Creating power from failure: policing stock theft in colonial East Africa

Abstract

In Dr. Keebet Benda-Beckmann’s scholarship that has transformed the field of legal pluralism, she highlights the importance of understanding how colonization impacted systems of power. This article extends Benda-Beckmann’s forum shopping framework to analyze colonial Tanganyika’s thwarted attempts to establish law and order, particularly when it came to cattle. Laws criminalizing stock theft were among the first imposed in British East Africa, and disputes rose to the surface of four decades of annual police and prison reports, in anxious correspondence between police commissioners and European settler farmers, in reports from the governor to London, and in meetings of farmers’ associations. In line with other case studies of legal pluralism, stock theft in this context of indirect rule shows how law-making and law-enforcing were not solely the domain of the state and police, but largely shaped by settler famers—and indigenous resistance to their theft of land and resources. Stock theft and attempts to stop it constituted state power and expanded the capitalist state and policing strategies, many of which traveled to other parts of the British Empire and outlived formal colonial rule. The colonial police gained their power not despite their failure to stop stock theft but because of it.

Keywords:

• Colonialism
• state
• legal pluralism
• police
• cattle
• Tanganyika
• Tanzania

Acknowledgements

I offer many thanks to the editor, two anonymous reviewers, and special issue editors Bertram Turner and Melanie Wiber for critical support in developing this article. I am especially grateful for excellent research assistance by James Harris, which was made possible by the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay. Any shortcomings are entirely my own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 After World War I, the British Empire took over Tanganyika as a mandate territory (1919–1961), following German occupation over East Africa (1885–1918). Tanganyika won independence in 1961, and this mainland territory would become Tanzania after merging with Zanzibar in 1964.