Carroll 1!

Around the turn of the 20th century, European colonial expansion into mainland Africa brought with it the trouble of outlining doctrines for managing capital and labor. European powers sought to phrase lawmaking so that productivity would be maximized, the probability of rebellion minimized, and social order would organize individuals to behave positively for the benefit of their industry-cultivating hegemons. These policies were cast by controlling states like Britain and Belgium minimally (perhaps reluctantly), and left largely to systems of fragmenting and increasingly hostile social order that often imploded. This paper will discuss literature addressing the cognitive perceptions of Europeans from the late 19th to mid-20th centuries, how these perceptions formulated civil policy (appended by productive interests), and how various African social constructs were transformed through this saga of gradual hegemonic codification. How were realities in colonial Africa results of how European powers thought? And how specifically have historians perceptions of colonial policy in Africa changed over time? Beginning with a Euro-centric outlook of a civilizing mindset, literature from the 60s onward drove headlong towards the view that colonial powers control was artificial, misconceived, almost never inclusive (in fact, exclusionary) of its African constituents, and rarely consolidated power to the authors of social doctrines. Lord William Malcolm Hailey, writing in 1957, inquires at length how African colonies could possibly develop without the close supervision of European civilization,1 following this with unspeakably offensive discourse. He describes Africa and Europe as inseparable,2 and implicates the subjugation of Africans in a natural order.3 The phrase So much for prologues a long discussion of missionary efforts in sub-Saharan Africa, suggesting that those regions could in some way use a leg up. He

Carroll 2! seems to ask, how will African nations (which he acknowledges were not yet autonomous) emulate Christian civilization? Hailey invidiously presupposes that Europe is the center of gravity in Africans lives, and that applications of European customs are necessary to objectively improve them qualitatively. This is an argument from power, which looks down upon its civil body. Civilization was the tool of power, Christianity and education were the system, and Africans were expected (saith he) to regulate accordingly. This fundamental authoritarian literary position, in which Hailey precludes European involvement in even the minutest African affairs, means that policy will be shaped and executed in this respect. Hailey imagines a colonial world of gradual, progressive insistence on European culture, which means some system of social management and, ultimately, overbearing economic superimposition will coalesce in colonial territories. Crawford Youngs Politics in the Congo provides a thorough, eerily detailed insight into the machinations of Belgian administration in colonial Congo.4 Belgium stated explicitly sometimes that its subject laborers should work diligently without rest, and land rights were left open to whichever European investors thought they could make a profit off the area.5 Neither naps nor land claims were accessible to native Congolese, but were compromised immediately by their subjugators. Political movements like the Commission for the Protection of Natives were serene artifices meant to dissuade certain beliefs about Belgiums rule in the heartland; the CPN in particular dissipated several years after it served its purpose to advertise reform to the international community. Policies in the Congo were either nonexistent or served only to assert productivity on the Congolese, scarcely minding the wellbeing of its people. This

Carroll 3! is not an inclination towards welfare (nor in any way a saturation of European culture) but a brutal, obstinate seizure of social processes, reconfigured to productive ends. Young writes here about the reality of colonial Africa, a surplus state whose cultural shepherding is a domesticated permutation of actual events. Although Hailey asserted somewhat innocent (if not ignominious) intentions for the alleged betterment of African societies, he is almost entirely paltry in positing a reproduction of sub-Saharan life under European intervention. Hailey wonders how Africans will carry on without European guidance; Young wonders how they will ever be able to live with it. Angola is yet another example of hardship in the colonial index, and yet its later authorship deviated dramatically from incurring fire and brimstone on its politically and economically disconsolate inhabitants. The Portuguese, intent on producing somewhat educated and civilized assimilados, provided slightly more realistic opportunities for its citizens to become educated and accustomed to European ways of life. Douglas L. Wheelers discourse on civil rebellion in Angola follows the assimilado population closely in its gradual, literary ascension to liberation. This class was a byproduct of miscegenation and liberal policies namely, the 1820 decision to make all Angolans Portuguese citizens.6 A mixed-race mestio could acquire an education, appeal to higher orders, get better paying jobs, and even contribute to a largely uncensored Angolan press. This is not to say Portugal is exempt from its atrocious 400-year tradition of slave trafficking. Also, citizenship was not an option before the 19th century, when slavery became a philosophical taboo and its demand waned. Nor do these policies help to solidify the iron fist of hegemony over Angola itself; as concessions were increasingly made to international opinion, the people of Angola received more and more

Carroll 4! opportunities to liberate. Originally, the assimilado were instructed as assistants to colonial officials, but the liberties involved in that title were not long contained in their bubble. Ultimately, such publications as O Cruzeiro do Sul provided the intellectual instrument with which Angolans polemically disassembled the colonial concept and came to realize their actual political condition.7 Belgian politics are here counterpoised by more ingratiating civil schemata; Wheeler here seems to stress that there was definite variation in the treatment of different colonies by different masters. Considering Portugals extensive history in slave bartering, this is crucial in subverting early assumptions about the unfeeling capitalist vigil, and paints Africans as members of the literal Portuguese state employed not only as agriculturalists, but as clerks and intellectuals. Seeing the Portuguese as ill-mannered, racist, backward, and uncultured,8 colonial policy in Angola collapsed in on itself. Modern revolutionary movements also capture the machinations of social altercation through a somewhat privileged class. Timothy Luke seems to ask, how did resistance demonstrate the ineffectuality of civilization? Haileys doctrine presupposed some downward thrust of cultural imaginings upon African colonies; had this thrust been received warmly, perhaps such a multitude of African states would not have sought their oppressors destruction. Luke outlines how resistance movements in Angola and Mozambique gave glimmers of hope to African peasants (a term whose controversy is lost on earlier authors) as a means of choosing their own identity, ethnicity, cultural affiliation, and social policy for the first time.9 He says this occurred through collusion between the petty bourgeoisie,10 an educated class of elites who could have formed nationalist prospects, which the masses could then execute. The elite were, to some

Carroll 5! degree, mediators between the people and European intentions, and were so placed as to engender resounding effects if a cohesive effort was made to subvert authority. This reality brings into question not only how heavy the impact of colonial intercession actually was, but also how Africans reacted according to this intercession. Certainly, according to Luke, they felt disenfranchised, lacking identity, lacking cultural context, and utterly without control over themselves. By negation of nationalist prospects, Luke managed extraordinarily to capture the fundamental political feelings of dissonant African multitudes in Angola and Mozambique. Why did European policies result in such overt dissidence in their sub-Saharan territories? Or, what prevented Europeans from more articulately negotiating the employment of African individuals in the affairs of commercial industry? V.Y. Mudimbe presents a groundbreaking exploration of European philosophy throughout the history of civilization, a term lingering everywhere in his study. He discusses the European episteme,11 the outward-looking body of precept-knowledge whereby information is appended through the ascription of familiar concepts on foreign bodies. This is basic ethnocentricity, the grounding of all information in insular terms, which, he says, founded early European anthropology and philology.12 European migrs to Africa expected some form of systematic intellectualism from those with whom they came in contact;13 failing this, Africans were assigned as savages, a term as old as the first hegemons.14 He explores at length the Other, an epistemological construct of missing knowledge that awaited fulfillment; prefacing anything with otherness places all speculation thereof beneath an ethnocentric and misconstrued metatheory of recognizable concepts.15 Mudimbe revolutionized the historiography of power and its effects by exploring the

Carroll 6! psychologically ingratiating nature of the powers that be. It was not a vicious sentiment of subjugation that brought African colonies to their knees, but the unabridged translation of idiosyncrasy into action. Not long after Mudimbes publication, Leroy Vail edited an equally resounding collection of essays simply titled, The Creation of Tribalism in Southern Africa, which explores the manufacture of fake ethnicities in colonial-controlled populations.16 Among many heralded contributors, Patrick Harries discusses how South Africans in Transvaal were categorically inculcated by vague and inaccurate ascriptions of origin, ethnicity, and tribal affiliation.17 Names like Tsonga, Ronga, and Gwamba were practically invented out of wrongly heard words and assigned to the wrong groups of people and thus, groups of Africans were given allegiances out of their control, and were differentiated from one another in the eye of empire. Europeans also attempted to classify Africans by nation (or the presupposed nation, until they get their act together, as Hailey would say), which assumes that swaths of the African continents population were subject to the same socio-political definitions as in Europe.18 Harries seems not only to demonstrate how Mudimbes analysis was demonstrated in reality, but almost addresses him directly as he states that as Europeans were unable to break from their ideological heritage, [they] implicitly believed their concept of ethnicity to be natural order and not merely one convention amongst others used to make sense of the world.19 This natural order also relates to Hailey, who was in many ways a vestige of this exact philosophy, but this time around literature has assumed an attitude rejecting insularity and preferring unmodified understanding to static cognitive assimilation, as Mudimbe accused Europeans of possessing in their stint with Africa.20 Driven out (and,

Carroll 7! eventually, back in) by white farmers, they were forced to become tenants for unspeakable wages under European lords who only saw workers and renters in them.21 Diets, resource availability, and language were fragmented geographically in this way;22 subtly, Harries founds the resounding point that African culture was violently dissembled by European inquisition, such that not even their breakfasts were ever the same again.23 Later in the colonial period, urbanization drove thousands to live and work in cities, wherein the consciousness of harsh industrial life was manifest in the establishment of kin relations in lieu of actual familiar structures, and ethnicities were actually embraced as a means of remaining socially and ethically stable in a fragmenting socio-political scheme.24 In the midst of Apartheid, Europeans flexed their true idiosyncratic muscle with the Homelands Citizenship Act (1970) by expediting undesirables to to their homelands, now no longer arable, all according to perceived ethnic affiliations, thus pairing strangers in a depraved state of geographic dispossession, starvation, and utter cultural decimation.25 Harries argument nearly proves itself; he exhibited to the historiography that categorical oppression of native peoples was (is, rather, considering his time of writing) absolutely real, and that the argument from antiquity implicated far more than basic atrocity; seemingly innocent systematization of peoples happenstance affiliations are easily misconstrued, injuriously applied, and result in identity abrogation entirely. Sara Berry argues similarly along the lines of a socially incisive civilizing doctrine. She opens by stating that African societies were generally autonomous and trade-oriented, and attached both material and symbolic significance to land.26 Societies sought similar commodities as Europeans: Berry mentions land and labor first

Carroll 8! in reference to initial African interests and then to the same interest under the thumb of hegemony. Africans, as she seems to suggest, initially and enduringly possessed common interests that accounted for their general malaise with colonial rule. In addition, European powers generated social abstractions about their subject societies with the invention of tradition27 (discussed later), which they held to be axiomatic in understanding most African cultures. Agriculture was expected to regularize with administrative oversight, so that laborers incomes could be taxed and the price of commodities could remain under control. African societies were generally seen as anachronistic and static to colonial powers, and so flaws in these ambiguous models were allegedly caused by the downfall of Africans themselves.28 Whereas Hailey intimated a cultural validation of intervening in Africans affairs, Berrys exposure of fundamental political-economic infrastructure suggests that colonization was a flat-out hegemonic takeover, and that civilization amounts to pure fluff. This also accounts for Africans general diffidence towards colonial decision-making, and why civilizing was such an apparent effort; Africans were not privy to industrialization, and so had no chance of understanding European sentiments. Most striking in Berrys analysis was her coverage of how African colonial subjects renegotiated rules and social identities in order to cope with or take advantage of colonial rule and commercialization.29 This is an explicit suggestion that African cultures molded around the doctrine of colonial powers; most shocking is the fact that this doctrine was a crude and misinformed reproduction of what European powers imagined to be the stable political and jural systems of the African past.30 Many colonies were living in abstract artifices of what Europeans thought to be their actual

Carroll 9! culture, doomed to live forever in a disgruntled theme park of their former lifestyles. Gertrude Mianda addresses this directly in her treatment of the volu.31 This was a class of native Congolese who literally and explicitly emulated European mannerisms according to the European order of male education. The volu were all men, who were educated early in their lives and were considered the elite in the Congo colonies. Women were made politically inferior; they were educated later on than men, and only ever learned domestic chores. The volus firmly believed that they had attained a level of civilization that brought them much closer to whites and further from common Congolese.32 Hailey suffers here, for not only did colonialism fail in its alleged goal, but it actually created violence and hostility by nature of its aberrant purview. Mianda seems to suggest that, in actually emulating European mannerisms (Hailey would be proud), Congolese took on a previously nonexistent Euro-similar sense of male superiority, a breakdown in womens rights in the community, and the deliberate denial of education to women. Mianda, a powerful womens rights author, exhibits to the historiography a world in which European intentions bred brutal class distinctions and gender suppression. In the 21st century, literature became purely retrospective, as opposed to active as when authors wrote during Apartheid, and during social revolutions in Congo, Angola, Mozambique, and elsewhere. Thomas Spear picked up precisely where Vails collection left off, sporting a similar lovely bibliography to this one, and citing improvements to authors arguments. He argues centrally that culture could have only been invented to a certain extent, before its legitimacy with Africans fell flat, and how such an artifice was therefore designed and transformed by Europeans and Africans alike.33 Not distant an argument from his forbears, Spear suggests that the metaphysic of tradition could only

Carroll 10! have allowed for a certain reach of power on behalf of Europeans, and in fact gave prevalence to Africans as all doctrine from above was filtered through localized cognitive validations.34 He also reminds explicitly that doctrines from above were productiondriven, avoiding centrally the advent of armed rebellion.35 To employ Mudimbe here, this is testament not to the insular episteme of Europeans, but their lackluster improvisation36 in generating social policy that met their goals. If only they emphasized theatre at Eton. Spear cites the ancient constructions of the tribe (a term he finally annuls), which he describes in terms of basic social networks (friends, family, acquaintances).37 He also discusses how, in such an actualized world of cultural identification, tradition could not be invented, but had to be recreated, and that customary laws were entirely colonial.38 Linguistically, he describes adapted native terms as taking on unwarranted ambiguous meanings,39 and that along with identity and language comes an interpersonal history that validates the individual. To mention Harries, Spear seems to suggest that identity was not a subject until colonial auspices threatened power, cohesion, liberty, or standard of living. People were driven into clans40 as a means of preserving themselves and remaining socially prevalent. Spear teeters constantly on stating outright that colonizing powers sought to grasp and manipulate various African pasts to seize sentimentalities and thereby gain control over the future of those they ruled. In other words, by providing a past they also provided a future - one spent in diligence to uncompromising top-down socio-political axioms designed centrally to forge productive routines. He instilled in the historiography a new dimension: the control of time. No longer required to negate civilizers, Spear incurs the

Carroll 11! philosophy that discourses may now deal with the physics of hegemonic oversight: time, history, and the manipulation of populations through information. Jan Vansina, legendary (perhaps mythical) guru of African studies, addresses at length the methodical decryption of African languages by Rudolf Meringer, who wrote in 1909.41 Some failures to assemble lexicons came with the lack of integral phonetic aspects to each word; words were often developed along lines of pronunciation.42 Word roots were also assumed to have prefixes and suffixes. Suppositions such as these portray something fiercely insular about European interpretations of African culture. It is easy to here invoke Mudimbe, whose analysis along similar lines was far more philosophical, in exhibiting to the historiography a near-psychological disruption of processing knowledge about contact cultures, illustrating European precepts of other cultures as almost mythical. Simply, African socio-political formats did not line up with European conceptions, and were thus marginalized this marginalization did not directly invite further inquiry, but instead opened African cultures to insular European assertions. To recapitulate, Haileys essay is by now almost immaterial considering Vansinas insight, who posits to the historiography that colonial administrators and endorsers were not fit mentally to interact with or even converse with an African-born individual. Authors perceptions on the relation between rulers and ruled have changed along lines illustrating European power as thin, ineffectual, neglecting of Africans well-being entirely, and in fact breeding hostility among people who were mostly strangers. Epistemologically, Mudimbe and Vansina have demonstrated that a foreign vocabulary can do a lot to invoke the atrocities reported on by his contemporaries. As African peoples were driven into cities, their former lifestyles were increasingly fragmented and

Carroll 12! they were driven to such madness as to invent ethnicities as a means of strengthening and reassuring themselves socially. Haileys image of the civilized African individual, citizens of a brave new world,43 has been subverted beyond recognition over the decades by authors intents on undermining the perceived authority of European colonizers. So much for insulting literature frequenting moot terminology, driving the decimating vehicle of capitalist industry, removing unassuming people from themselves, and starving them until they adapt the very illusory and inane visions of ethnicity that their rulers first invented. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
1

This word will be mercilessly caged in quotations throughout the paper, figuratively constraining such a digressive term to the absurdity it deserves. 2 Lord William Malcolm Hailey, The Differing Faces of Africa, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 36, No. 1 (Oct. 1957): 144. 3 Ibid., 145. 4 Crawford Young, Politics in the Congo (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1965). 5 Ibid., 16. 6 Douglas L. Wheeler, "Angola is Whose House?, African Historical Studies, Vol. 2 No. 1 (1969): pp. 9-10. 7 Ibid., 15-17. 8 Ibid., 21. 9 Timothy W. Luke, Angola and Mozambique: Institutionalizing Social Revolution in Africa, The Journal of African History, Vol. 44, No. 1 (2003): introduction, 413; emergence of identity, 415. 10 Ibid., 417. 11 V.Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988): 25. Mudimbes characterization of European epistemology extends far beyond the included description, and so a meager summation had to suffice; in other words, Mudimbe is too eloquent to quote sufficiently. 12 Ibid., 18-19. 13 Ibid., 12-13. Admittedly, this sentence leaves much to be explained, as it is a reduced version of many pages. His exposition on mercantilist visions of Africa occupy a complete chapter, beginning on page 17. 14 Ibid., 69-71. 15 Ibid., 20. 16 Leroy Vail, introduction to The Creation of Tribalism in Southern Africa, ed. Leroy Vail (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989): 1. 17 Patrick Harries, Exclusion, Classification and Internal Colonialism: The Emergence of Ethnicity Among the Tsonga-Speakers of South Africa, in The Creation of Tribalism in Southern Africa, ed. Leroy Vail (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989), 86. 18 Ibid., 87.

Carroll 13! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

19 20

Ibid., 90. In addition, Harries exposition of tribalism (not yet discredited from the historiographical vocabulary) scarcely fails to qualify as a monastic European state in the making, minus its geographical location and its lack of cathedrals. Power was apparently centralized to one person, relations contested for his or her posthumous succession, and everyone spoke generally the same language. 21 Ibid., 96. 22 Ibid., 89. 23 Ibid., 95. 24 Ibid., 100-103. 25 Ibid., 104-106. These are three separate points summarized into one, all of which work together to illustrate the mechanic at work in the suppression of Transvaal Africans. Also, venturing too deeply into Apartheid would potentially verge on other social and cultural narratives, which were not pertinent to this paper. With a more flexible central inquiry, I would have devoted many more pages to the subject. 26 Sarah Berry, "Hegemony on a Shoestring: Indirect Rule and Access to Agricultural Land," Journal of the International African Institute ,Vol. 62 No. 3 (1992): pp. 327. 27 Ibid., 331. 28 The word downfall is chosen frivolously. Throughout the paper, I try to choose words that Hailey may have used, emphasizing that antique colonial doctrines are both archaic and predictable. 29 Ibid., 338. 30 Ibid., 329-330. 31 Gertrude Mianda, "The volu Case," in Women in African Colonial Histories, ed. Jean Allman, Susan Geiger and Nakanyike Musisi (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), pp. 144. 32 Ibid., 145. 33 Thomas Spear, Neo-Traditionalism and the Limits of Invention in British Colonial Africa, in The Journal of African History, Vol. 44, No. 3 (July 1982): 4-5. 34 Ibid., metaphysic, 6; validation, 8. 35 Ibid., 9. Refer back to Luke. 36 Ibid., 6. 37 Ibid., 16-17. 38 Ibid., 11-12. 39 Ibid., 20. 40 Ibid., 22. 41 Jan Vansina, "How to Distil Words and Obtain Culture History," History in Africa, Vol. 33 (2006): pp. 500. 42 Ibid., 507-510. 43 Hailey, Differing Faces, 153.