Power in Colonial Africa: Conflict and Discourse in Lesotho, 1870-1960 available in Hardcover, eBook
Power in Colonial Africa: Conflict and Discourse in Lesotho, 1870-1960
- ISBN-10:
- 0299223701
- ISBN-13:
- 9780299223700
- Pub. Date:
- 10/08/2007
- Publisher:
- University of Wisconsin Press
- ISBN-10:
- 0299223701
- ISBN-13:
- 9780299223700
- Pub. Date:
- 10/08/2007
- Publisher:
- University of Wisconsin Press
Power in Colonial Africa: Conflict and Discourse in Lesotho, 1870-1960
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Overview
In Power in Colonial Africa: Conflict and Discourse in Lesotho, 1870-1960, Elizabeth A. Eldredge analyzes a panoply of archival and oral resources, visual signs and symbols, and public and private actions to show how power may be exercised not only by rulers but also by the ruled. The BaSotho—best known for their consolidation of a kingdom from the 1820s to 1850s through primarily peaceful means, and for bringing colonial forces to a standstill in the Gun War of 1880-1881—struggled to maintain sovereignty over their internal affairs during their years under the colonial rule of the Cape Colony (now part of South Africa) and Britain from 1868 to 1966. Eldredge explores instances of BaSotho resistance, resilience, and resourcefulness in forms of expression both verbal and non-verbal. Skillfully navigating episodes of conflict, the BaSotho matched wits with the British in diplomatic brinksmanship, negotiation, compromise, circumvention, and persuasion, revealing the capacity of a subordinate population to influence the course of events as it selectively absorbs, employs, and subverts elements of the colonial culture.
“A refreshing, readable and lucid account of one in an array of compositions of power during colonialism in southern Africa.”—David Gordon, Journal of African History
“Elegantly written.”—Sean Redding, Sub-Saharan Africa
“Eldredge writes clearly and attractively, and her studies of the war between Lerotholi and Masupha and of the conflicts over the succession to the paramountcy are essential reading for anyone who wants to understand those crises.”—Peter Sanders, Journal of Southern African Studies
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780299223700 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Wisconsin Press |
| Publication date: | 10/08/2007 |
| Series: | Africa and the Diaspora: History, Politics, Culture |
| Edition description: | 1 |
| Pages: | 264 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.20(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
POWER IN COLONIAL AFRICA
CONFLICT AND DISCOURSE IN LESOTHO, 1870-1960
By Elizabeth A. Eldredge
THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN PRESS
Copyright © 2007
The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-299-22370-0
Chapter One Power in Theory and Practice
Actions speak louder than words.
This is a study of power and how it operates. Studying the operation of power in a colonial setting is particularly appropriate because colonial rule has been so often misunderstood in terms of unremitting and successful domination through both coercion and persuasion. Virtually the entire world has been shaped by the colonial experience through the historical actions of people, individually and collectively, as colonizers or as colonized. The widespread influence of Western modernity across the globe has inspired various theories about power, domination, discourse, and hegemony among contemporary scholars.
The study of power is hardly new. Issues of domination and resistance, economy and ideology were so much a preoccupation of nineteenth-century scholars and intellectuals that as we theorize about them there is a danger of reinventing the wheel. Scholars studying society and history from what has been defined as a postmodern perspective have focused on the examination of discourses as a source of power exerting control over society and politics, although the definition of terms used by self-defined postmodernists, including the term discourse, has varied, as have their assumptions and conclusions. Postmodernism draws its influence from the field that claims the study of culture as its own, anthropology. It has been the goal of Western anthropology to discover and reveal the internal logic of a non-Western culture in order to bring into question the apparent naturalness of Western culture, to have a benchmark from which to measure Western culture, and to question our Western selves and our humanity and way of life by putting them next to a non-Western culture and society. Hence the colonial setting is a suitable arena for examining questions of power, political rule, knowledge, and discourse because of the blatant initial preexisting distance, contestation, and countervalence between two nodes or foci of power and discourse representing two distinct, intersecting cultures.
Like ethnographers and anthropologists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, postmodern scholars laudably assert the value and difference of non-Western cultures. Just like their predecessors of one hundred years ago, postmodernists decry the assumption that what is taken for granted in Western culture is universal, natural, and better. For generations Western anthropologists have sought to understand and critique Western society by achieving an understanding of alternative cultural worldviews in terms of both explicit beliefs and unstated habits and practices, the world of the "taken-for-granted." The validation of non-Western cultural beliefs and practices by postmodernists who are insistent that there are no universals in the human experience borders on the repetition and glorification of "othering," which today, as in the past, tends to exoticize the expression of non-Western cultural experiences, set in contrast to Western culture, rather than actually decentering the Western mindset. Intellectuals hailing from the realms of the colonial empire who experience most thoroughly the fuzzy cultural borders between the Western and non-Western worlds that were once the realms of the colonizers and the colonized have brought eloquence to the expression of postcolonial ideas in their attempts to speak for their kith and kin in former colonial outposts. These intellectuals, still cognizant of the imbalance of political and cultural power in the modern world, cannot afford to adopt a postmodernist view that romanticizes difference and seems to refute the possibility for liberation from oppression. For the postcolonial world themes of domination, ideology, and discourse are not merely academic.
Definitions of power that equate power with domination and assume implicitly that power flows downward from those who hold political authority ignore the play of power outside the realm of officially recognized channels of authority. We are able to perceive power when it produces results, whether it appears as the ability to cause action or the ability to prevent action. The ability of individuals and groups to exercise power as political and cultural domination has been demonstrated throughout history, but less evident has been the ability of people and groups to resist successfully their domination by others, culturally as well as politically. The potential for the abuse of power through domination in the name of politically recognized authority has historically been kept in check by a universal drive for political and cultural self-determination and autonomy from control by others. The preservation of freedom, as much as the extension of political domination, is the product of the exercise of power. Where political domination occurs it is a reflection of an imbalance of power rather than the monopoly of power by one group over another. Domination is achieved through the mobilization of various tools of power, which in turn operate through processes of both coercion and persuasion. The tools of power range from the obvious deployment of military strength in manpower and technology to the subtle exercise of individual influence. Wealth and authority are often used to mobilize tools of power, but they do not constitute power in and of themselves. Force, ideology, knowledge, and discourse are tools of power, but they are not merely tools of domination; all are also employed by the dominated as means of resistance to domination.
Violence, terror, and the threat of violence are tools of coercion that operate to achieve domination through force. Ideology, or the diffusion of ideologies, is sometimes deployed in an attempt to achieve domination through consent, albeit consent offered by those who have been convinced through ideological forces that the domination is either beneficial or, at least, inevitable and natural. Discourses, the collective body of statements about given subjects, reflect, convey, and support the diffusion of ideologies, whether in the service of domination or in that of resistance. The fact that ideology, diffused through public discourses, can achieve the apparent consent of the ruled to domination indicates the importance of understanding how ideologies are deployed and how discourses emerge and achieve influence. The apparent acceptance of domination by the dominated can be deceptive, however, as the mere threat of violence or terror can elicit cooperation, acquiescence, and silence and can suppress all discernible signs of nonconsent and resistance to domination. The use of violence, what has been termed violence douce as well as violence directe, has supported domination generally throughout history, and not only in colonial settings. Conversely, resistance does not always reflect rejection of the dominant sociopolitical and cultural order and may emerge from the desire of the resisters to become part of the established political order.
Written statements have been the focus of discursive analysis because of Western favoring of literacy and written representations in the legitimation of knowledge. But alternative forms of expression contain statements that constitute evidence of alternative discourses. Such alternative forms of expression include oral testimony, visual arts, music, clothing and adornment, and public actions carrying intended meanings. The privileging of written forms of discursive expression in the analysis of power relations and attributions of power falsely portrays illiterate people, or people whose voices are not permitted access to the printed record, as powerless. The recovery of oral traditions and oral history has deeply enriched our ability to discern historical agency among people whose perspectives remain, for a variety of reasons, unrepresented in the written historical record. Gaining access to unwritten and nonverbal expressions can be difficult, but historians have come to recognize the importance of reading all forms of cultural expressions as "texts," albeit with the caution necessary in the use of all sources, such as in the attribution of intention where necessity or constraint rather than choice might have prevailed. The adoption of forms of expression can reflect conscious choice, bearing a strong message, or unconscious acceptance of cultural norms, indicating cultural "hegemony" in operation or sociopolitical pressures necessitating involuntary conformity. Nonverbal indicators of culture must be read with caution, then, since forces of repression may inhibit or prevent any indication of resistance and create an illusion of unchallenged dominance or "hegemony." Both public and private statements and actions may contain secret or coded messages, whether they are generated by the dominators or the dominated. Private messages meant to be kept secret might subsequently be revealed, deliberately or unintentionally. Therefore, in the recovery and interpretation of sources it is important to recognize that the boundaries between public and private are sometimes ambiguous.
Michel Foucault has made one of the most original contributions to the study of power in recent Western intellectual history. His own intellectual growth is evident in the progressive change of his ideas over the course of his career; thus there is slippage in Foucault's definitions and uses of terms such as discourse and power. He asserts that the structure and functioning of power in any society determine what is given legitimacy as knowledge and what is excluded from such legitimation and recognition. Foucault rejects the validity of Western universalistic theories, which is the characteristic feature of postmodern thought, but in alternative non-Western perspectives he identifies alternative sources of power. Foucault seeks to unmask the power structures that dictate what is seen as truth and reality by pointing to alternative sites of knowledge that contest the dominant regime and perspective, what he refers to as "subjugated knowledges." Foucault argues, to use his own words in reverse, that an historical struggle of knowledges arises because of the historical knowledge of struggles: "In the case of the erudite as in that of the disqualified knowledges-with what in fact were these buried, subjugated knowledges really concerned? They were concerned with a historical knowledge of struggles. In the specialised areas of erudition as in the disqualified, popular knowledge there lay the memory of hostile encounters which even up to this day have been confined to the margins of knowledge."
Foucault's work reflects not a nihilism, then, as is often assumed about his thought and that of other postmodernists, but, rather, a profound hope that with the elimination of "the tyranny of globalising discourses" the potential had been created for the success of the heretofore hidden struggles for power as well as knowledge. Indicating his goal of liberation, he wrote, "Our task ... will be to expose and specify the issue at stake in this opposition, this struggle, this insurrection of knowledges against the institutions and against effects of the knowledge and power that invests scientific discourse."
Foucault questioned the Marxist conception of power and the conceptualization of power as "essentially that which represses," to which he had himself previously subscribed. Foucault abandoned the conceptualization of power as intrinsically flowing downward as part of domination, in particular as associated with the state: "I don't want to say that the State isn't important; what I want to say is that relations of power, and hence the analysis that must be made of them, necessarily extend beyond the limits of the State. In two senses: first of all because the State, for all the omnipotence of its apparatuses, is far from being able to occupy the whole field of actual power relations, and further because the State can only operate on the basis of other, already existing power relations." Instead of focusing on the apparent centers of power such as the state, Foucault adopted a view of power operating through countless channels in every direction. These interconnected channels of power constitute power relations through which power operates but only sometimes through evident dominating structures such as the state.
Since the association of power with domination has given it negative connotations, that is, as primarily a tool of or means for domination and repression, Foucault was forced to explain why his reconceptualization of power as an inescapable web did not imply the inevitability of domination: "It seems to me that power is 'always already there,' that one is never 'outside' it, that there are no 'margins' for those who break with the system to gambol in. But this does not entail the necessity of accepting an inescapable form of domination or an absolute privilege on the side of the law. To say that one can never be 'outside' power does not mean that one is trapped and condemned to defeat no matter what."
Never a nihilist, on the contrary, Foucault perceived power as an ability to produce effects that are positive as well as negative. For Foucault, power "traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse. It needs to be considered as a productive network which runs through the whole social body, much more than as a negative instance whose function is repression." Because "power is exercised from innumerable points, in the interplay of nonegalitarian and mobile relations," it is widely accessible and not monopolized by those who hold political domination: "Power comes from below; that is, there is no binary and all-encompassing opposition between rulers and ruled at the root of power relations."
Arguing that "power exists only when it is put into action," Foucault also rejects a simplistic reduction of power to the use of force or violence. Force and violence, like ideology and discourse, are instruments employed in the exercise of power but are not intrinsic to power itself. Foucault is not blind to the problem of domination; rather, he perceives that domination, not inevitable, is a temporary "strategic situation" in the relations of power that may shift at any time.
If discourse is the means through which power produces truth, it is clear that discourse is one key element in Foucault's propositions about power. Specifically, Foucault writes that, "indeed, it is in discourse that power and knowledge are joined together." Foucault concedes that ideology or, more specifically, "ideological productions" accompany the "major mechanisms of power," but he considers the term limited by its use and connotations, for example, as standing in opposition to "truth." Discourse includes all statements about a given subject, whether they are considered true or false; it is within the context of the discourse that statements come to be legitimated and validated or fail to be, as "truth" and "knowledge," but all statements become part of the discourse, including "the things said and those concealed, the enunciations required and those forbidden." He writes: "We must not imagine a world of discourse divided between accepted discourse and excluded discourse, or between the dominant discourse and excluded discourse; but as a multiplicity of discursive elements that can come into play in various strategies. It is this distribution that we must reconstruct, with the things said and those concealed, the enunciations required and those forbidden, that it comprises." As a comprehensive collection of statements about a subject, discourse cannot be merely equivalent to or a tool of ideology that excludes countervailing perspectives and opinions. Discourse is not merely a tool of domination; rather, it is an instrument of power. Those who make statements in any venue, publicly or privately, openly or secretly, participate in the creation of a discourse and may wield power accordingly. Discourse does not serve merely the goal of domination, it can also serve the goal of liberation. As Foucault puts it,
Discourses are not once and for all subservient to power or raised up against it, any more than silences are. We must make allowance for the complex and unstable process whereby discourse can be both an instrument and an effect of power, but also a hindrance, a stumbling-block, a point of resistance and a starting point for an opposing strategy.
Discourse transmits and produces power; it reinforces it, but also undermines and exposes it, renders it fragile and makes it possible to thwart it. In like manner, silence and secrecy are a shelter for power, anchoring its prohibitions; but they also loosen its holds and provide for relatively obscure areas of tolerance.... There is not, on the one side, a discourse of power, and opposite it, another discourse that runs counter to it. Discourses are tactical elements or blocks operating in the field of force relations; there can exist different and even contradictory discourses within the same strategy; they can, on the contrary, circulate without changing their form from one strategy to another, opposing strategy.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from POWER IN COLONIAL AFRICA by Elizabeth A. Eldredge Copyright © 2007 by The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System. Excerpted by permission.
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Table of Contents
Preface vii
Names and Terms xi
Power in Theory and Practice 3
Transcripts of the Past: The BaSotho under Colonial Rule 25
Prelude to Rebellion: Pitsos, Magistrates, and the Imposition of Colonial Rule 40
The White Horse and the Jailhouse Key: Moorosi's Rebellion 55
Guns, Diplomacy, and Discourse: The Gun War 71
Hidden Discourse in the Public Transcript: Ceremony and Subversion 90
Lerotholi and "Masopha's War": The Colonial/Civil War of 1898 118
Of Laws, Courts, and Chiefs: The Twentieth Century 140
Of Paramente and Power: Terror in Basutoland 168
Discourse and Subterfuge: Responses to Medicine Murder 184
Seeking Sovereignty and the Rule of Law 215
Notes 227
Bibliography 249
Index 259