Introduction
Few areas of study have come to parallel such a vast scope of phenomena and methodological approaches – from the most microscopic biographies to the largest transnational world-systems – as studies of colonialism, colonial collaboration, and resistance. A long way has come since George Shepperson and Thomas Price’s paradigmatic Independent African (1952), the unforgettable although flawed account of John Chilembwe and the apparently sudden Nyasaland revolt of 1915. Since then, scholars have accumulated a broad corpus of analytical tools and conceptual frames: from the “repertoires of rule” of colonists and the complicated “intermediaries” that often facilitated that rule, to the Truillotian “silences” that continue to shape the limits of historical inquiry.[1] Even the once ubiquitous keyword of “power” – which once represented one of the most central devices of colonialism studies – has faced its limitations in historical analysis.[2] The notion of an unstoppable colonial force in histories of old have lost their absolute value; as Burbank and Sheppard point out, the acceptance of this trope ironically constituted the uncritical acceptance of colonial propaganda.[3] In recent histories of African resistance and collaboration, “power” no longer replaces the vacuum of “silence,” but instead has become the result of laborious historical and interpretative labor.
A neat division between “colonizer” and “colonized” after all was bound to collapse as historians gradually recognized the complex fault lines of identity, motivation, and structure in pre-colonial and colonial African societies.[4] Far from the simple binaries and absolute conceptual tools of past historiographies, then, recent African resistance and collaboration histories have shifted the microscope onto the subtle and important degrees of distinction within. This has been accomplished through an expanded conceptual scope. Where Independent African appealed to “traditional African careless” in the absence of an analytic for deeper scrutiny, contemporary scholars have rejected blanket metanarratives that abstract away the problems of approaching “silences.”[5] This has been fulfilled by the introduction of innovative concepts like African “intermediaries” – court translators, interpreters, and managers that could facilitate or subvert colonial rule (usually both to varying degrees) according to their privileged positions and own personal motives.[6] Historiographical developments have complicated the study of African responses to colonialism, therefore, changing the paradigms and possibilities of research. This historiographical paper aims to bring out that transition, particularly through recent historiography.
The first section of this essay focuses on African resistance and collaboration historiography beginning with Independent African until the late 1960s. I focus on the gradual recognition of unique historical backgrounds in their impact on African responses to colonial rule. I also note key contributions in the perception of complexities in colonial African societies. Then, I turn to the transitions in historiography during the 1970s that posed significant challenges to several conceptual motifs of scholarship of the previous two decades. This survey continues into the 21st century and introduces recent contributions that have responded to the arguments traced so far. Finally, I offer one possible new thematic pathway and one subtle alteration of research for continuing this ongoing dialogue. To this end, these suggestions work off recent contributions and select paradigms of the field in advancing historiography.
After Independent African
Published just one year after the independence of Ghana and half a decade prior to the formal independence of Malawi, George Shepperson and Thomas Price’s Independent African: John Chilembwe and the Origins, Setting and Significance of the Nyasaland Native Rising of 1915 (1958) focused one African protagonist’s incredible journey that culminated in violent revolt. The story is a classic in the ambiguities of colonial rule, especially in relation to subversion of power by trust and tact. Indeed, it featured a mysterious but successful missionary protégé under the patronage of one white missionary Joseph Booth, who unpredictably orchestrated a rebellion with armed engagements, murders, and an atmosphere of alarm and confusion for unsuspecting colonial authorities.
What is most interesting about the book is that Shepperson and Price did not necessarily accept colonial accounts uncritically. They recognized that in the historical documents “native evidence… [was] received with caution,” and that they had to read against the grainfor any semblance of accuracy.[7] Shepperson and Price did in fact draw upon a diverse range of sources: responses from relatives and acquaintances of John Chilembwe; testimony from American Civil Rights leaders who met John, including W.E.B. Du Bois; as well as contextual sources such as local ordinances and tax changes.[8] Indeed, the authors clearly attempted to resist the traditional tropes of colonial narratives that depicted African resistance as largely unreasonable.
In spite of its novelties, however, there were significant disjunctures and silences in Independent African that match its historiographical context. A considerable chunk of the narrative is rendered through the teachings and ethos of John Booth, as if Chilembwe was merely a one-dimensional copy of his original mentor. Shepperson and Price also abstract African identities into shapeless tropes that replace where crucial historical details are absent. For example, they cite “traditional African carelessness” to account for the lack of proactive famine prevention in Nyasaland.[9] Shepperson and Price also eschew critical examination of power relationships and refer to the simple “colonizer” and “colonized” binaries. In fact, the raison d’être of the book, the revolt of 1915, amounts to an explosive retort to that directionality in Independent African. The contingent complications that defined the revolt’s character, however, are left out as uncommital elements absent of identity or motivational differences.
Three years after Shepperson and Price’s publication, Franz Fanon would publish The Wretched of the Earth (1961), and that decade, further scholarship would call into question the basic methodological assumptions of Independent African. One such historian that arose in the period, Terence O. Ranger, would maintain as a lasting force in African resistance and collaboration studies. In one Ranger’s paradigmatic articles of the late 1960s, he challenged Shepperson and Price’s notion of resistance as an “impulsive negative retort.”[10] Ranger urged historians to examine the details of revolt in their full depth – in the “historic connections” that framed colonial resistance in the first place.[11] Indeed, much of Ranger’s classic Revolt in Southern Rhodesia, 1896-97: A Study in African Resistance (1967) aimed to dispel simple conceptual paradigms through concrete historical examples that resisted those models. There, Ranger showed how diverse identities and motives in Rhodesia dramatically complicated colonial preconceptions of one-dimensional peoples without roots, conscious histories, nor even “way[s] of life worth fighting or dying for.”[12] This differentiation, in fact, translated to drastically incompetent colonial applications, including concessions over lands where negotiators had no established jurisdiction in the first place.[13]
Nonetheless, Ranger’s contributions were not wholly detached from the historiographical paradigms he aimed to subvert. In the end, Ranger did imagine a monolithic, unified “widespread rebellion” and “theological revolution” by a “Mwari” cult against colonists.[14] It would take another decade before historian Julian Cobbing contested this thesis – not on the grounds of plausibility, but on Ranger’s highly skewed source selection. In fact, Cobbing charged Ranger with accepting a myth of colonial propaganda and therefore elevating colonial sources as the ascendent truths in the official narrative.[15] After all, Revolt in Southern Rhodesia, 1896-97 was published two decades prior to Truillot’s pathbreaking Silencing the Past. Nonetheless, Cobbing revealed dramatic entrapments that still haunted African resistance and collaboration historiography.
1970s to the Present
Julian Cobbing’s critique of Terence Ranger reflected far more than biases in source selection. Ranger’s thesis of a unified, cult force remained right in line with previous historiographies of an almost fanatical, homogeneous upheaval that retained relatively clear hierarchies on national lines. For one, African resistance historiography had its own Whig history moment where the explanation of resistance focused on elites or great leader-types.[16] According to this reading, the architect of the Nyasaland uprising fell almost exclusively on John Chilembwe, and the Mwari cult fell on mastermind, proto-revolutionist priests. During the 1970s and perhaps spurred on by relatively new histories from below, African resistance and collaboration histories would witness a gradual fragmenting of “colonized” peoples into many pieces of identity and cultural expression. This same divestment of the concept, moreover, would occur in the source selection process, from the expansion of valuable “sources” to the greater interrogation of colonial sources.
In 1975, the historian Patrick Redmond detailed the Maji Maji rebellions from 1905 to 1906 and the dramatic African variance of resistance and collaboration to German colonial rule in Tanzania. There were, in fact, rigid pre-colonial class divides between Ngoni societal “founders,” versus the sutu captives of war, each invested with their own social norms and restrictions that affected their colonial receptions.[17] Where German colonists attempted to implement broad impositions, the respective impact on classes was highly varied. Quite simply, there were dramatic increases of advantages for the sutu, and dramatic decreases for Ngoni, that therefore impacted their respective willingness to resist or collaborate.[18] This disparate reception not only impacted the outcome of revolt, but questioned larger assumptions behind motivations in colonial societies.[19]
This same theme appeared in Allen and Barbara Isaacman who stressed the local rivalries, clashes, and even imperial projects within African societies (and how such contingencies affected colonial projects). With the Isaacmans the concept of “collaboration” begins to fill a further robust form than the classic tropes of impotent servants of colonial forces. As they point out, in several Central and southern African polities, collaboration with Western states occasionally meant maintaining often newfound, relative independences.[20] In other words, political alliances with colonists could paradoxically support some Africans own motives. Where the purpose behind collaboration was for African elites, however, there could be consequent “cris[e]s of authority when the decision did not reflect the desires of a part or all of their subordinates.”[21] Thus, the investigation of local variations in reception to colonial rule has diversified since the 1970s.
If the 1970s levied a critique against a homogeneous African society, still wanting was a larger analytical investigation into the possible lines and sites of diversity. One of the most fruitful sites that has arisen since then is gender. There has been Judith Van Allen’s work on Igbo women that were pushed from traditional substance lifestyles, for example, and suddenly devalued in a rapidly changing British colonial society.[22] Allen’s work is wholly historicist, as she points out that Igbo women turned to their tradition of collective action for protest.[23] There is also Luise White’s work on prostitution in colonial Nairobi. There, the criminalization of prostitution paradoxically led to its greater formalization, especially as women faced rising economic uncertainties in the colonial economic environment.[24] However, if Allen and White focus on women’s unique receptions to colonial rule, Nwando Achebe’s biographical account of Ahebi Ugbabe has complicated classic gender binaries. As Achebe explains in The Female King of Colonial Nigeria (2011), in pre-colonial Igboland, “gender and sex did not coincide.”[25] Instead, Achebe notes, “gender was flexible and fluid, allowing women to become men and men to become women,” enabling social identities from female husbands and sons to male priestesses.[26] This is also despite Igbo society historically being self-avowedly kingless, at least, until British colonists imposed warrant chiefships.[27] Nonetheless, Achebe’s work requires us to look beyond the heteronormative and gender binaries that have dominated our hermeneutical insight and to recognize the truly variated possibilities of identity in colonial African societies.
Another site that has become paramount in the study of African resistance and collaboration is “intermediaries.” In the edited volume Intermediaries, Interpreters, and Clerks, we learn about the “bargains” of African collaboration with colonial forces, often via positions of administration, translation, or interpretation. For example, African translators for colonial courts could “collaborate” with colonial powers by facilitating authentic translations, or subvert the process through inaccurate or false translations, often for their own personal motives.[28] As Moses Ochonu points out, these collaborators could represent a whole “subcolonial bureaucracy” where local institutions and personnel could act as administrators of colonial projects, that is, unless practical or personal motives trumped colonial doctrine, “no matter how elaborate or canonical such a doctrine had become.”[29] Intermediaries could also represent the enforcement of colonial rule – in African colonial armies, for example – that occasionally even mobilized African soldiers’ whole families into the colonial apparatus.[30] It is not surprising, however, that enforcement was often selective. As Tamba Mbayo points out in the French colonial state in Senegal, Muslim intermediaries’ enforcement could be highly selective, especially in regard to acculturation – for example, where the secular “civilizing mission” conflicted with the core beliefs of Islamic heritage.[31] Intermediaries, therefore, extend our conception to the practical level of colonial force and often situate that power on local grounds thereby blurring even clean distinctions between “resistance” and “collaboration.”
After all, a substantial chunk of the difficulties around examining African resistance and collaboration in colonial contexts arises from the dramatically diverse systems of belief, knowledge, and values. As we’ve seen, the differentiation in background, identity, and motives within colonial contexts speak in large part to the vast array of material encompassed by “colonial.” Since Independent African, a large part of the work has been how to even approach such diversity, as well as how to render it into something imaginable in our own cultural understandings. As Achebe points out, the complicated distinctions even among the categories of king, men, women, and chief in colonial Nigeria speak more to the process of translating customs that do not have a direct counterpart in the West.[32] Achebe nonetheless attempts to accomplish this by providing two or sometimes three approximate translations for the original terms and idiomatic expressions. This exercise is refreshing since the cultural precision in communicating these customs is a fundamental aspect for their interpretation.
Interpretations of different sources of knowledge, moreover, requires our expansion of the horizon of what counts as a “source.” Leroy Vail and Landeg White, for example, trace song motifs in colonial Mozambique in an effort to show how the medium reflected worlds of social value and lines of distinction. There, poetry and songs could communicate grievances or openly criticize power – these cultural products, in other words, were not merely produced for “fun” in an abstract conceptual vacuum.[33] In fact, Judith Van Allen similarly focuses in on the landscape and body (two sources that have become increasingly pervasive in historical analysis) to show how African women in colonial Nigeria took to marketplaces and village public spaces in march, dance, and song in resistance to their devaluation from economic life.[34] Of course, the marketplace was a deeper symbolic site of their economic and cultural value and not merely a place for exchange. The enumeration of all the possible sources of cultural meaning and interpretation is beyond the scope of this paper; nonetheless, these entries highlight innovations behind that translation. After all, the recent developments in African resistance and collaboration studies have demonstrated that new concepts can open pathways of understanding. Thus, I turn now to propose fresh contributions to the field.
Considerations of Method
What is clear about recent histories of colonialism is the vast expansion of theoretical methods and concepts in the field. The reason for that extension is out of cause of the unique struggles of interpreting colonial contexts. As we’ve seen, “colonialism” incorporates an unmatched magnitude of historical space and time, bringing together under its categorical heading a vast bricolage of cultures, knowledge systems, economic configurations, and spiritual beliefs. Even the unique nature of the source material has conflicted our understanding around the production of historical understanding.[35] This means that scholars must often draw upon a sophisticated range of concepts, frameworks, and disciplines. In an effort to propose new pathways for the field, therefore, I focus on two advancements from other historical subfields: the “history of emotions” and intellectual histories.
History of Emotions
Resistance and collaboration in colonialism studies has always dealt with emotion to some degree. As Nancy Rose Hunt opens A Nervous State, “The Belgian colonial state was born from nervousness, and Congo became a nervous state.”[36] In fact, there has been a turn to emotion in recent years across all sectors of histories, reflecting the birth of a new subdiscipline: the “history of emotions.” Barbara Rosenwein’s Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (2006) and Thomas Dixon’s From Passions to Emotions (2003) have pioneered this burgeoning field, with high-profile associations at the Max Planck Institute and Queen Mary College emerging in support.[37] The key insight is that emotions are not static nor transcendent properties – instead, feelings themselves are contingent and heterogeneous across space and time. This means taking a step further than ordinary cultural histories, to see “love” as not solely a signifier of contextual cultural meanings, but more radically as a contextual feeling. As Thomas Dixon explains, emotions are “complex, emergent, [and] multi-component realities” and not “self-evident unities.”[38] In defining emotions, Dixon casts a wide net akin to “culture,” describing them as “composites made up in intricate ways from words, categories, narratives, metaphors, images, moral beliefs, religious attitudes, visual representations, bodily responses, behaviours, public performances, subjective experiences, feelings and testimonies.”[39] Our feelings can be applied to any facet of life, even if that feeling is mixed.
This theme can, of course, be useful for the deeper interpretations not just into ideological or cultural beliefs in colonial Africa, but into the unique feelings therein. This project views the nervousness and fear in colonial administrators imagining revolt as something unique and worthy of analysis, rather than an assumption that scholars can couch actions into a priori.[40] This also means rejecting the import of neat Western categories of emotion into African societies. A study on this topic can be dauntingly expansive since like culture it can fit into all shades of subjective determination – from the interpretation of art and architecture to even the emotional appeals behind the most technocratic scientists and inventors. Nonetheless, the history of emotions stresses the full range of expression and can therefore be useful for histories of African resistance and collaboration.
Intellectual Histories
Another possible source of fruit comes from the realm of “intellectual history.” As we’ve seen, historians of African have always conveyed systems of knowledge in broader social, economic, and cultural contexts. Yet, by “intellectual histories,” I do not mean to demarcate such knowledge systems as something other than intellectual – quite the opposite, I recognize the conceptual landscape as coequal irrespective of other categorical designations. Nonetheless, there has been heavy reference to the underlying material, or non-conceptual basis behind ideologies in colonial African studies, perhaps reflecting the greater force of Marxian thought absorbed by the discipline. This has certainly provided enlightening investigations into the concrete “causes” behind certain political and religious ideologies in Africa. Indeed, the rejection of a Platonian “history of ideas” that imagines thought as detached from those external circumstances is certainly right. Yet, this movement can at the same time devalue “ideas” as contingent causes of things. Just as ideas themselves can reflect larger concrete material circumstances, so can they count as contingent causal factors that substantiate action (or inaction) regardless of materialities. As Peter Gordon points out:
“To be sure, sometimes the requisite context is simply the context of other, historically conditioned ideas—intellectual history does not necessarily require that concepts be studied within a larger, non-conceptual frame.”
This is not to say that we cannot render each idea in a broader context, nor that we need large-scale projects tracing dramatic conceptual histories, but that “ideas” can shape the further production of ideas without being merely hollow facades of a concrete materialist substratum or social milieu. Again, this light suggestion interprets concepts as just as potent as that external world, without reducing them to metaphysical devices of a transcendental “reason.” After all, we could not interpret that concrete world without reference to concepts.
Conclusion
A long way has in fact come since Independent African, that memorable tale complete with preconceived notions of absolute colonial power, binary lines of division, and at times, hasty oversights over historical “silences.” No longer do scholars accept simple solutions that run over the difficult, historical work of even determining the problems at hand. Concepts of “power” are not a priori assumptions that replace the fact of inquiry – the lines of “power” are precisely what historians of colonialism attempt to understand and uncover. In large part, useful concepts of “intermediaries,” gender, and class have brought us to that recognition, even if we now advance toward a point whether static classifications of “gender” is really so helpful after all. These difficulties are to be expected in a field that brings together vast differences in understanding across cultures, borders, and time horizons. Indeed, scholars can count on increasing specification in their conceptual frameworks, so long as they are founded on historical contingencies and not meant to replace them. If the past decades of African resistance and collaboration studies have advanced toward this end, then, we can expect scholars turning to new paradigms and insights, perhaps, from the history of emotions and intellectual history. That extension characterizes the deeper recognition of the complex lines of identities, motives, and structures in colonial African societies.
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[1] I refer to the “repertoires of rule” as described by Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper. See Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), p. 3.
[2] I do not suggest that “power” has lost its prominence in contemporary scholarship. Instead, the limits of the concept has been increasingly recognized. See below, “After Independent African” and “1970s to the Present.”
[3] Ibid., pp. 288-289.
[4] Regarding that binary split of “colonizer” and “colonized” in colonial historiographies, see Burbank and Cooper, Empires in World History, p. 12.
[5] George Shepperson and Thomas Price, Independent African: John Chilembwe and the Origins, Setting and Significance of the Nyasaland Native Rising of 1915 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1958), p. 189-192.
[6] See for example, Benjamin Lawrance, Emily Osborn, and Richard Roberts, “Introduction: African Intermediaries and the “Bargain” of Collaboration,” in Intermediaries, Interpreters and Clerks:
African Employees in the Making of Colonial Africa (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2015), pp. 3-34.
[7] George Shepperson and Thomas Price, Independent African: John Chilembwe and the Origins, Setting and Significance of the Nyasaland Native Rising of 1915 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1958), p. 228.
[8] Ibid., pp. 193-196, 509.
[9] Ibid., pp. 189-192.
[10] Terence O. Ranger, “Connexions between ‘Primary Resistance’ Movements and Modern Mass Nationalism In East and Central Africa. Part I,” The Journal of African History 9, no. 3 (July 1968): p. 437
[11] Ibid.
[12] Terence O Ranger, Revolt in Southern Rhodesia, 1896-97: A Study in African Resistance (London: Heinemann, 1967), p. 2.
[13] Ibid., pp. 30-31, 54.
[14] Ranger, “Connexions between ‘Primary Resistance’ Movements and Modern Mass Nationalism In East and Central Africa. Part I,” p. 449
[15] Julian Cobbing, “The Absent Priesthood: Another Look at the Rhodesian Risings of 1896-1897,” The Journal of African History 18, no. 1 (1977): pp. 81-82.
[16] Allen Isaacman and Barbara Isaacman, “Resistance and Collaboration in Southern and Central Africa, c. 1850-1920,” The International Journal of African Historical Studies, Vol. 10, No. 1 (1977), pp. 39-40.
[17] Patrick M. Redmond, “Maji Maji in Ungoni: A Reappraisal of Existing Historiography,” The International Journal of African Historical Studies 8, no. 3 (1975): pp. 409-410.
[18] Ibid., pp. 412-413.
[19] In fact, those sutu freed from Ngoni power often resisted participation in the Maji Maji rebellions at all. Ibid.
[20] Allen Isaacman and Barbara Isaacman, “Resistance and Collaboration in Southern and Central Africa, c. 1850-1920,” pp. 37, 42.
[21] Ibid.
[22] Judith Van Allen, “Sitting on a Man: Colonialism and the Lost Political Institutions of Igbo Women,” Canadian Journal of African Studies, 6, No. 2 (1972), pp. 180-181.
[23] Ibid., pp. 173-176.
[24] Luise White, The Comforts of Home: Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 3-5.
[25] Nwando Achebe, The Female King of Colonial Nigeria: Ahebi Ugbabe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), pp. 23-24.
[26] Nonetheless, Ugbabe does note that such statuses were relatively rare. Ibid.
[27] Ibid., p. 99.
[28] Benjamin Lawrance, Emily Osborn, and Richard Roberts, Intermediaries, Interpreters, and Clerk, pp. 104, 108-109.
[29] Moses Ochonu, Colonialism by Proxy: Hausa Imperial Agents and Middle Belt Consciousness in Nigeria (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), pp. 2-3, 211-212.
[30] I refer to Tamba Mbayo, Colonial Senegal, 1850- 1920: Mediations in Knowledge and Power in the Lowed and Middle Senegal River Valley (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2016).
[31] Ibid., pp. 12-14.
[32] For Achebe, even the ordinary Western conception of “marriage” between two women doesn’t fit, for Ugbabe could act as a “female husband” that had paternal rights of sorts over “wives” that would birth children for her, that could become “name-bearers” of Ugbabe’s female kingly lineage. See Achebe, The Female King of Colonial Nigeria, pp. 3, 42, 59.
[33] Leroy Vail and Landeg White, “Forms of Resistance: Songs and Perceptions of Power in Colonial Mozambique,” The American Historical Review 88, no. 4 (1983): pp. 887.
[34] Misty Bastian, “Dancing Women and Colonial Men: The Nwaobiala of 1925,” In Wicked Women and the Reconfiguration of Gender in Africa (Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2001), pp. 109-116.
[35] I refer again to Truillotian “silences.”
[36] Nancy Rose Hunt, A Nervous State: Violence, Remedies, and Reverie in Colonial Congo (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), p. 1.
[37] The monikers are Barbara Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006) and Thomas Dixon, From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category (Cambridge: University of Cambridge, 2003).
[38] Thomas Dixon, “What is the History of Anger a History of?” Emotions: History, Culture, Society 4, 1 (2020): p. 31.
[39] This list is not meant to be exhaustive. Nonetheless, it does illustrate the relationships between emotion and all forms of language.
[40] I do not refer to Hunt, here. A Nervous State is one early example of an African colonial study that draws upon the history of emotions.