The colonial state emerged through brutal conquest and was consolidated through Indigenous land alienation, brutal labor and tax regimes, and racially motivated segregationist policies. It ended as a fragile authoritarian state, leaving deeply divided ethnic units and emerging modern states with new economic prospects but uncertain political futures. The colonial state was also a patriarchal one, led almost exclusively by men who were socialized in Victorian ideals. By this token, women were considered second fiddle in both local and colonial social spheres. Official policies were designed to invisibilize women and promote male accumulation. But the masterminds of European imperialism did not envisage the “tensions of empire” – global catastrophes that would upset their imperial ambitions such as the two World Wars, the uncertainties of the inter-war years, the Great Depression, the Cold War, global ideological polarization, the influenza pandemics, rise of labor movements, and mass nationalism. More importantly, they underrated the resilience, adaptability, and dynamism of local cultures and institutions on which they would eventually rely to legitimate their rule. These tensions would come to a head after the Second World War, but by the early 1920s Africans had begun to challenge colonial hegemony in different ways; youth movements and political parties had been established in Kenya, Ghana, Zimbabwe, Nigeria, apartheid South Africa, and even in tightly controlled Portuguese colonies of Mozambique and Angola to seek local welfare and contest unfavorable clauses in the constitutional provisions of various colonial regimes.
While these early political organizations were largely elitist with often ambiguous visions for independent Africa, their actions, as historians James Coleman, Toyin Falola and Funso Afolayan have shown, were critical to the emergence of widespread anti-colonial nationalism across the continent by the early 1950s. African women would play invaluable roles in the build-up to, and during the process of mass political mobilization across the continent, even though their efforts would be undermined in official scholarship until the 1970s, and is still largely subsumed within the broader categories of male-dominated history of decolonization. Given the bellicose nature of colonial rule especially in settler societies where most of the worse cases of racialized violence were meted on Africans, it is easy to summarize the colonial moment as the prominent African historian, Felix Ekechi did in his contribution to Toyin Falola’s volume, Africa vol. 3. Like most African historians, Ekechi was certain that “for all practical purposes, the story of Africa from the Berlin Conference to c.1914, revolves around these five major themes: the establishment of European colonies, the consolidation of political authority, the development of the colonial state through forced labor, the cultural and economic transformation of Africa, and African resistance.” These are undeniable facts.
However, it is safe to argue that there was more to colonialism than the three evils of conquest, exploitation, and resistance. Africans found ways to navigate, contest, and shape colonial policies, even if it meant carving niches within the crevices of colonial power. This was possible because despite the obvious violence of empire and the everyday enactment of colonial power in Africa, colonialism was not a complete process or a stable system. It occurred in phases, and official policies reflected prevailing administrative concerns per time. As the eminent Africanist historian Frederick Cooper has argued, official programs designed to systematically exploit African resources were often inchoate, ad hoc, and contingent on local circumstances. This constant state of colonial ambivalence and the agency and actions of local actors in routinizing colonial societies do not often make it to official accounts of the period. Nor were the internal tensions, social hierarchies, and cultural norms which complicated the moral choices available to Africans in their relations with the forces of colonialism. Similarly, in his widely cited opus, Colonial Subjects: African Intellectuals and Atlantic Ideas, Dal’s renown professor of modern African history, Philip Zachernuk, has identified the dynamism of African intellectual traditions by foregrounding the complex, overlapping nexus of African and European systems of thought evident in the intellectual ferment of 19th century southern Nigeria. So that far from fundamentally remaking African identities as nationalist literature portends, European ideologies and systems of knowledge, generation and wealth, were appropriated and infused with local meanings to create intellectual ideas that Zachernuk eloquently describes as “neither ‘traditional African’ nor ‘modern European,’ but modern African creations that much be grasped on their own terms.”
As I have argued in preceding posts, Africans from all works of life: low cadre employees in colonial bureaucracies, women, townspeople, artisans, chiefs, and headmen among others, found ways to cope with colonial rule. Some of these include contesting colonial legal principles through petitions and appeals, protest migration, appropriating colonial symbols of power for group purposes or personal gain, sabotaging official policies through local networks, insisting on the cultivation of staple foods rather than colonial exports, and sustaining drinking cultures through gin smuggling and local brewing. Africans also found ways to (re)define popular culture and public space by questioning local and colonial hierarchies of power which impeded the social mobility of visible minorities, especially women and young men. Indeed, the scope of African historiography has broadened in recent years to capture these, and many other themes that were not previously considered as the stuff of good and authentic African history. But more needs to be done. My research and teaching experience at Dalhousie University and the University of Nigeria shows that across continental lines, African historical scholarship is still dominated by official accounts that omit these critical twists and turns of the colonial moment. The result is that local agency in sustaining and transforming colonial societies and ensuring Africa’s liberation from the clutches of colonialism continues to be understudied and undermined.
Photo by Ransford Quaye | Unsplash
