The Rise of Nationalism in Colonial Africa: The Case of Colonial Malawi

1968 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 142-161 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger K. Tangri

The years of colonial rule in Malawi (formerly Nyasaland) were characterised by the imposition of a political and social system whereby a superior European authority attempted to exercise its will over a territory already populated by Africans. This enforced colonial relationship determined the pattern of political change within the Protectorate, so that any variation in the fundamentals of the relationship was bound to have important repercussions on the total colonial situation. From the earliest years of British rule in Malawi, Africans sought to modify or alter the colonial relationship and it is this sort of African sentiment and activity in reaction to alien control and domination that has come to be regarded as manifestations of nationalism not only in colonial Malawi but also in the other ex-colonial territories of Africa. Thomas Hodgkin, for example, has lumped under the general rubric of ‘nationalism’ “any organisation or group that explicitly asserts the rights, claims and aspirations of a given African society (from the level of the language-group to that of ‘Pan-Africa’) in opposition to European authority, whatever its institutional form and objectives”. Others, however, although appreciating the deep roots of nationalism have tended to confine the use of the term to the post-1945 period with its emergence of nation-wide movements seeking self-government and independence. They have argued that to include every social movement of protest against alien rule as a part of nationalism obscures the political meaning of the concept, blurs the important distinctions that can be made among African responses to the colonial situation, and makes comparative analysis difficult.

1972 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 119-143 ◽  
Author(s):  
E. R. Turton

This article investigates the relationship between different phases of Somali political activity in Kenya. A clear contrast emerges between the focus, the aims and the methods adopted by the Somali pastoralists along the northern frontier and those adopted by the Isaq and Herti Somali traders in Nairobi and Isiolo. The attitude of the former towards the Colonial Government was essentially negative. Yet, while they tended to be resisterspar excellenceand fought against the Government on a large number of occasions between 1893 and 1916, this article shows that their resistance was much more limited than has generally been supposed and that they were never united on a clan basis in their resistance. In fact intra-clan rivalries seriously undermined the effectiveness of their activities Moreover, certain weaker Somali segments actively cooperated with the Government in order to obtain military and political support for their positions which were threatened by stronger groups.On the other hand, Isaq and Herti traders attempted to manipulate the political institution in order to obtain additional privileges within the system. Their agitation had positive goals, for they campaigned to gain Asiatic status. They put pressure on the central organs of Government and hired lawyers to plead their case. They wrote numerous petitions and memorials to governors of the colony, to Secretaries of State and even to two British kings. They formed well-organized political associations and had contacts in British Somaliland and England. Yet, by a curious irony, it seems that the Somali Exemption Ordinance of 1919, which represented the closest they came to achieving non-native status, was not passed as a result of their campaigns. In fact, their later agitation achieved nothing; it seems to have represented a futile effort to counter the gradual erosion of privileges obtained at an earlier date.One of the main characteristics of the Isaq and Herti agitation was its essentially sectarian character. In fighting to obtain Asiatic status they emphasized traits that isolated them from other Somali groups, and they even ended by denying that they were Somali. As such, there was a considerable disparity between their aims and those of the Somali Youth League which emerged in 1946 as the main vehicle of mass Somali nationalism, uniting the Somali pastoralists and traders in one group.


2014 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 42-58
Author(s):  
Emilio Dabed

This article sheds new light on the political history of legal-constitutional developments in Palestine in the fourteen years following the Oslo Accord. It examines the relationship between the unfolding social, political, and economic context in which they arose, on the one hand, and PA law-making and legal praxis, on the other. Focusing on the evolution of the Palestinian Basic Law and constitutional regime, the author argues that the “Palestinian constitutional process” was a major “battlefield” for the actors of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Thus, changes in the actors' political strategies at various junctures were mirrored in legal-constitutional forms, specifically in the political structure of the PA. In that sense, the constitutional order can be understood as a sort of “metaphoric representation” of Palestinian politics, reflecting, among other things, the colonial nature of the Palestinian context that the Oslo process only rearticulated. This perspective is also essential for understanding the evolution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict after Oslo.


1981 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 383-412 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miles Kahler

The relationship between economic system and political regime has recently reemerged as a central issue in social science. An examination of the political perceptions and actions of individual firms and of sectors during the uncertainties of decolonization permits a new approach to this question, using the concept of political exposure. The firm or sector characteristics that are associated with greater political exposure are assessed. Political preferences cannot be equated with either political action or outcomes, however. The links between capitalism and political regime require further refinement and qualification.


1995 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 341-362 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. M. Rees

ABSTRACTThis article argues that the writings of T. H. Marshall contain not one, but two, theories of citizenship, and there is a problem about whether they are compatible with one another. The second, less familiar, theory is mainly developed in Marshall's later works, especially The Right to Welfare, but many of its essential features can be found in Citizenship and Social Class, although not in the sections of that work which are most frequently quoted. Several areas where Marshall's shifting views contributed to this second version of citizenship are discussed: citizenship as national membership and as a body of obligations, the reality of social rights, discretion versus enforceable entitlements, citizenship as a bearer of its own inequalities, the relationship with the capitalist class system. Increasingly, Marshall came to restrict citizenship to the political sphere, thereby endorsing a conventional liberal view: but then he was, it is argued, in many respects a pretty conventional liberal. The article concludes by noting the paradox that much of the current interest in Marshall's thought is because a ‘strong’ view of citizenship is attributed to him which he may never have held, and which he certainly relinquished towards the end of his writing career.


Itinerario ◽  
1984 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 92-95
Author(s):  
Roger N. Buckley

In an article published in this journal (V (1981), 1), I argued that we will not be able to fully understand the political significance (if any) of the widespread eruption in John Company's Bengal Army in 1857, unless we hear from the “other side of the hill,” from the alienated sepoy officer and rank and file. In the interim we have heard principally from several senior British writers. And because of, for instance, a much flawed research methodology, they have reached unanimity in their analysis of the shock to British rule in India: it was simply a mutiny, one absolutely void of any organized political aims or expressions. The work of Thomas Spear is typical. He has this to say in his India: A Modern History concerning the question of the mutiny as a nationalist movement, a war of independence: “The view that the mutiny was a concerted movement against the British, a violent predecessor of Mahatma Gandhi's campaigns, overlooks the fact that there was then no Indian nation.” He adds: “The new classes with ideas of nationalism were then very few in numbers and they were wholly opposed to the movement.” Philip Mason added the weight of his distinguished reputation to this chorus of disbelievers, who appeared to cringe in retrospective horror at the thought that the good and faithful sepoy could harbor such hideous–and ungrateful–thoughts as freedom from (what was) alien tyranny. After all, Mason muses, did not every British writer up to the mutiny repeat the belief that the Indian soldier had no sense of nationalism? No, he concludes smugly, the Indian soldier had no national feeling until long after World War One. The sepoy was, then, nothing more than a mindless mercenary-child-robot. The mutiny, however, and the other disturbances among the native soldiery prior to 1857, would indicate that the British, then and now, never fully understood their Indian auxiliaries.


2004 ◽  
Vol 38 (3) ◽  
pp. 517-558 ◽  
Author(s):  
T. R. TRAVERS

Ever since the late eighteenth century, no subject has been more prominent in histories of ‘the transition to colonialism’ in south Asia, than the issue of taxation. In particular, the complex system of agrarian taxation that was developed under the Mughal empire, and further elaborated by various post-Mughal regimes, has often been seen as the defining institution of both the pre-colonial and colonial states. What the British called ‘land revenues’, which included taxes on land proper (mal) and taxes on trade and markets (sair), were the main source of income for both Indian and British rulers. Assessments of the impact of colonial rule have often depended on supposed changes in the tax regime. Since the nineteenth century historians have tended to focus their attention on the relationship between the land tax and structures of agrarian property. They have generally argued that British rule both substantially increased the tax burden, and modified structures of agrarian tenure by splicing together rights of revenue collection and private property in land. But they have focused much more on early colonial policies with regard to private landed property, and less on the issue of the actual tax assessment. This paper takes up the issue of the land tax demand (known as jama in the terminology of Mughal and post-Mughal administration) tracing British debates about tax assessments through the first three decades of colonial rule in Bengal.


1976 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-71 ◽  
Author(s):  
E. V. K. Fitzgerald

Any attempt to define the changes in the Peruvian political economy that have taken place since 1968 1 must be made in terms of the relationship between the state and domestic capital on the one hand and foreign capital on the other, and must offer an explanation of the way in which this military- controlled state has tended to replace the former and establish a new relationship with the latter. In particular, the confrontation between the government and foreign capital, and the significance of internal ownership reforms cannot be understood without reference to the development of Peruvian capitalism before 1968.


1969 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 469-493 ◽  
Author(s):  
Howard Wolpe

To the political scientist concerned with the relationship between social and economic modernisation, on the one hand, and political change and integration, on the other, the Ibo experience has long held particular interest. In his pioneering study of Nigerian nationalism, James Coleman observed that Ibos had played a singular role in the post-war political era: ‘Ibos overwhelmingly predominated in both the leadership and the mass membership of the N.C.N.C., the Zikist Movement, and the National Church. Postwar radical and militant nationalism, which emphasized the national unity of Nigeria as a transcendent imperative, was largely, but not exclusively, an Ibo endeavor’1 But radical and militant pan-Nigerian nationalism was only one part of the Ibo political posture. No less noteworthy was the parallel development of a highly cohesive and organisationally sophisticated pan-Ibo movement, the very success of which ultimately undermined the pan- Nigerian aspirations of the Ibo-led N.C.N.C. and, subsequently, was one of several factors operating to impair the national legitimacy of an Ibo-led military régime. It is this paradoxical blending of ‘civic’ and ‘primordial’ sentiments which, perhaps, best defines the modern Ibo political experience2.


Author(s):  
Белоногов Юрий ◽  

The article considers historiographic assessments of the administrative-territorial transformations of the Stalinist period of Soviet history through the prism of relations "Center - Regions." For the supreme government in the period under study, the obvious dilemma was the choice between the economic efficiency of the spatial development of enlarged and self-sufficient regions, on the one hand, and the increase in the political manageability of the Center for regional development, on the other hand. The policy of disengaging the regions and giving the former dis-trict centers the status of regional capitals was connected with the need of the Cen-ter to monitor the processes of industrialization and collectivization, bring man-agement closer to production, as well as weaken the influence of regional leaders to strengthen the regime of personal power of I.V. Stalin. Subsequently, the political struggle for power in the 1950s. contributed to a gradual and irreversible review of the relationship between the central and regional authorities: for political reasons, the Center abandoned the administrative-territorial transformations of the regions.


2020 ◽  
pp. 76-90
Author(s):  
Maria A. Elizarieva ◽  
Marina A. Chigasheva ◽  
Boris Blahak ◽  
Maria Yu. Mikhina

The article is devoted to the role of intertext in public speeches of politicians of the Christian Social Union in Bavaria within the framework of the “political ash Wednesday”. On the example of the speeches of M. Söder, A. Scheuer and M. Blume in 2018, the relationship between the type of intertext and its pretext, on the one hand, and the speaker’s intention, on the other, was analyzed. As a result of the analysis of 23 intertextual inclusions, four intentions were revealed, among which (48 %) criticism of political opponents (SDPG, “The Greens”, AfD, “Free Voters”) prevails. Quotes from representatives of these parties, political slogans, a paraphrase of the name of the eco-movement and a quote from an artist are used to express it. As the intertextual analysis showed, to verbalize the second intention (appeal to authoritative opinion and emphasize the continuity of the party course), the former chairman of the CSU F. J. Strauss is cited, while the third intention (opposing Bavaria to the rest of Germany) is implemented using a quote from the Bavarian anthem, a paraphrase of a television commercial and quotations from a literary work. In addition, the authors found that the fourth intention (emphasizing the dialogic nature of communication with ordinary people) is found only in M. Söder’s speech in the form of a retelling of his dialogues with ordinary citizens.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document