 2007 and 2009 and in the summer of 2012.

⁴This was also a transformative decade for the mining industry in Northern Rhodesia (Frederiksen 2013).

⁵Vaughan's work should be partially excepted from this critique, as it is very sensitive to the limitations of colonial power.

⁶There are undoubtedly further studies of colonial biopolitics that could be mentioned here, but to my knowledge they all share the weaknesses described in the literature here—an emphasis on the coercive to the exclusion of other forms of power and little interest in the forms of economic subjectivity that I would argue were central (along with political and racial forms of subjectivity) to the colonial enterprise (Legg 2007).

⁷This approach is one endorsed by many leading thinkers in governmentality studies—that governmentality was never a complete theory and should be treated as a toolkit lest it become “dogma or a mere social science methodology” (Dean 2010, 2; see also Vaughan 1991; Redfield 2005; Walters 2012). For comprehensive reviews of Foucault's thoughts on governmentality, see recent books by Walters (2012) and Dean (2010). For recent reviews of work in geography on ideas of biopolitics (with much overlap with ideas of governmentality), see Rutherford and Rutherford (2013a, 2013b) and the collection by Crampton and Elden (2007).

⁸More accurately, conduire des conduites (see Crampton 2007).

⁹For example, some Bemba groups maintained an effective trade in salt, enabling them to pay their taxes without working for Europeans (Luchembe 1992).

¹⁰Government office.

¹¹This is not to say that the policy was implemented in the same way with the same intentions across time and space; even within the Northern Rhodesian colonial administration, there were conflicting wishes and designs for the policy (Datta 1976; Mantena 2010).

¹²A range of political groupings were marginalized in this rationalization, including “age groups, clans, women's groups, … [and] religious groups” (Mamdani 2005, 6).

¹³This exact complaint was registered in 1932 but dismissed by the colonial authorities (NA, Departmental Reports 1932, NA)

¹⁴The National Archives of Zambia and the ZCCM-IH Archives have suffered losses and some sources used by earlier scholars no longer exist. In the absence of unmediated African voices, three approaches are taken—an emphasis on sources that use oral history (Meebelo 1971; Macpherson 1981; Chipungu 1992b), an emphasis on sources that include African voices (e.g., meeting minutes and testimony to inquiries), and an emphasis on contemporary colonial sources that actively sought to represent African interests (e.g., missionaries).

¹⁵Dog and gun licenses were most bitterly resisted, with chiefs such as Uwenuka being reprimanded for their “poor” efforts at collecting this tax by the Mazabuka District Officer (Chipungu 1992a, 57).

¹⁶African elites contested impositions that affected their own scope for rule more heatedly than they did those that affected their populace (NAZ ZA 1/9/59/1/2).

¹⁷Further delegation of powers to the Native authorities followed in the coming decades, including the formation of Native treasuries (NA CO 799/15).

¹⁸By the 1940s and 1950s, some Africans, such as Luka Bomba, had accumulated sufficient capital to own fleets of buses and trucks (Seleti 1992).

¹⁹The patterns of migration and growth of urban populations around the mines is a much-studied facet of Copperbelt history (e.g., Ferguson 1999).

²⁰Although, as Walters (2012) contended, “trade offs are an intrinsic feature … of liberal governmentality” (35), I would argue that the challenges of managing these were particularly acute in colonial governance with its limited resources and population resistant to alien rule (Foucault 2008).

²¹I deal with this argument at greater length in Frederiksen (2010).

²²Here I am interested in the techniques used for managing diversity. An exploration of the philosophical tensions between differentiation and the universalism of liberalism in nineteenth-century colonialism can be found in Helliwell and Hindess (2002) and Hindess (2001).

²³Instead I take Gidwani's (2001) argument that coercive practices, or the threat of them, play an important role in sustaining disciplinary power.