"A Palimpsest of Contradictions": Ethnicity, Class, and Politics in Africa

Author(s): Bruce J. Berman

Source: The International Journal of African Historical Studies, Vol. 37, No. 1 (2004), pp.
13-31
Published by: Boston University African Studies Center
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 International Journal of African Historical Studies, Vol. 37, No. 1 (2004) 13

"A PALIMPSEST OF CONTRADICTIONS":

ETHNICITY, CLASS, AND POLITICS IN AFRICA

By Bruce J. Berman

John Lonsdale's use of the striking metaphor, "a palimpsest of contradictions," to

describe the colonial state in Kenya in our first joint paper sent me running to the
dictionary. A palimpsest is simply "a manuscript written over a partly erased
older manuscript in such a way that the old words can be read beneath the new."'
It vividly makes a similar point to two of Karl Marx's most famous aphorisms.
The first deals with the relationship between social structure and human agency in
history: "Men make history, but not actually as they will, but under conditions
given and determined in the past. The ghost of all dead generations weighs upon
the conscience of the living like a nightmare." The second is his characterization
of the state, not the incessantly quoted and often misleading characterization of it
as the "executive committee of the bourgeoisie," but his more profound descrip-
tion of the state as the "r6sum6 of society." For twenty-five years the two of us
have worked to translate these vivid images into an approach to the method and
theory of studying the political economy, state, and culture in Africa, both histori-
cal and contemporary.

In 1992 we produced a book recording the first dozen years of that col-
laboration, and in reviewing its development we concluded that "we must again
take seriously the subjective cognitive dimensions of colonial and contemporary
Africa-the construction of meanings as well as structures--contained in knowl-
edge and belief, ideology and culture among Africans as well as Europeans, as
they acted within and against the constraints of their times," and noted this
required "that we reassess some of the most basic and taken-for-granted concepts
in African studies-such as nationalism and the secular industrial nation-state as
the inevitable end of development, and even more important, African custom and
tradition-as socially constructed artifacts that reflect particular social and politi-
cal interests and continue to shape vital and living African histories."2 This
thinking has led us to a focus on three particular areas of concern: the relationship
between the state and society in colonial and postcolonial states, the cultural

I Encarta World English Dictionary (New York, 1999), 1300.

2 Bruce Berman and John Lonsdale, Unhappy Valley: Conflict in Kenya and Africa, Book
One: State and Class (London, 1992), "Introduction," 7-8.

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14 BRUCE J. BERMAN

response of African societies to capitalist modernity as it was imposed upon

experienced by them, and the relationship between African political cultur
the modern development of ethnicity and class. In each of these areas we h
attempted to combine the analysis of culture, cognition, and human agency
the analysis of social structural forces of material property, production, and
to produce explanations of historical complexity and diversity. The present
reviews our work over the past dozen years and, in particular, pays tribute to
Lonsdale's remarkable combination of wide historical erudition, deep cu
understanding and theoretical creativity. While we have applied our effort
marily to the study of colonial Kenya, the method and theory are of wider
cation in Africa and, indeed, elsewhere for understanding the varied local ex
ences of the political economy, politics, and culture of colonialism and mode
Lonsdale's work has, in particular, opened the way towards deeper understa
of the development and internal conflicts of African ethnicity, class, gender
generation; the development of African political discourse, including indig
constructions of history; and the turbulent confrontations of these factor
disparate elements of capitalism and the state.

Method and Theory in the Study of African History and Politics

The study of Africa (and, indeed, the rest of the world) has been undermine
attempts to develop and apply theories that claim universal relevance as "o
tive" science, whether neoclassical economics, rational-choice theory, d
ency theory, or some versions of Marxist theory. Such efforts at a scienti
universalism leads to "one size fits all" theorizing that we have found histor
fallacious, intellectually misleading, and politically disastrous. We rejected
creation of a universal theory as the end and purpose of social science and h
and, instead, tried to employ theory, as Foucault put it, as a conceptual to
that makes possible the analysis of the similarities and differences betwee
world cases, with the belief that understanding lies in the explanation of
plexity and contingency in a small universe of cases with distinctive idiosy
sies and trajectories of change. Theory is the start not the end of analysis
objective of which is the explanation of the specific case. As Jean Paul
actually did say about theory in his Critique of Method, the proof of the pu
is in the eating.

What struck us about detailed oral and written historical evidence was
degree of uncertainty, confusion, misinformation, and conflict it frequen

3 Michel Foucault, Knowledge and Power (New York, 1980), 145.

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 "A PALIMPSEST OF CONTRADICTIONS" 15

revealed among historical actors and the complex interaction of consciou

and structural influences in shaping the actual course of events. The poin
brought home to us with particular force in a letter from one of the most
ful colonial officials we had interviewed, commenting on a manuscript w
sent him that he had sent to a colleague and copied to us:

Most historians and political writers attribute to diverse parties in a

try and to its governors calculated intentions and conscious objecti
any sequence of events which were just not there and did not exist
tions and purposes ... were never so informed, cool or compos
L[onsdale] infers. I don't think they were all that conscious that they
muddled when they were muddled.4

Making sense of this remark involves a crucial methodological point

historical analysis made by Charles Tilly in his introduction to a major c
analysis of the historical deficiencies of the American SSRC series o
books on comparative political development. We can work either backwar
the present or forward from some point in the past, retrospectively or
tively.5 The former leads to notably deterministic modes of explanation.
ning from known present conditions and searching backwards to uncove
causes, we are inclined to ignore or eliminate as extraneous all those fact
do not appear directly causally related to those conditions. The present the
to appear as the inevitable consequence of a single linear path of developm
history could only have happened this way. In the context of the method
individualism of rational choice theory, for example, which focuses
imputed rational interests and intentions of the actors, we too easily end
the rationalist fallacy that Tom Colchester, the colonial official quoted abo
complaining about, which makes everything that happened an understoo
intended outcome. Prospective analysis, however, begins with a specific s
circumstances in the past and from this baseline works forward through th
sis of the diverse factors that shape a varying succession of outcomes lea
through a convoluted path to the present. The result is a much less tight
matic but more nuanced and contingent understanding of historical develo
It requires the analysis of both structural forces and subjective experien
the former shape the immediate present of historical actors who must cho

4 T.C. Colchester to R.O. Hennings, 30 November 1978, as quoted in Bruce

Control and Crisis in Colonial Kenya (London, 1990), xv.

5 Charles Tilly, "Reflections on the History of European State-Making," in Tilly,

Formation of National States in Western Europe (Princeton, 1975), 14-15; Berman, C
Crisis, 22-23.

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16 BRUCE J. BERMAN

act towards an unknown future, and how these actions affect in turn larger
tural forces. It involves Weber's method of verstehen, analyzing the subjec
perspectives and knowledge of the actors in order to understand the diver
between conscious intentions and actual historical outcomes and to allow for the

influence of unforeseen and unintended factors and consequences that shape con-
tingent and often singular events.

We initially approached the study of colonialism through political econ-

omy, attracted by the holism, historicity, and power of Marxist analysis. The
political economy of colonialism that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s remains a
major achievement, not least because it provided a conceptual basis for the analy-
sis of the colonial "state" rather than colonial "administration" and focused on the

relationship between the state and African societies. It brought to the fore the role
of the state in creating markets for commodities and wage labor and promoting
the emergence of new class and regional cleavages in African colonies that has
substantially enriched our understanding of what "development" and incorpora-
tion into the world capitalist system through colonialism actually meant. Our own
initial focus was on the political economy of the colonial state in Kenya, particu-
larly its role in creating markets, commodity production. and wage labor, and the
varied impact on indigenous African societies.6 However, Marxist analysis, we
found, has two potentially serious problems that need to be avoided and, if possi-
ble, corrected.

The first is a tendency towards structural determinism, visible particularly

in the quasi-Marxism of dependency theory with its vision of a self-reproducing
system of "underdevelopment' and in more vulgar applications of Marxism that
insist on the "objective" laws of motion of capitalist development. In both cases,
we find a universal, linear path of development (or underdevelopment) quite
independent of the conscious will or intentions of historical actors. Ironically, this
sort of systemic social realism has a penchant for retrospective analysis similar to
that of the methodological individualism of rational choice theory or neoclassical
growth theory, only here it is the contradictory "laws of motion" of the capitalist
mode of production that are supreme. The result is a tendency to black box the
state since its role is structurally determined in all cases as the "agent of metro-
politan capitalism"-regardless of what goes on inside the box. The sort of evi-

6 John Lonsdale and Bruce Berman, "Coping with the Contradictions: The Development of
the Colonial State in Kenya, 1895-1914," Journal of African History 20, 4 (1979), 487-505;
Bruce Berman and John Lonsdale, "Crises of Accumulation, Coercion, and the Colonial state: The
Development of the Labour Control System in Kenya, 1919-1929," Canadian Journal of African
Studies 14, 1(1980), 55-81.

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 "A PALIMPSEST OF CONTRADICTIONS" 17

dence about the internal processes of the colonial state we focused on

from this perspective, to be unnecessary and irrelevant. Its role is det
the system regardless of whatever odd things its officials may have sai

What was needed, we found, is an approach that can transla

description of the state as the "resume of society" into analysis of spe
cal cases. It involves a projective "archaeology" of the state, working
succession of historical levels of institutional creation and destruction. This makes
possible realization of the key principles of Marxist historical analysis of human
beings making their own history in conditions derived from past experience and
through such actions both intentionally and unintentionally reproducing and
modifying the old circumstances.7 In so doing, we can grasp, as E.P. Thompson
put it, the reality of "the crucial ambivalence of our human presence in our own
history, part-subject, part-objects, the voluntary agents of our own involuntary
determinations."8 It also requires, however, an understanding of the fundamental
uniqueness and contingency of real historical experience and avoiding reducing it,
in the name of theory, to relatively featureless and indistinguishable representa-
tions of the same thing. As Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer noted in their
important historical sociology of the state, "Outside of theoreticians' models there
is no such thing as capitalism 'in general'; real capitalisms only ever exist as
particular historical forms of civilization ... in the real world all cases are in their
own way 'peculiar'."9 And it is precisely such peculiarities and idiosyncrasies of a
society that may be the most important thing shaping its historical development
and contemporary significance.

We found, second, that writing the narrative of the colonial state revealed
another missing element: culture. Marxist analysis, along much of modernization
theory and neoclassical growth theory, tends to reduce "culture" to an epiphe-
nomenal product of social structure: change the structures and the culture will
change to something that fits appropriately with all instances of those struc-
tures-yet another assertion of universal outcomes. It is clear, however, that this
has rarely been the case in Africa: Western forms of political and economic insti-
tutions, state and market, introduced into African societies rarely work the way
they are supposed to in the West, and Africans occupying social roles of class and
gender seldom behave exactly like their Western counterparts. Culture-the

7 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (New York, 1947), 13, 38.

8 E.P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory (London, 1978), 280.

9 Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer, The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural
Revolution (Oxford, 1985), 189-90.

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18 BRUCE J. BERMAN

context of meaning and social practice through which Africans enco

interpreted, and responded to the institutional and cultural intrusions of
ism and postcolonial "development"---clearly plays an important role in
modern African history. It is the shadow writing of the past visible in th
the present. African cultures, contrary to Western expectations, did not
or go into terminal decline in the face of Western modernity, but h
assimilated elements of that modernity and reinvented themselves in the
As James Clifford notes, contemporary "ethnography begins from the in
fact that Westerners are not the only ones going places in the modern wor

In our study of the colonial state in Kenya it became clear that eth
and class were not contradictory bases of identity and social solidar
former archaic and disappearing, the latter a growing element of capitalis
nity-but were rather intricately intertwined aspects of colonialism. We n

The hidden pillar of the early labour supply was therefore the con
tion within the peasant sector between those who were able to main
domestic production their status in the inflationary spiral of com
obligation, especially in bridewealth payments, which resulted
monetization and the intensification of the market, and those who
only attempt to do so by wage labour. It rested on the ambivalent p
of the appointed chiefs. It could stand only as long as the collabor
relationship between peasant economy and the district adminis
retained enough autonomy to allow household production to contin
expansion, so giving the chiefs the resources with which to rewar
followings while picking on their opponents. The oppression of pr
accumulation on behalf of estate production was thus factionalized
the peasant periphery. Both settler and peasant production were a
expand before 1914, with their major contradiction raging half-hi
within the African labyrinths of lineage and clientage."1

Our research focus began to shift increasingly from the political ec

of the colonial and postcolonial state to analysis of the interaction of cu
political, and economic forces in the historical construction of African et
that constitute one of the most distinctive features of the African exp
modernity. In 1992, in the crucial culminating essay of Unhappy Valley,
Lonsdale laid out his powerfully original explanation of Mau Mau, he lai
agenda for much of our work since:

10 James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), 17.

11 Berman and Lonsdale, Unhappy Valley, 92.

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 "A PALIMPSEST OF CONTRADICTIONS" 19

This essay ... enquires into the past pluralism of tribe and the creative
achievement of ethnicity in the course of bitter, unresolved internal com-
petitions to build political community....

Tribes, it has been said, "are not actual social organizations: rather, they
are states of mind." I go further: tribes, like nations-and they are alike in
most respects other than their lack of a state-are changing moral arenas
of political debate.... Kikuyu nationalism, like any other, was in origin an
intellectual response to social process. It was a contest of moral knowl-
edge.... After British conquest they had to thrash out again the old issues
raised by their society's unequal moral economy at a time when its distri-
bution of wealth, honour and power was being subverted by external pres-
sure for change.... three further conclusions need emphasis: First, ethnic
identity was the reverse of what it is often said to be, unthinking confor-
mity. A common ethnicity was the arena for the sharpest social and politi-
cal division. Second, argument over domestic civic virtue tested claims to
provide external political leadership. Finally, contests about tribal identity
did not exclude and may have kindled a territorial, "Kenyan," political
imagination then.12

Ethnicity and class were then the linked, deeply contested and often vio-
lent responses in African society to the disruptive intrusions of capitalist moder-
nity and the bureaucratic state. To comprehend such fraught histories, we sought
to develop a theoretical and conceptual toolkit that combines the structural and
material with the cultural and cognitive in the analysis of the diverse and contin-
gent paths of changing political and social institutions in African states, while
avoiding materially vacuous idealist or rigidly determinist structural explanations.
We have attempted to construct narratives of historical change through theoreti-
cally grounded comparative and case studies that capture the singularity and com-
plexity of real experience in systems that are never quite integrated and always
contentious and incomplete. And this requires a flexible degree of eclecticism in
both theory and method. The role of theory in historical analysis-and all social
sciences are historical sciences-is to come to grips with the explanation of real
world complexity in which a set of common variables of diverse possible charac-
teristics interact to produce unique historical experience. The character of theory
and explanation in studying historical phenomena is brilliantly expounded by a
master of another historical science, paleontology, Stephen Jay Gould:

12 Berman and Lonsdale, Unhappy Valley, Book Two: Violence and Ethnicity, 267-68. The
internal quotation is from Andrew Roberts, A History of Zambia (London, 1976), 65.

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20 BRUCE J. BERMAN

Historical explanations are distinct from conventional experimental

in many ways. The issue of verification by repetition does no
because we are trying to account for uniqueness of detail that canno
by laws of probability and time's arrow of irreversibility, occur t
again. We do not attempt to interpret the complex events of narrat
reducing them to simple consequences of natural law; historical ev
not, of course, violate any general principles of matter and motio
their occurrence lies in a realm of contingent detail. And the issue
diction ... does not enter into a historical narrative. We can exp
event after it occurs, but contingency precludes its repetition, even
identical starting point. ...

... A historical explanation does not rest on direct inductions from

nature, but on an unpredictable sequence of antecedent states, whe
major change in any step of the sequence would have altered th
result. The final result is therefore dependent, or contingent, upon
thing that came before-the unerasable and determining signa
history.

... with contingency, we are drawn in; we become involved; we share the
pain of triumph or tragedy. When we realize that the actual outcome did
not have to be, that any alteration in any step along the way would have
unleashed a cascade down a different channel, we grasp the causal power
of individual events. We can argue, lament or exult over each
detail-because each holds the power of transformation. Contingency is
the affirmation of the control by immediate events over destiny, the king-
dom lost for want of a horseshoe nail.13

Such an understanding of history accommodates human agency as well as

structural and cultural forces; we can "leave the dead some room to dance"'4 and
see the presence of the individual in history as something other than the automa-
ton "bearer" of systemic imperatives. It links us as well to the normative and
instrumental functions of knowledge in the present. The purpose of explaining the
past is to help us influence and exercise more effective agency and predictable
control over the future; to move, as Marx would have it, from the realm of neces-
sity to the realm of freedom. And in such explanations the genius lies in uncov-

13 Stephen Jay Gould, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (New
York, 1989), 278-79, 283, 284.

14 Wole Soyinka, as quoted by John Lonsdale in "African Pasts in Africa's Future,"

Unhappy Valley, 203.

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 "A PALIMPSEST OF CONTRADICTIONS" 21

ering the details that make for differences in outcomes; as Gould notes i
derful Life, to understand contingency is an invitation to participate in hist

We have pursued such an approach theoretically and empirically in

areas: (1) the relationship between high and deep politics and the mode of
nation in the colonial and postcolonial state; (2) the crisis and transforma
African moral economies under the impact of modernity; and (3) oral eth
and political tribalism in the shaping of African political culture and practi

Accumulation and Control: High and Deep Politics

In the Colonial and Postcolonial State

We began our work with a materialist understanding of the state as neither an

autonomous power over society nor the compliant instrument of a particular clas
or power group, but rather as a system of domination, a complex social process
always to some degree contested and incomplete.'5 The history of political insti-
tutions, their creation, destruction, reconstruction, and reform, constitutes th
continuing resume of a society's internal inequalities and struggles over the dis-
tribution of wealth and power; the constant presence of institutional and cultural
anomalies remaining from the conflicts of earlier history are the enduring shad-
ows of the palimpsest of contradictions. Such formal institutions claiming and/or
exercising legitimate state authority exist only in class-divided societies marked
by a structured inequality in the distribution of wealth and power. The relation
ship between the state and social classes is grounded in the efforts of dominant
classes to assure their material reproduction in the context of asymmetrical con
flicts with subordinate classes.

In precapitalist states the accumulation of wealth takes the form of direct

appropriation from the producers through the social relations of power, i.e.,
through political means external to the sphere of production itself. In capitalist
societies, however, accumulation of wealth takes place directly within the sphere
of production through what appear to be economic means alone and is ideologi-
cally constructed as acts of free and equal exchange. While the state exists as an
apparently separate and autonomous institutional apparatus, it actually functions
as an integral component of the capitalist mode of production in which the "rela-
tions of production take the form of particular juridical and political rela-

15 This section is based on the following: John Lonsdale, "States and Social Processes in
Africa," African Studies Review XXIV, 2/3 (1981); John Lonsdale, "Political Accountability in
African History," in Patrick Chabal, ed., Political Domination in Africa (Cambridge, 1986);
Berman, Control and Crisis, Ch. 1.

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22 BRUCE J. BERMAN

tions-modes of domination and coercion, forms of property and social org

tion-which are not merely secondary reflexes but constituents of prod
relations themselves."16 In so doing, the state in capitalist societies no
secured the conditions for the accumulation of capital but also established
sustained the legitimacy of capitalist social relations, making accumulation
ble without resort to open coercion. By so defining social relations, the stat
them the appearance of being "natural" and permanent, part of the "t
given" structure of the social order. Strategies of domination succeed by e
lishing capitalist social relations as part of the routine continuities of dail
power becomes "hegemony," in which the asymmetries of power and weal
subordination of the populace become a culturally embedded part of the n
order of the social world.

Accumulation and legitimation, the two central, dialectically related proc-

esses of the capitalist state, are derived, however, from the central contradiction of
capitalist societies. In so far as the institutions of the state reproduce capitalist
social relations in abstract, ostensibly "universal" forms, the contradictions of
capitalism are embedded within them. "Legitimacy" is an "extremely turbulent"
description, and "all state forms under capitalism are constituted through con-
tinuing conflicts, struggles and contradictions, despite their seeming natural and
civilized status above society."'7 The state cannot play a role in the accumulation
and legitimation of capitalist relations of production if it is not itself legitimated
and this entails a constant struggle to turn power into legitimate authority.
Historically, this involved the establishment of the state as a separate, apparently
autonomous and impersonal apparatus of public power, above particular sectional
interests, that acts as a neutral and disinterested arbiter of clashing private inter-
ests according to asserted "universal principles" and the "public" interest. Such is
the "relative autonomy of the state' that fascinates many contemporary Marxist
writers, and it is both an illusion and a reality, ceaselessly undermined by the very
conditions that make it necessary. The contradiction between accumulation and
legitimation and the resulting contests over the autonomy of the state are played
out in the interaction between what Lonsdale has described as high and deep poli-
tics.

High politics involves the managerial competition and contests for access
to state institutions among power-holders, the symmetrical politics of a state in

16 Ellen Meiksins Wood, "The Separation of the Economic and the Political in Capitalism,"
New Left Review 127 (1981), 78-79.

17 Philip Corrigan, Harvie Ramsay, and Derek Sayre, "The State as a Relation of Produc-
tion," in Corrigan, ed., Capitalism, State Formation and Marxist Theory (London, 1980), 12, 19.

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 "A PALIMPSEST OF CONTRADICTIONS" 23

organizing the accumulation and maintenance of the wealth and power

nant class. Deep politics is the "negotiated arena in which leaders
private rewards of high-political deals against the demands from below
their civic virtue."18 It is the asymmetrical relationship between pow
and the majority of the populace without wealth or power, the contest
legitimacy in which the claims of rulers to accountability and responsi
authority of applied moral principle, are constantly challenged by the
the ruled to hold them accountable. It is about the mutual responsibi
quality in a political community. Successfully asserted, concepts of acc
articulate the hegemony of the wealthy and powerful and disorganize
weak by legitimating their consent and obedience. At the same time,
deep politics requires constraints on self-interest and a degree of shar
by the dominant class to sustain the relative autonomy and legitimacy
As Geoffrey Kay so memorably put it in his study of the colonial stat
"those who wish to rule must first learn to govern themselves."'9 In t
of high and deep politics, culture-in the form of concepts, values, and
history, communal and individual identities, and modes of discourse, b
nous and foreign-is the idiom of action and the context of motive and

The approach to the state outlined above led us to the idiosyncr

cumstances of the colonial state in Kenya and elsewhere in Africa, par
partiality of colonial conquests and relative weakness of the hegemony
states that resulted in the confused, disorderly, and incomplete capital
mations of subject African societies. The immediate result was the p
articulation of African societies with colonial metropoles within the
world system that defined the distinctive and diverse forms of unev
development in colonial Africa. Lonsdale noted four possible forms o
age: "intransitive, transitive, tributary, and syncretic. The first was i
colonial Africa; the second was often an economic ideal but for long
anathema; the third the settlers' dream; and the fourth the general co
The typical syncretic articulation, involving an unstable partial transfo
partial preservation of indigenous institutions of production and dis
reflected both the weakness of colonial coercive resources and the fi
resistance in many societies to the imposition of capitalist markets a
tion. The result was a disorderly "kaleidoscope" of shifting and changi

18 Lonsdale, "The Moral Economy of Mau Mau," 300.

19 Geoffrey Kay, The Political Economy of Colonialism in Ghana (Cambridge, 1

20 Lonsdale, "States and Social Processes," 182.

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24 BRUCE J. BERMAN

of penetration of peasant societies and the extraction of labour and com

production in attenuated and contentious processes of class formation.

To maintain control and sustain the limited extraction of labor and com-

modities, colonial states relied on indirect rule through local African authorities
both indigenous and colonial creations, rewarded by decentralized channels o
clientelistic access to state resources for chiefs and new elites, including a devel-
oping petty bourgeoisie. Colonial administrators became, in effect, patrons t
their African client/collaborators and made patron-client relationships, already
deeply imbedded in the "big man-small boy" political relations of most African
societies, the fundamental idiom of high and deep politics and mode of access to
the state. Clientelism became the dominant social relations of power in colonial
Africa, the primary linkage between the colonial state and African societies and
mode of access to modernity. At the same time, the personalistic ties of clien-
telism undermined the universalistic relations of state and market, while the latter
increasingly materialized patron-client exchanges. Africans were not fully incor-
porated as "free citizens" or producers and workers in "free markets," nor did they
remain dependent "subjects" or clients of traditional authorities.21

From a perspective linking the material and cultural, structure and agency,
the cultural and political bases of African responses to colonialism can be more
fully understood. In societies already internally divided along a number of social
axes and in which culture, custom and social identity were by no means rigidly
fixed or univocal, colonialism both introduced new sources of wealth and power
and undermined or abolished old ones. The confusions, inequities, and conflicts
resulting from the intrusions of state and capital into African societies made mod
ernity, as Lonsdale stressed, into "a monster of social disruption,"22 both it
opportunities and oppressions instruments of moral danger and confusion. Former
understandings of moral economy and political legitimacy that defined the recip-
rocal obligations of ruler and ruled, rich and poor, elders and youth, men and
women were called into question. Ethnicity and class were long seen by scholars
as alternative bases of social cleavage (Africans either had tribes or classes, but
not both). Social constructivist analysis increasingly revealed them to be inti
mately linked products of the same social forces and expressions of the moral and
political crises of colonialism:

21 As argued, most notably, by Mahmood Mamdani in Citizen and Subject: Contemporary

Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton, 1996).

22 John Lonsdale, "Jomo Kenyatta, God and the Modern World," in Jan-Georg Deutsch and
others, eds. African Modernities (Oxford, 2000).

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 "A PALIMPSEST OF CONTRADICTIONS" 25

This conjuncture of the rise of a new class and widely feared threats to the
status of the weak is a common one in modem history. It is seated in the
expansion of the modern state and the rise of capital. The one gives
unbounded opportunity to the educated; the other overwhelms most small
producers. The definitive experience of Europe in the 19'" century, it has
been Africa's ordeal in the 20'h. It is the seedbed of nationalism.23

Contests over property rights and access to resources (including the new oppor-
tunities of modernity through state and capital), social differentiation and class
formation, became inseparable from debates over the legitimacy of politica
authority and the definition of moral and political community cast in ethnic term
Within these intersecting social, cultural, economic, and political processes the
social construction of modern.African ethnicities has taken place-partially delib
erate and intended, partially as unforeseen and unintended consequences of con-
flict and disorder.

Moral Ethnicity, Political Tribalism and Political Culture

John Lonsdale's critical contribution to the historiography of modern Africa is his

explanation of how the disruptions of colonial modernity were experienced in
African societies as a crisis of moral economy-the indigenous understandings of
the legitimate bases of the inequalities of wealth and power, authority and obedi-
ence, and the reciprocities and loyalties of social relations.24 In the conflicts over
shared moral economies we found the internal moral perplexities and interior
architecture of ethnic formation.25 The deep politics of patron-client relations was
the social terrain of struggle, its arguments the idiom of the search for political
authority and accountability in times of disorienting change and disorder. The old
moral economies, themselves the subject of historical conflict, conceptualized
vertical relations of patrons and clients involving mutual obligations of support
and assistance that extended the ties of kinship and sentiment into wider social
structures. Wealth and power rested on the ability to mobilize and maintain a fol-

23 Lonsdale, "The Moral Economy of Mau Mau,", 294.

24 The concept of moral economy was adapted from E.P. Thompson, "The Moral Economy
of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century," in his Customs in Common (London, 1993).

25 This section is based primarily upon John Lonsdale, "The Moral Economy of Mau Mau:
Wealth, Poverty and Civic Virtue in Kikuyu Political Thought," in Berman and Lonsdale,
Unhappy Valley; John Lonsdale, "Moral Ethnicity and Political Tribalism," in Preben Kaarsholm
and Jan Hultin, eds,, Inventions and Boundaries: Historical and Anthropological Approaches to
the Study of Ethnicity (Roskilde, Denmark, 1994); and Bruce Berman, "Ethnicity, Patronage and
the African State: The Politics of Uncivil Nationalism," African Affairs 97, 388 (July 1998).

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26 BRUCE J. BERMAN

lowing of both kin and unrelated dependents. For the poor this provided acc
resources through an indigenous paternalism. Such ties were subject to neg
tion and conflicts were often left open and unresolved, allowing both side
for maneuver. The impact of colonial states and markets undermined local
economies by providing differential opportunities and threats to the positio
reciprocal obligations of all. For chiefs and elders, there were opportunitie
increase control over land and property and to accumulate wealth through
patronage of the state and favored access to markets, but threats from the
control over youth and women who found opportunity in migrant labor and
Male loss of control over women, particularly of their labor and offspring th
access to trading or escape into the cities, provoked widespread moral pani
community after community. For the poor, the reciprocities of clientage
threatened by the rich who denied them access to land and livestock that to
increasing cash value in colonial markets. Christian converts repudiated th
als, social practices, and authority of indigenous religion, while young men
women in the towns flaunted the immoralities of adopted European dr
customs.

The struggle over the redefinition of moral economy became incre

intertwined with the issue of the boundaries of ethnic communities: onl
with recognized ties of kinship and ethnicity could legitimately negotiat
property rights, marital connections, and relations of obligation and recip
the moral economy. Deep politics became the domain of moral narrative,
people imagine, and dispute, the reasons for honoring or breaking their r
demands upon each other, from on high or low. It is the sphere of public m
in which there was once honor, and could be again, or where injus
inflicted that must now be undone.... people sustained in their narrative
tion what they struggled to achieve in practice, that is, deep political ag
across the widening divisions of social status, high and low, middle class,
and landless prole."26 Modern African ethnicities thus originate in attem
reconstruct political community against the threat of class formation. In
out conflicts to redefine an accepted moral economy, Africans became m
of self-conscious ethnic communities both larger in social scale and mor
demarcated than what had existed before.

The internal discursive political arena within which ethnic ide

emerged through the renegotiation of the bounds of community and auth

26 John Lonsdale, "KAU's Cultures: Imaginations of Community and Constructions of

Leadership in Kenya after the Second World War," Journal of African Cultural Studies 13, 1
(2000), 107-24.

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 "A PALIMPSEST OF CONTRADICTIONS" 27

social rights and obligations of moral economy, including the mutual recip
of developing classes; and the rights of access to land and property, as wel
resources of colonial modernity, add up to what John Lonsdale has called
memorably powerful concept, "moral ethnicity." While the politics of mor
nicity is as much about class as it is about culture and identity, the confro
over class formation have been subsumed within disputes and discourses
custom, social obligation, and responsibility, and the bounds of the mora
munity: "tribe was the imagined community against which the morality
inequality was bound to be tested."27 This concept has opened up new pos
ties for analyzing the political culture and modes of discourse of African s
the development of new, if historically rooted, individual and collective id
and for understanding the search for legitimate authority and leadership, i
the historically contingent roles of particular individuals and groups. In par
in highly charged political circumstances, ethnicity has been constructed
multiple, selective imaginings of "tradition," culture, and identity from a
of cultural and cognitive materials, European as well as African, in c
eclectic combinations.

The concept of moral ethnicity as a dynamic social process of sociocul-

tural and political change facilitated Lonsdale's analysis of a specifically Kikuyu
process of ethnic formation that recognized the crucial role of reinterpreted
indigenous political concepts in arguing out issues of authority, leadership, the
value and responsibilities of wealth, social justice, communal membership, and
control of social change: wiathi (moral self-discipline, the freedom to decide of
the property-owning elder), kihooto (the definitive, persuasive political argument
that permits no repost), muigwithania (the elder who brings clashing factions
together, the reconciler of Kikuyu and European culture), and kikuyu karing'a
(real or authentic Kikuyuness). Moreover, a crucial element of moral ethnicity for
the Kikuyu as well as for other communities in Kenya and elsewhere in colonial
Africa was the grounding of ethnic community, culture, and identity in re-imag-
ined and invented histories of the tribal past, heroic leadership and prophetic
tradition employing Western concepts of historical time and narrative. The colo-
nization of African consciousness by Western modernity and Christianity also
provided crucial resources for Africans to conceive of their communities as dis-
tinct societies separate from and in opposition to both other African societies and

27 Lonsdale, "Moral Economy of Mau Mau," 316; and "Kikuyu Christianities: A History of
Intimate Diversity," in David Maxwell and Ingrid Lawrie, eds., Christianity and the African
Imagination (Leiden, 2002), 161. This analysis connects with and extends that of Benedict Ander-
son, Imagined Communities (London, 1991).

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28 BRUCE J. BERMAN

the European colonial presence. African accounts of their society interacte

and were influenced by missionary and anthropological accounts of their cu
which both accentuated the importance of historical constructions of the pa
reified their conceptions of their culture and community. Christianity, in pa
lar, provided intellectual resources to oppose and challenge colonialism's fa
to live up to its own professed ideals. The Bible, particularly the Old Testa
provided a political language and store of parables to attack both internal m
decay and external colonial oppression. And, finally, the increasingly l
nature of the process of ethnic imagining is striking, as is the role of distanc
"home" in the growing ethnic consciousness of migrant workers and the l
creations of an educated intelligentsia.28

What is also conspicuous is the role of particular class interests i

politics of moral ethnicity, notably a developing dominant class emerging
colonial chiefs and headmen, wealthy farmers and traders, and an overlappin
erate intelligentsia that provided much of the intellectual labor of ethnic con
tion. The role of Christian converts who comprised the first generation of
literate elite was often crucial. Indeed, the central importance of the intellig
signals the dual character of the culture and identities of modern African e
ities-both traditional and modern, reactionary and progressive, and combin
elements of African tradition and European modernity. They express a pro
"conservative modernization" attempting to selectively control social chang
preserve a sense of continuity, order and authority against the turbulent co
tion of colonialism: "Order and Progress" was Jomo Kenyatta's motto.2
dominant discourses of ethnicity came from those groups that gained the
from colonialism and who interpreted tradition, particularly to the c
authorities, to justify their gains and maintain control over the netwo
patronage that provided access to the resources of modernity. At the same

28 Bruce Berman, "Ethnography as Politics, Politics as Ethnography: Kenyatta, Malin

and the Making of Facing Mount Kenya," Canadian Journal of African Studies 30, 3
Bruce Berman and John Lonsdale, "The Labours of Muigwithania: Jomo Kenyatta as
1928-1945," Research in African Literatures, 29, 1 (1998); John Lonsdale, "Kikuyu Chr
ties"; John Lonsdale, "Jomo, God and the Modern World"; John Lonsdale, "Contests o
Kikuyu Historiographies, Old and New," in Axel Harneit-Sievers, ed., A Place in the Worl
Local Historiographies from Africa and South Asia (Leiden, 2002); Bruce Berman a
Lonsdale "Custom, Modernity and the Search for Kihooto: Kenyatta, Malinowski and the
of Facing Mount Kenya," in Robert Gordon and Helen Tilley, eds., Anthropology, Eu
Imperialism and the Ordering of Africa (Manchester, forthcoming).

29 Conservative modernization is discussed more fully in our soon to be complet

House of Custom: Jomo Kenyatta, Louis Leakey, and the Modern Kikuyu.

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 "A PALIMPSEST OF CONTRADICTIONS" 29

within the conflicts of class buried in moral ethnicity was the challenge of
poor and dispossessed who often expressed fierce resistance to the loss of l
and property rights and proletarianization through counter-discourses deman
the social responsibility, accountability and reciprocity of the dominant class
both rich and poor moral ethnicity was about finding a stable identity and a
of belonging and continuity in a world of increasing flux, uncertaint
conflict.

There is also an external and dialectically related dimension of eth

construction that Lonsdale has named "political tribalism," which emerged
the varied impact of colonialism on different African communities with rega
access to the resources of modernity and capitalist economic accumula
Rather than a search for moral community and belonging, political tribalis
and is about collective political mobilization and action across the boundarie
communities defined by moral ethnicity, directed first against the alien pow
the colonial state and then against the competing interests of other emergin
ethnicities for access to the state and control of patronage resources. Politica
balism really began to emerge more forcefully in the late colonial period w
developmental colonialism began to substantially increase the resources inve
by the state in projects of economic growth, education, and social services
made access to such patronage resources more and more important. Po
tribes constitute multi-class alliances mobilized for access to the state and cen-

tered on clientelism as dominant relations of power. With independence and the

passing of direct control of the state apparatus and all of its resources of power
and wealth to the relatively weak multi-ethnic coalitions of most nationalist
movements, political tribalism was manifested in the increasingly frenetic com-
petition for control of parts of the state and its resources by political leaders cum
ethnic magnates who could distribute patronage, both individual and communal,
along networks of clientelism reaching into the rural grassroots. Moral ethnicity
and political tribalism together provide a basis for understanding the underlying
weakness of African nationalism and the failure of its nation-building project in
either creating a cohesive trans-ethnic dominant class, a dominant national iden-
tity or a relatively autonomous state and civic political arena.30

30 Bruce Berman, "Caught in the Contradictions: The State in Kenya, 1945-97," in A. Bakan
and E. Macdonald, eds., Critical Political Studies: Essays in Honour of Colin Leys (Montreal,
2002); John Lonsdale, "Moral and Political Argument in Kenya," in Bruce Berman, Dickson
Eyoh, and Will Kymlicka, eds., Ethnicity and Democracy in Africa (Oxford, forthcoming).

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30 BRUCE J. BERMAN

Reading the Palimpsest

Richard Sklar reports an encounter with the late Carl Rosberg when the latte
finishing his classic study of African politics in colonial Kenya, The Myth of
Mau, with former colonial administrator John Nottingham. When Sklar ask
Rosberg how the book was going, "Oh, fine," he replied, "I am just not sure
to do with the weird stuff."31 It is the precisely the explanation of "the w
stuff," the aspects of culture and history that make experience and behavior
tinctively, idiosyncratically Kikuyu or Luo, Yoruba or Hausa, Zulu or Ts
that John Lonsdale has achieved through the development of a conceptual fra
work applicable to the analysis of the impact of Western imperialism and mo
nity in non-Western societies that can be described as a combination of his
cally grounded ethnography, political science, and political economy.

Bronislaw Malinowski, the teacher and mentor of Jomo Kenyatta, and

students turned in the late 1930s to a growing concern with the results of
they called "culture contact" and an increasingly critical view of the effect
colonialism in Africa. His central assertion was that the encounter of African
European cultures would not transform the former into the latter, but wo
produce instead distinctive patterns of change incorporating elements of bo
although completely reproducing neither, in a third way or entity, or tertium
as he called it.32 The forms that this has produced in each African society
varied widely according to the distinctive and contingent interactions o
diverse social forces converging in them. It has become one of the central n
tives of African history, generating a vital and important ethnohistory th
changing our understanding of the experience of African societies over the
century and more. Our work in Kenya has analyzed one example of such a t
way produced by the Kikuyu. It has led us to not only an understanding of
construction of Kikuyu ethnicity within Kenya, but also the role in that proc
individuals like Jomo Kenyatta and Louis Leakey. A meticulous analy
Kikuyu moral economy and its crisis in the politics of Kikuyu moral ethnicit
class struggle also led Lonsdale to a profoundly original understanding of the
gins and objectives of Mau Mau, including the failed efforts of the forest fig

31 Richard Sklar, personal communication.

32 Bronislaw Malinowski, "Introduction" to The Study of Culture Contact in Africa (Lo

1938); and Malinowski, "Introduction" to Jomo Kenyatta, Facing Mount Kenya (London
See also Carlo Rossetti, "B. Malinowski, the Sociology of 'Modern Problems' in Africa an
'Colonial Situation,'" Cahiers d'etudes Africaines 25 (1987), 477-503; Berman, "Ethnograp
Politics."

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 "A PALIMPSEST OF CONTRADICTIONS" 31

"parliament" to recreate a Kikuyu civil authority and responsible leadership.33 His

work has, moreover, facilitated the analysis of the complex variants of African
political discourse, including their eclectic borrowings and adaptations, and giv-
ing serious attention to the study of African political thought both in historical and
contemporary contexts, and in comparison with Western political theory.34 And
finally, by writing history that does not work backwards from the present or rely
on supposedly universal laws of change, Lonsdale has combined the large forces
of social structure with the conscious, culturally idiosyncratic agency of real
human beings who succeed, fail and more often produce unexpected historical
results. In so doing, he allows both the dead and the living some room to dance.

33 John Lonsdale, "The Moral Economy of Mau Mau"; John Lonsdale, "Authority, Gender
and Violence: The War Within Mau Mau's Fight for Land and Freedom," in E.S. Atieno-
Odhiambo and John Lonsdale, eds., Mau Mau and Nationhood (Oxford, 2003).

34 As, for example, by John Lonsdale's former student Fred Hobson in "Freedom as Moral
Agency [Wiathi] in the Context of Colonial Kenya" (M.A. thesis, University of Chicago, 2003).

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