The Renovation of Custom in Colonial Kenya: the 1932 Generation Succession Ceremonies in Embu

1989 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 139-156 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles H. Ambler
Keyword(s):  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Local Autonomy ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Genital Mutilation ◽  
New Tribe ◽  
Opposition Movements ◽  
Substantial Degree ◽  
Central Kenya

The role of custom and tradition in the development of colonial rule in Africa has received little attention from scholars. Historians of colonial Kenya, particularly, have focused on the powerful transforming impact of the colonial state and economy and on the growth of opposition movements; they have had little to say about the processes through which previously autonomous societies negotiated their incorporation into the Kenya state. Yet by the 1920s and 1930s that state had acquired a substantial degree of popular legitimacy. ‘Customary’ institutions and rituals played an important part in the development of that legitimacy. This essay examines the institution of the genealogically defined ‘generation’ in the Embu-Mbeere area in colonial central Kenya and the ceremonies held in 1932 to mark the transition from one generation to the next. These ceremonies attracted considerable attention because they provided the occasion for the proclamation of rules, supported by the British administration, relating to the bitter issue of genital mutilation in female initiation. But this was not a crude case of the manipulation of custom. The attempt to reform female initiation was part of a larger process, of which the rituals of generation succession were elements, of building the ideological basis of a new ‘tribe’ in a society previously characterized by local autonomy and collective authority. As investigation of the succession ceremonies makes clear, the notion of a tribe dominated by appointed chiefs and identified with an exclusive territory lay at the centre of this ideology.

The Facilitators I: Policing

2021 ◽  
pp. 69-105
Author(s):  
Deana Heath
Keyword(s):  
Structural Violence ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
British Government ◽  
Police Reform ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Legal Violence ◽  
Set Up

Focusing on the role of atrocity facilitators, particularly colonial officials and the British government, in the governmentalization of torture by the police and other officials in colonial India, this chapter examines the ways in which, following the transfer of India’s governance from the East India Company to the Crown in 1858, the extra-legal violence of torture became systematized as a technology of colonial rule. Beginning with an analysis of what led to the perpetration of torture by state officials, the existence of which had long been known in both India and Britain, to erupt into scandal in 1854, the chapter interrogates how the commission set up to investigate torture led to the emergence of a new facilitatory discourse that served both to deny the existence of torture and the structural violence that underpinned it, as well as to displace blame for it from the colonial regime to its Indian subordinates. The chapter further explores how police reform in the commission’s aftermath was designed not to eradicate torture or ensure the welfare of the Indian populace but to safeguard the coercive and terrorizing powers of the colonial state

Introduction: Torture, Empire, and the Exception

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-42
Author(s):  
Deana Heath
Keyword(s):  
Historical Memory ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
High Court ◽  
Virtual Absence ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
Colonial Violence ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Exposed Facets

Colonial Terror begins with an examination of a historic case before the High Court of England and Wales in 2011 regarding torture in colonial Kenya that exposed facets of the brutal violence that sustained Britain’s empire, and argues that the case and its aftermath offer a number of insights into the role of extraordinary violence in the operation of colonial states, and with it to the maintenance of imperial and colonial sovereignties, in addition to the discourses and practices of denial regarding British culpability for torture and other forms of colonial violence. After elucidating the book’s key arguments regarding the centrality of the torture of Indian bodies to the law-preserving violence of British colonial rule in India the introduction then considers both the virtual absence of colonial violence from British historical memory and recent scholarship on such violence in former British colonial contexts that seeks to redress such an absence. Proposing that scholars of colonial violence need to broaden their understanding of, and approaches to, violence, as well as the impact of violence on both bodies and minds, the introduction goes on to examine the scholarly literatures on, and lacunae in, colonial policing, colonial law, the colonial state, colonial sovereignties, and the use of torture and terror to construct and maintain such sovereignties, and suggests ways in which Colonial Terror will address such omissions.

scholarly journals “Human Telephone Lines”: Flag Post Mail Relay Runners in British Southern Cameroon (1916–1955) and the Establishment of a Modern Communications Network

2014 ◽  
Vol 59 (S22) ◽  
pp. 211-235 ◽  
Author(s):  
Walter Gam Nkwi ◽  
Mirjam de Bruijn
Keyword(s):  
Colonial Period ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Colonial Administration ◽  
Archival Research ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Communications Network ◽  
Southern Cameroon ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
Communications System

AbstractThe flag post mail relay runners, a communications system established in Cameroon during British colonial rule, laid the foundations for the communications structure of this colonial state. They were a remnant of a pre-colonial communications system and, with the advancement of “modern” communications structures such as roads, telephone lines, and post houses, the flag post runner gradually disappeared. This article explores the role of the runners for the colonial administration in Cameroon and is based mostly on archival research. It describes the runners’ system and how it influenced the colonial communications landscape. In addition, the questions of how these runners were involved in the colonial state and what forms of resistance emerged among runners are analysed. Finally, the article discusses the degree to which the subsequent construction of roads, telegraphic communications, and postal networks reflected the role played by mail runners in the British colonial period up to the 1950s.

Bringing Order to Chaos: The Appropriation of Maithili by Colonial State, c 1870s–1940s

2019 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-246
Author(s):  
Sneha Jha
Keyword(s):  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Colonial Power ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Colonial Policies ◽  
The Government

This article, through the use of several surveys, grammar books and articles on language written by colonial officials, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, has explored how language became an instrument in the exercise of colonial power in Bihar in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Taking the case of a particular language Maithili, spoken in the Mithila region of Bihar, the paper has engaged with the suggestion by Bernard S. Cohn that the history of language can help us understand the mechanism of power in a colonial context. The aspirations of the rulers, as well as the intended and unintended implications caused by such experiments, are worth examining. They would help us answer many general questions about colonial policies and power – not just on the theme of language – such as the following: How does one situate the understanding of the rulers while writing a history of colonialism? How do different debates among the colonial administrators shape the policies of the government, and what does that tell us about the nature of colonial rule? How does one see the role of the ‘native’, both as an informant as well as the subject of study? How does one read the native agency?

‘CIRCLE OF IRON’: AFRICAN COLONIAL EMPLOYEES AND THE INTERPRETATION OF COLONIAL RULE IN FRENCH WEST AFRICA

2003 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
EMILY LYNN OSBORN
Keyword(s):  
General Population ◽  
West Africa ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Significant Role ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
French West Africa ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Local Elites ◽  
French Colonial

This article investigates the role of African colonial employees in the functioning of the colonial state in French West Africa. Case studies from the 1890s and early 1900s demonstrate that in the transition from conquest to occupation, low-level African colonial intermediaries continually shaped the localized meanings that colonialism acquired in practice. Well-placed African colonial intermediaries in the colonies of Guinée Française and Soudan Français often controlled the dissemination of information and knowledge in the interactions of French colonial officials with local elites and members of the general population. The contributions of these African employees to the daily operations of the French colonial state show that scholars have long overlooked a cadre of men who played a significant role in shaping colonial rule.

BEING ‘CHAGGA’: NATURAL RESOURCES, POLITICAL ACTIVISM, AND IDENTITY ON KILIMANJARO

2013 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 199-220 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew V. Bender
Keyword(s):  
Water Resources ◽  
General Population ◽  
Natural Resources ◽  
Political Identity ◽  
Political Activism ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Mount Kilimanjaro ◽  
Common Identity

AbstractThis article argues that the emergence of Chagga political identity on Mount Kilimanjaro in the 1940s and 1950s can best be understood as a product of intensive debates over the control of natural resources and the nature of chiefly authority. As a result of perceived threats to the land and water resources of the mountain and resentment of the role of the chiefs in these issues, grassroots activists adopted a language of unity using the ethnic term ‘Chagga’ – a moniker long used by the colonial state but eschewed by the general population. With the rise of a paramount chieftaincy in 1951, the term shifted from being a symbol of colonial rule to one of common identity and resistance against the encroachment of the colonial state in local affairs.

Not Yet Uhuru: The Unfinished Revolution in Africa

2012 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 269-278 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pade Badru
Keyword(s):  
Sub Saharan Africa ◽  
Social Revolution ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Black Africa ◽  
Racial Democracy ◽  
The People ◽  
Sub Saharan

In Kwandiwe Kondlo’s In the Twilight of the Revolution (2009), which examines the role of the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC) of Azania in South Africa’s anti-apartheid struggle as the backdrop, this article surveys the momentum of social revolution in Sub-Saharan Africa during the decolonization era that started in the mid-20th century and ended with South Africa’s transition to a multi-racial democracy in 1994. It argues that the failure of the African elite to achieve a genuine independence from both colonial rule and South Africa’s apartheid system is largely because of inconsistent nationalist ideologies and the detachment of the African elite from the popular struggles of the people, which could have resulted in the revolutionary overthrow of the colonial state and the dawn of more progressive and autonomous states all across Black Africa. It concludes that this failure led to the continuing instability of the post-colonial states across Africa and, in South Africa, to the achievement of a particular form of multi-racial democracy with very little or no change to the real politics of apartheid and Boer domination.

Genealogy of Colonial Discourse: Hindu Traditions and the Limits of European Representation

2009 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 563-589 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raf Gelders
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Colonial Discourse ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
The Core ◽  
European Culture ◽  
Eastern Cultures ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Core Issues

In the aftermath of Edward Said's Orientalism (1978), European representations of Eastern cultures have returned to preoccupy the Western academy. Much of this work reiterates the point that nineteenth-century Orientalist scholarship was a corpus of knowledge that was implicated in and reinforced colonial state formation in India. The pivotal role of native informants in the production of colonial discourse and its subsequent use in servicing the material adjuncts of the colonial state notwithstanding, there has been some recognition in South Asian scholarship of the moot point that the colonial constructs themselves built upon an existing, precolonial European discourse on India and its indigenous culture. However, there is as yet little scholarly consensus or indeed literature on the core issues of how and when these edifices came to be formed, or the intellectual and cultural axes they drew from. This genealogy of colonial discourse is the subject of this essay. Its principal concerns are the formalization of a conceptual unit in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, called “Hinduism” today, and the larger reality of European culture and religion that shaped the contours of representation.

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