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PART I Governing Colonial Urban Space

What do a temporary migrant, an urban dweller, a native, a non‐native, a delinquent, a single woman, and a child in need of protection have in common in the context of two countries such as Nigeria and South Africa in the early twentieth century? In principle nothing, except for the fact that these terms came into being at a particular time (the colonial period) in a specific environment (cities) and were part of a nomenclature for the instruments of power designed to govern populations by classifying them into categories. The aim of Part I is twofold: first, to analyse the environment that generated and introduced policies to identify groups to exclude them from access to urban space and its resources (housing, work, leisure activities) and second, to reveal the new social differentiations these policies produced.

The history of colonial domination has often been read as a profoundly violent and racist endeavour that robbed colonised people of their own history. But the internal contradictions of colonialism, its bureaucratic inefficiency, negotiation, mutual instrumentalisation and the capabilities of the colonised to take action have made it impossible to reduce this domination solely to its violence or its surveillance functions, including in South Africa.¹

In this case as in others, the exercise of domination implied taking advantage of its ‘insidious gentleness’ or douceurs insidieuses, to employ Michel Foucault’s expression, recently used by Béatrice Hibou (Hibou 2011), i.e. the observation that it was often in the concrete, circumstantial and historically situated moments that the day‐to‐day practices of power and the ambivalent relationship between rulers and the ruled were manifest. Adopting such a perspective in the colonial context frees us from thinking in terms of oppositions such as collaborators vs opponents, racial coercion vs African resistance and the elite vs the people. For example, the forms of cooperation between townships, elders and apartheid police in security matters and the pragmatic acquiescence of Africans to the social housing programmes of the apartheid government (Evans 1997, pp. 155–159) cannot be understood as simply offsetting authoritarianism by social programmes (Hibou 2011). Similarly, contemporary – or colonial – bureaucratisation can be seen not so much as the result of strategically motivated public policies, coherent strategies or control and subjugation alone, but as the product of a constellation of interests – to use a Weberian expression – that unfolds through the many different actors who are stakeholders in this process (Hibou 2013, pp. 13–14).

An urban environment offers an excellent vantage point for observing the way such bureaucratic procedures and routines develop. Empirical knowledge about the so‐called urban populations of Africa expanded under the impact of social and political changes in the first half of the twentieth century. Until then, the colonial and South African authorities had been steeped in a dual vision of the continent, opposing the primitive African to the civilised European, the pre‐capitalist to the capitalist, the tribal system perceived as rural and the urban world perceived as modern – in which urbanisation was seen as a process of modernisation (Cooper 1983; Ferguson 1999, p. 86). Indirect rule² in the British Empire, racial policy in French West Africa³ and the reserve system in South Africa were all inspired by the idea that native populations should be kept in place to make it easier to control and govern them (Geschiere and Jackson 2006, p. 4). In the eyes of the administrations, cities were created to meet the needs of the imperial economy or the mining industry were foreign to the practices of African people; they imagined rural societies in which people respected the authority of the chiefs and elders, and opposed them to a menacing urban world where detribalisation was under way (Burton 2005; Lewis 2000). The south‐western (Ibadan, Lagos, Abeokuta) and northern city‐states (Kano, Zaria, Zamfara) that predated the conquest of Nigeria, were also viewed and administered as traditional spaces, according to the principles of indirect rule.

Very soon, however, the colonial and South African authorities were faced with contradictory injunctions. How can migrants be assigned the role of making the colonial or industrial economy work without calling into question racial hierarchies in South Africa or the native authorities in Nigeria? And what should be done about ‘unemployed’ youths, who were ‘idle’ or ‘unruly’ and ‘single’ women without wage jobs, whose ordinary behaviour threatened the authority of the chiefs, elders or husbands? One of the solutions the colonial and South African authorities found to these problems was to identify individuals and groups and manage their differences according to geographical or ethnic origin, sex or age.

The analysis we are proposing here adds complexity to the definition suggested by Mahmood Mamdani (Mamdani 1996) of a bifurcated colonial state resulting from the institutionalisation of two systems of power by the colonial authorities: the first, an urban, racialised system, based on rights guaranteed to Europeans; the other, rural and tribalised, based on the despotism of customary law and chiefs described as decentralised despots. Mamdani’s analysis, according to which African workers and middle‐class urban residents found themselves in a legal vacuum (Mamdani 1996), schematically opposes urban and rural areas, whereas urban Africans also came under the authority of traditional chiefs. It fails to mention that colonial authorities were continually implementing specific legal apparatuses for Africans residing or working in the city; and it is a de‐historicised analysis as the categories of urban dwellers and workers were continually shifting in labour policies (Cooper 1995). More broadly, this book asks whether urban spaces were areas for testing and implementing a governmentality aimed at reforming individual conduct. Collected data by colonial administrators did not automatically lead to the implementation of specific policies – far from it – and one must be circumspect about their performative aspect (Bonnecase 2011, p. 21). Rather than the product of a coherent machinery, measures implemented by colonial power were makeshift devices that grew out of fragmentary empirical knowledge, the concerns of the moment, the expansion of the agencies or ministries in charge of these populations and the support of certain groups who saw them as furthering their own interests, all of which could, in the process, alter the initial objectives.

Colonial cities offered spaces to develop and implement labour policies and population management, relying on the exclusion of differentiated groups according to the context and the period – exclusion that may have pertained to temporary migrants, but which also encompassed other more or less sizeable categories or subaltern groups (the unemployed, single women, non‐natives, delinquents, street traders, etc.). Our purpose here is not to write the social history of these groups, nor to give voice to those once reduced to silence by their conquerors. Instead, we aim to show that the metropolis was a space that simultaneously produced social subordination and constructed a bureaucratic reality. This task implies thinking about the inextricable entanglement between the governing and the governed, and questioning the extent to which the various instruments of power that were introduced generated new social realities and participated in building a bureaucratic state that devoted much more time, energy and resources to gathering information on these people, classifying and categorising them and allocating reserved spaces to them.

We will focus on certain measures that favoured the exclusion – and inclusion in urban space – of the following specific groups: temporary migrants (versus urbans) in South Africa, non‐natives (versus natives) in Nigeria and young delinquents (versus adults) in both countries. At the very core of the processes of social differentiation, these measures were not only imposed from the top by the bureaucratic apparatus, they were also sponsored, shared and assimilated by a number of actors favourable to these policies. Thus, specific urban policies were developed for particular age groups identified, depending on the context and the period, either as dangerous (juvenile delinquents) or endangered (children in need of care). Though they were carried out by social services seeking to reform the conduct of children and youth, they were also supported by elders and parents in townships who saw these young people as threat to a certain moral view of the world (Chapter 2).

These policies were simultaneously appropriated and challenged by the population, which indicates their relative importance. The Kano riots in 1953 and the Sharpeville massacre in 1960 revealed new social configurations that originated in the colonial domination (Chapter 1). They show that the marginalised groups express their own demands, thereby demonstrating autonomous political initiative, but at times within the horizon of the language and practices of government. They also bring out divergences between the social and political interests of the various groups involved. Our analysis thus marks a break from an approach centred on nationalism and resistance to colonialism or apartheid. Similarly, it departs from a class‐based approach that sees the marginalised population either as dominated by elites and incapable of revolt or as rebellious and driven by awareness of their precarious economic situation.

Notes

1 1. Regarding these two successive approaches, see Achille Mbembe (2010) and Vincent Foucher’s (2010) answer. See also the analysis in terms of hegemonic transactions developed by Jean‐François Bayart (1989) and on South Africa by Deborah Posel (1991).

2 2. Indirect rule was a way of exercising colonial power by governing through native leaders, who were given power to deal with legal matters, policing, administration and taxation and overseen by the British authorities. First implemented in India, and experimented in Uganda and later Nigeria in the early twentieth century, indirect rule became the official policy of the British Empire and was extended to its other African colonies during the interwar period.

3 3. A race‐based policy, promoted by the governor general of French West Africa (AOF), William Ponty, starting in 1909, which relied on chiefdoms to act as intermediaries between the colonial administration and ethnic groups or races henceforth codified in an official taxonomy.