Chiefs and colonial rule in Cameroon: inventing chieftaincy, French and British Style

Africa ◽  
1993 ◽  
Vol 63 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-175 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Geschiere
Keyword(s):  
The State ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
British Rule ◽  
Middle Range ◽  
Proper Power ◽  
Context Dependent

Given the crisis today over the proper power of the State in modern Cameroon (as elsewhere in Africa), chiefs are sometimes considered as a possible alternative focus of authority. Yet chieftaincy is a very variable, context-dependent phenomenon, even when it originated only in the colonial period. The article illustrates this point by examining the different fortunes of the office of chief in two Cameroonian societies, the Maka (who came under French rule) and the Bakweri (who came under British rule). In neither instance (but for different reasons) does chieftaincy appear to offer the alternative, middle-range authority that is needed.

Women, Power, and the State in Guinea

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Dessertine
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Property Rights ◽  
Political Party ◽  
The State ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Political Involvement ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Domestic Sphere ◽  
Political Resource ◽  
French Colonial

Women’s involvement in the processes of state formation is marked by a strong ambivalence in Guinea: female political mobilizations appear as an indispensable advantage for state power when they are deployed in support of it, but these mobilizations can likewise disrupt and generate major problems for the state when they are directed against it. The efficacy of female political involvement is closely linked to the historiography of relationships between women and the state in Guinea, a country that helped construct an image of female activism outside of areas considered to be exclusively political, and as a guarantor of social justice. During the colonial period, as was the case for many other countries under French colonial rule, the influence of women was restricted to the domestic sphere: once households ceased to constitute a political resource for the colonial regimes (in contrast to the precolonial era), the influence that women were able to wield within, for example, matrimonial alliances was considerably reduced. Yet, women played a highly important role in nationalist conflicts and under the regime of Sékou Touré, who served as Guinea’s first president from 1958 to 1984. Presented as the “women’s man,” Touré sought high integration of women into his political party, based on structures inspired by the Soviet socialist model. This was a Guinean political originality. In this context, even though women were given official prominence, their demands nonetheless drew on conservative models that relied on a politicization of the maternal figure. Yet the domestic and apolitical character of female mobilization still lends it a spontaneous efficacy in a context in which laws supporting women are seldom enforced and in which the situation seems to have become increasingly precarious for women due to male emigration and inequalities in property rights.

British Rule and Tribal Revolts in India: The curious case of Bastar

2015 ◽  
Vol 50 (5) ◽  
pp. 1619-1644 ◽  
Author(s):  
AJAY VERGHESE
Keyword(s):  
Colonial Period ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Indian Government ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Archival Material ◽  
British Rule ◽  
Indigenous Groups ◽  
Princely State ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
Colonial Policies

AbstractBritish colonial rule in India precipitated a period of intense rebellion among the country's indigenous groups. Most tribal conflicts occurred in the British provinces, and many historians have documented how a host of colonial policies gave rise to widespread rural unrest and violence. In the post-independence period, many of the colonial-era policies that had caused revolt were not reformed, and tribal conflict continued in the form of the Naxalite insurgency. This article considers why the princely state of Bastar has continuously been a major centre of tribal conflict in India. Why has this small and remote kingdom, which never came under direct British rule, suffered so much bloodshed? Using extensive archival material, this article highlights two key findings: first, that Bastar experienced high levels of British intervention during the colonial period, which constituted the primary cause of tribal violence in the state; and second, that the post-independence Indian government has not reformed colonial policies in this region, ensuring a continuation and escalation of tribal conflict through the modern Naxalite movement.

Tracing Burma's Economic Failure to Its Colonial Inheritance

2011 ◽  
Vol 85 (4) ◽  
pp. 725-747 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Brown
Keyword(s):  
Rice Field ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Political Freedom ◽  
Dominant Factor ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Commercial Experience ◽  
British Rule ◽  
Colonial Economy ◽  
Economic Failure

The extent to which the inheritance of British rule in Burma, including Burmese perceptions of that inheritance, might explain Burma's economic failure since independence is explored. Several factors came into play. One was the ferocious rejection of the economic structures of colonial rule by the Burmese. Another was the failure of Burmese entrepreneurs– who had been in a position to achieve little beyond dominance over the rice field–to emerge during the colonial period. Finally, there were the implications for independent Burma's economic options of the withdrawal of Indian capital, enterprise, and commercial experience, which had been a dominant factor in the colonial economy, at the point when Burma regained its political freedom.

Colonial Rule and Modernization in Ballari

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 8
Author(s):  
Asra Afrin
Keyword(s):  
Positive Impact ◽  
Modern Technology ◽  
Native People ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Indian Literature ◽  
Indian History ◽  
British Rule

Colonialism is one of the most important aspects of Indian history and Indian literature. The colonial rule has left its impression in both positive and negative ways. The paper looks at the positive aspects of the British rule in Ballari a District in Karnataka. The paper/article deals with the development that took place during the colonial rule in Ballari. It explores the adoption of modern technology and science and opening of missionary schools at Ballari and its positive impact on the region and regional/native people. The paper shows how the modernization and Westernization made its way in Ballari.

Islam and Colonial Rule in Lagos

1995 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 66-80
Author(s):  
Olakunle A. Lawal
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Muslim Community ◽  
Tropical Africa ◽  
Southwestern Nigeria ◽  
Urban Settlement ◽  
Islam And Politics ◽  
British Rule ◽  
History Of ◽  
Process Of Urbanization

IntroductionThis essay provides an explanation of the dynamics of the interactionbetween Islam and politics by placing emphasis on the role played byMuslims in the collision of traditionalism and British rule as colonialismtook root in Lagos. The focus is on the development of a political schismwithin the nascent Muslim community of metropolitan Lagos at the startof the twentieth century up until the end of the 1940s. It highlights therole of Islam in an emerging urban settlement experiencing rapid transformationfrom a purely rural and traditional center into a colonial urbancenter. The essay is located within the broader issues of urban change andtransition in twentieth-century tropical Africa. Three major developments(viz: the central mosque crisis, the Eleko affair, and the Oluwa land case)are used as the vehicles through which the objectives of the essay areachieved.The introduction of Islam into Lagos has been studied by T. G. O.Gbadamosi as part of the history of Islam in southwestern Nigeria. Thisepic study does not pay specific attention to Lagos, devoted as it is to thegrowth of Islam in a far-flung territory like the whole of modem southwesternNigeria. His contribution to a collection of essays on the historyof Lagos curiously leaves out Islam’s phenomenal impact on Lagosianpolitics during the first half of the twentieth century. In an attempt to fillthis gap, Hakeem Danmole’s essay also stops short of appreciating the fundamentallink between the process of urbanization, symbolized in this caseby colonial rule, and the vanguard role played by Muslims in the inevitableclash of tradition and colonial rule in Lagos between 1900 and 1950.

Suffering Spectators of Development

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arjun Chowdhury
Keyword(s):  
Civil Wars ◽  
Central Government ◽  
State Capacity ◽  
State Power ◽  
The State ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Alternative View

This chapter offers an alternative view of the incidence and duration of insurgencies in the postcolonial world. Insurgencies and civil wars are seen as the primary symptom of state weakness, the inability of the central government to monopolize violence. Challenging extant explanations that identify poverty and low state capacity as the cause of insurgencies, the chapter shows that colonial insurgencies, also occurring in the context of poverty and state weakness, were shorter and ended in regime victories, while contemporary insurgencies are longer and states are less successful at subduing them. The reason for this is the development of exclusive identities—based on ethnicity, religion, tribe—in the colonial period. These identities serve as bases for mobilization to challenge state power and demand services from the state. Either way, such mobilization means that popular demands for services exceed the willingness to disarm and/or pay taxes, that is, to supply the state.

Litigating Honor, Defamation, and Shame in Southern Rhodesia

2018 ◽  
Vol 61 (3) ◽  
pp. 79-98
Author(s):  
Allison K. Shutt
Keyword(s):  
The State ◽  
The Other ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Government Employees ◽  
Court Records ◽  
History Of ◽  
Southern Rhodesia ◽  
Special Protection

Abstract:This article reviews the history of defamation cases involving Africans in Southern Rhodesia. Two precedent-setting cases, one in 1938 and the other in 1946, provided a legal rationale for finding defamation that rested on the ability of litigants to prove they had been shamed. The testimony and evidence of these cases, both of which involved government employees, tracks how colonial rule was altering hierarchy and changing definitions of honor, often to the bewilderment of the litigants themselves. Importantly, both cases concluded that African employees of the state deserved special protection from defamation. The article then traces how the rules and ambiguities resulting from the legal logic of the 1938 and 1946 cases gave a wider group of litigants such as clerks, police, clergy, and teachers room to maneuver in the courtroom where they also claimed their professional honor. Such litigants perfectly understood the expectations of the court and performed accordingly by recounting embarrassing, even painful, experiences, all to validate their personal and professional honor in court. Such performances raise the question of how we might use court records to write a history of the emotional costs to people who used astute strategies that rested on dishonorable revelations to win their cases.

Some Origins of Nationalism in East Africa

1968 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 119-146 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. M. Lonsdale
Keyword(s):  
Central Government ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Political Activity ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
National Movements ◽  
New Type ◽  
First Time ◽  
Official Recognition

This paper attempts to provide a frame of reference for evaluating the role of ordinary rural Africans in national movements, in the belief that scholarly preoccupation with élites will only partially illumine the mainsprings of nationalism. Kenya has been taken as the main field of enquiry, with contrasts and comparisons drawn from Uganda and Tanganyika. The processes of social change are discussed with a view to establishing that by the end of the colonial period one can talk of peasants rather than tribesmen in some of the more progressive areas. This change entailed a decline in the leadership functions of tribal chiefs who were also the official agents of colonial rule, but did not necessarily mean the firm establishment of a new type of rural leadership. The central part of the paper is taken up with an account of the competition between these older and newer leaderships, for official recognition rather than a mass following. A popular following was one of the conditions for such recognition, but neither really achieved this prior to 1945 except in Kikuyuland, and there the newer leaders did not want official recognition. After 1945 the newer leadership, comprising especially traders and officials of marketing co-operatives, seems everywhere to have won a properly representative position, due mainly to the enforced agrarian changes which brought the peasant face to face with the central government, perhaps for the first time. This confrontation, together with the experience of failure in earlier and more local political activity, resulted in a national revolution coalescing from below, co-ordinated rather than instigated by the educated élite.

scholarly journals Tuberculosis, Housing and the Colonial State: Hong Kong, 1900-1950

2003 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 653-682 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret Jones
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
Social Policy ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
British Rule ◽  
Laissez Faire ◽  
Imperial State ◽  
Indirect Rule

As Tak-Wing Ngo has argued, the ‘dominant’ view of colonial rule in Hong Kong is one of a state which governed through ‘a deliberate policy of indirect rule—a combination of economic laissez-faire and political non-intervention’. It depicts a government which was disengaged from the population, preferring to see the colony as a trading opportunity, whilst leaving the condition of the peoples it held sway over to the philanthropy and humanitarianism of the colony's Chinese elites. This view of British rule was even supported by the primary representative of the imperial state when Sir David Trench admitted in 1970 that social policy, in the sense of responding to the needs of the populace, only began in the colony in 1953. But as Tak-Wing Ngo has argued, these ‘established narratives’ of Hong Kong's colonial history need to be reassessed and a more nuanced approach adopted to reveal the complexity of even Hong Kong's seemingly simple ‘colonial state-society’ relations.

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