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Classify, Exclude, Police
ОглавлениеNigeria, 2006: Human Rights Watch published a report on discrimination against the country’s non‐indigene*1 populations:
‘The population of every state and local government in Nigeria is officially divided into two categories of citizens: those who are indigenes and those who are not. The indigenes of a place are those who can trace their ethnic and genealogical roots back to a community of people who originally settled there. Everyone else, no matter how long they or their families have lived in the place they call home, is and always will be a non‐indigene.’ (Human Rights Watch, April 2006, p. 1.)
The report indicates that many states refuse to employ non‐indigenes in the civil service, discriminate against them in the provision of basic services, and often deny them the right to stand for office in local and state government elections, thereby treating them as second‐class citizens. Furthermore, the report asserts that the division between indigenes and non‐indigenes has led to extreme violence in some localities: 1,000 people died in the city of Jos (in the centre of the country) in September 2001, more than 600 in the small town of Yelwa (200 km from Jos) during the first half of 2004, and several hundred in 1997 and 2003 in the city of Warri (Niger Delta).
South Africa, May 2008: xenophobic violence engulfed the whole country during the month of May, leaving 60 dead, 700 injured, and more than 100,000 displaced. A third of the victims were South Africans, although foreigners from other African countries were the main targets (Landau 2011, p. 1). The violence began in the township of Alexandra in Johannesburg, then spread to other townships chiefly in the province of Gauteng, and later to the cities of Cape Town and Durban. The 140 zones involved were mostly townships and informal urban areas.
The violence of the attacks was unspeakable. For the moment, we would simply note that it was grounded in the exclusion of a group based solely on nationality (other than South African) or origin (non‐indigene), and that it took place on a national scale and in urban environments.2 National affiliation or supposed origin are only one among numerous repertoires of exclusion and one of the categories that potentially generates the use of violence, but their repetition and widespread protean nature – offences against the integrity of persons, mob violence, repression by security forces – and the countless forms of exclusion are indeed at the core of the historiography of these two countries.
Metropolises function as command posts, overseeing a concentration of population, production and consumption. As such, they offer an ideal observation point for studying the day‐to‐day practices of power and the genealogy of forms of exclusion. Lagos, Ibadan and Kano in Nigeria and Cape Town and Johannesburg in South Africa have been metropolises for over a century (see Figures I.1 and I.2). All of them house government agencies and influential political networks.3 By the end of the nineteenth century, they had become leading labour markets at the regional or countrywide level, and their rapid growth (see Table I.1) soon gave rise to new forms of poverty and social violence (unemployment, delinquency, maltreatment, prostitution, gangsterism, procuring) and problems integrating migrant populations. Their increasing social diversity generated a profusion of discourses and they became privileged places for producing knowledge and testing, developing and implementing new apparatuses of power.4 These apparatuses contributed significantly to turning the metropolises into laboratories for exclusion and the use of violence. Some initiatives were introduced by state agents to target categories of people whose socialisation to urban life was deemed problematic (temporary migrants, non‐natives*, delinquents, children in need of care, single women). Over time such instruments became permanent features of city life, but they remained politicised, conveying values that embodied a particular interpretation of society and ideas about how to regulate it (Lascoumes and Le Galès 2004, p. 13).
FIGURE I.1 States and cities in Nigeria
Source: Realised by Christine Deslaurier. IRD, UR 102, 2007.
FIGURE I.2 Provinces and cities in South Africa.
TABLE I.1 The population of Lagos, Ibadan, Kano, Johannesburg and Cape Town (in thousands)5
| 1866 | 1891 | 1911 | 1952 | 1963 | 1970 | 1991 | 2010 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lagos | 25 | 32 | 73 | 272 | 542 | 1266 | 5195 | 8048 |
| Ibadan | 100 | 120 | 175 | 459 | 427 | 998 | 1835 | 2551 |
| Kano | 30 | 127 | 255 | 882 | 2167 | 2826 | ||
| 1866 | 1891 | 1904 | 1951 | 1960 | 1970 | 1996 | 2011 | |
| Johannesburg | — | 3 | 327 | 969 | 1247 | 1561 | 2638 | 4434 |
| Cape Town | 22 | 51 | 77 | 500 | 803 | 1300 | 2565 | 3740 |
From the early twentieth century onwards, South African labour policies divided workers into two separate groups: on one hand, a category of urban workers who were to be made into stable residents by granting them rights related to housing, employment and family life, and on the other, a population of temporary migrants destined to return to the countryside once their labour contracts were completed. For the members of this second group, the hostel* – or more precisely the assignment of a bed (‘bedhold’) – became the institution structuring their daily lives, as well as relationships with their employers and administrative authorities, fellow workers at the hostel, apparently favoured neighbours living nearby in family quarters and women whose unauthorised residence depended on the goodwill of the men to whom they had to be attached (Ramphele 1993). During the same period, labour policies in Nigeria led to the creation of a new category of urban resident called ‘non‐native’ – defined in opposition to ‘native’ – which was the norm at the time. These policies authorised the presence of migrants needed by the colonial economy, but required them to reside in reserved neighbourhoods and placed them under a separate authority to avoid diminishing the power of native chiefs.
The historical invention of these categories is at the heart of the processes of exclusion and the reification of differences between natives and non‐natives, and between urbans and temporary migrants, which had enduring legacy in post‐colonial and post‐apartheid periods. In the 1930s, further categories were added in both countries to define and classify urban youth as delinquents, children in need of care and minor girls in need of protection. When South African social workers and their British imperial counterparts in Nigeria embarked on a mission to have boys released from prison and protect girls from the dangers of street life, they set up social services that criminalised the presence of these young people on the streets. In Lagos, they sent the boys to the countryside, and prohibited minor girls from street trading. Girls were regularly rounded up, forced to undergo gynaecological examinations, and confined to hotels in the company of prostitutes, thereby arousing the indignation of their parents. The notion of delinquency as a form of criminal behaviour came into being during this period, but it is difficult to ascertain whether it applied to street children, girl street vendors, occasional thieves or hardened criminals. A similar ambiguity surrounds contemporary local expressions (tsotsis or skollies in South Africa, boma boys or jaguda boys in Nigeria) used to describe groups of boys engaged in activities on the borderline between legality and illegality, ranging from shoplifters and groups of neighbourhood mates to hierarchically organised gangs.
These examples attest to the new mode of governing populations introduced during the colonial period. Migrants, non‐natives, delinquents, children in need of care, minor girls and single women became administrative categories that had little in common other than being part of a nomenclature designed to rule by classification – a process that paralleled the invention and reification of ethnic groups in the countryside.6 Indeed, the new categories constituted more than just an administrative taxonomy: they were also associated with rights (regarding work, access to housing or place of residence), punishments (prison, deportation, fines, flogging) and prohibition (from circulating freely, engaging in trade, working, living alone or with a family). The individuals concerned used these categories to define and describe themselves as well as to describe, stigmatise and exclude other groups they considered their opponents. As a result, these categories left a deep imprint on the collective imagination long after such social engineering was abandoned.
In the 1930s, new security apparatuses were also developed by non‐state actors at the neighbourhood level. After identifying the most obvious threats, local organisations in South Africa and Nigeria introduced schemes for policing everyday life in low‐income districts. These actors were given substantial power for the reason that the authorities had neither the resources nor a compelling need to ensure a police presence in areas that played a minimal role in the colonial economy. Such organisations acquired considerable operational autonomy and, in some respects, actually governed the neighbourhood, especially at night. They were free to use undue violence against unruly youths or ‘foreigners’ whose access to the neighbourhood was regulated after certain hours. By drawing the boundaries between insiders to be integrated and outsiders, they built a political community at the neighbourhood level.
These organisations or their successors still operate in the two countries today, but their modus operandi has been partly transformed. The violence is perhaps better regulated nowadays; corporal punishment no longer enjoys the same legitimacy, and it has become more discreet or rare but it has not disappeared. Neighbourhood policing organisations have become more bureaucratised, politicised and, in some cases, feminised. They now charge low rates for their services, rather than performing them for free. But, as in the colonial period, policing still consists in identifying specific threats to neighbourhood cohesion and controlling target populations.
Finally, other apparatuses are used at the micro level of bureaucratic and political spaces (local government offices, the residence of a political boss) and public spaces (the street, bus stations, markets). Access to these places is constantly being challenged and brokered between individuals in positions of authority (civil servants, trade union leaders, godfathers, governors) and subordinate actors (street vendors, bus drivers, unemployed workers, students) seeking a service, an authorisation, a document, a stall in a market or a place at university. Observing the myriad negotiations between street‐level bureaucrats, private agents working on behalf of the state and economic players whose livelihoods depend on the street provides an up‐to‐date picture of the opportunities for inclusion in a clientelistic network or in a local political community as well as the forms of discrimination at play in granting access to a service, a job or a space for trading. Above all, these negotiations reveal a whole range of diverse practices. For a street vendor, the process may involve bargaining for a reduction in the amount to be paid to a municipal tax collector; for a student, complying with what local government agents present as the rules for obtaining a certificate and finding a job or a place at university; for a tax collector at a bus station, being paid by the road transport union to intimidate or attack bus drivers who refuse to yield to union authority; for an unemployed unskilled worker, to benefit from the largess of a godfather, including food, in exchange for intimidating his political opponents if need be during electoral periods.
By exploring these varied apparatuses, we can measure the effects of classifying populations in terms of exclusion and inclusion, the violence they sometimes engendered, and the forms of social differentiation they brought about. For example, one might examine how state agents identified and analysed different (or similar) problems in Kano, Lagos, Cape Town and Johannesburg and how this process led to policies that simultaneously altered the limits of the state, claimed to govern conduct and produced social differentiation; or we might look at why the relationships between political bosses and their clients in Ibadan and Lagos, which for many years were quite similar, began moving in different directions in recent times, conditioning the violent (or non‐violent) nature of mobilisations, state intervention and the integration of city dwellers in political networks; or we might question why the everyday work of patrolling neighbourhoods, which appeared to be identical in Ibadan and Cape Town, has had radically different effects on the construction of community boundaries within these cities, on the use of coercion, and on what these practices tell us about the nature of a state that outsources its security functions in this way.
This book does not tell the story of how most of the population was denied political rights – the foundation of apartheid and colonial and military regimes – nor of the inequalities and the enrichment of a racial or political minority at the expense of the majority, or of repression and attempts by the police or the army to subject citizens. Instead, bearing in mind this historical matrix, it invites us to step away from the national frameworks to study the myriad of urban arrangements used to manufacture exclusion. By articulating insights across the various local, national, imperial and global levels, and the colonial, apartheid and contemporary periods, it will bring to the fore the everyday practices of power and a genealogy of different forms of classification, exclusion and policing. By focusing on power relationships in daily life and understanding objects that extend across the twentieth century into the twenty‐first, I am seeking to open up a dialogue including equal parts of history, political sociology and comparative urban studies. I am seeking to account for the chaotic historical formation of the state – which could not be reduced to its fragile or weak dimensions – and an unforeseeable changing urban social reality that cannot be adequately explained by planning nor by informality. Essential components of the repertory of public actions such as providing security, attempting to monopolising violence, and producing or reproducing social, racial or generational differences are not restricted to state agents but carried out by numerous social groups that change their concrete implementation, often in very accidental ways.
This process echoes the genealogical analysis of Foucault, whose aim is to retrace the historical conditions of emergence of specific apparatuses of power. Foucault was largely influenced by Nietzsche’s own interpretation of history, as shown in his key text published in 1971 (Foucault 1971, pp. 1004–1024). Genealogy aims to ‘detect the singularity of events outside of any monotonous finality’ (Foucault 1971, p. 1004). It requires the meticulousness of knowledge, a large number of materials piled up, details, random beginnings, accidents, small deviations or complete reversals, errors, misjudgements, miscalculations. Foucault is said to have challenged ‘traditional history’, but according to his friend, the historian and philosopher Paul Veyne, Foucault believed only in the truth of the facts, of the countless historical facts that fill all the pages of his books; he was sceptical towards any universal concepts and started from the concrete practices of the state, and ordinary places of power rather than from general and well‐known ideas (Veyne 2008, p. 9, 19, 33). Interpreting history as a series of accidents and considering ‘that the forces at stake in history do not obey a destination or a mechanism but the randomness of the struggle’ (Foucault 1971, p. 1016) was quite unusual in the 1970s. Foucault’s genealogy was opposed to meta‐historical forms of writing (Foucault 1971, p. 1005), to historians who focus excessively on causal relationships (Veyne 2008, pp. 38–39), and to a history that does not take into account ordinary mechanisms of power (Foucault 1971, p. 1019). As David Garland explains (2014, p. 372), ‘genealogical analysis traces how contemporary practices and institutions emerged out of specific struggles, conflicts, alliances, and exercises of power, many of which are nowadays forgotten’. This book is an attempt to discover exercises of power, often located outside state power, sometimes within it.
In keeping with sociological traditions from its founding fathers to Michel Foucault and Paul Veyne, this book calls into question the antinomy between past and present. In an age of fragmented, hyper‐specialised and standardised knowledge, this choice reflects a scientific conviction – a unified conception of the social sciences including history – and a taste for intellectual and methodological cross‐pollination and comparative approaches. Such an endeavour entails articulating periods, and in this case, taking stock of the legacy from the colonial era and earlier periods, some of which are present in the forms of postcolonial power (Bayart and Bertrand 2006, p. 142). It means searching for the traces of the past in the present day (including the present of the historical actors) by making intelligible how ‘the things of the past are objectivised and crystallised in mental structures, in material things, in habitus’ (Noiriel 2010). This approach is characteristic of comparative historical sociology, which calls into question the opposition between idiographic and nomothetic disciplines (Bayart 1989; Déloye 1997) and of sociohistory, which emphasises the need to historicise social relationships viewed as products of power relationships that have become solidified, objectified, and naturalised over time (Noiriel 2012, 2010).
This dialogue between history and social sciences are central in the tradition of interdisciplinary knowledge in African studies (Balandier 1985 [1955]; Coquery‐Vidrovitch 1993; Ferguson 1999; Freund 2007; Mbembe and Nuttall 2004) which in some cases have entered into a productive dialogue with urban studies of the continent (Myers 2011; Simone and Pieterse 2017; Robinson 2006; Simone 2004). These have helped to include a more diverse historical experience in understanding the urban world and possible peculiarities of urban histories of the global south. Despite this tradition, a very specific use of history needs to be interrogated within some segments of urban studies. First, the historical experience is rarely based on a dialogue with the long tradition of African history. Second, while ethnographic methods have become central in so many disciplines, historical methods, i.e. the patient time‐consuming archival work and collection of oral and material sources, often seems to be marginal, leaving urban scholars with a second‐hand approach and a relative neglect of historical everyday life. Third, many scholars have not totally avoided a form of presentism. Presentism – or the rise of the category of the present until this comes a ubiquitous evidence – partly consists of reinterpreting the past according to this present (Hartog 2003, p. 223). A genealogical analysis is suggested as a possibility to avoid that risk while questioning the often‐marginal place devoted to the historicised dimension of urban life.
Practically, this means that there is a need to take contemporary and colonial periods seriously, i.e. systematically giving priority to primary sources with the same density of information. It has been of paramount importance to constitute a body of historical and ethnographical sources around shared questions. The historical sources include colonial, national and local archives consulted since 2000 at various sites in Nigeria (Ibadan, Kaduna, Enugu), South Africa (Pretoria, Cape Town, Johannesburg) and Great Britain (London, Oxford), and the local and national press archives in both countries, along with several dozen interviews with ‘elders’ on certain topics. The ethnographic materials come from a familiarisation with the environment of the neighbourhoods investigated in Cape Town, Ibadan and Lagos, repeated interviews with dozens of police organisation members, civil servants, union members and traders, together with participatory observation whenever possible (volunteer patrols in Cape Town, local governments in Ibadan and Lagos).7 Rancière (1987) invites us to move between a word divided ‘between those who explain and those who listen’. As a French academic living and working in Nigeria and South Africa I was first and foremost educated by the many informants I had the chance to meet. Cross‐checking historical sources with ethnographical materials generated dialogue between literatures that usually do not communicate their findings and brought to light particular historical configurations that raised questions about changes in national policy (colonial/post‐colonial, military/post‐military, apartheid/post‐apartheid), which are often taken as the narrative starting point for want of longitudinal studies.
Many scholars have recommended provincialising Western urban analysis to achieve a more comprehensive view of global urbanisation, to give priority to a post‐colonial approach, and to call for a localisation of theoretical production (Robinson 2012; Roy 2011). If this book explores colonial and postcolonial history to figure out a peculiar historicity that may not fit a ready‐made definition of the urban, my aim is not to take part in developing a ‘Southern theory’ that would abstract from, circumvent or challenge ‘Western thought’. I prefer to read academics promoting Southern theory as cultural intermediaries who have raised these issues precisely because they have knowledge in different fields and different academic institutions (northern and southern). James Ferguson reminds us that ‘Thinking does not mean thinking from a single point of view, but thinking from more than one point of view at the same time’ (Ferguson 2012), a comment made in reference to Jean and Jane Comaroff who, like many ‘intellectuals of the South’, have positioned themselves in the space between them (Comaroff and Comaroff 2012).
I have adopted a similar approach in exploring this space between different academic traditions. For historical reasons, African universities are too often in a subaltern position in the production of knowledge that has received worldwide audience in the social sciences. A first step towards rebalancing this unequal production is to use the considerable and often neglected research produced in African universities. There is a long tradition of research in South African and Nigerian universities not always exposed in urban studies journals but which constitute the fundamental basis of this book. To produce new knowledge and new facts on urban Africa is another necessary step, not a technical point but a need for an exhaustive empirical research for which not abundant available data pre‐existed for a number of issues (Pieterse and Parnell 2016). This is also an epistemological choice situated in a grounded theory that provides theoretical insights based on empirical data (Glaser and Strauss 1967) that are necessarily provisional and revisable (Robinson and Roy 2016) and only possible through a constant process of exploring the tiny minutiae of urban life (Simone and Pieterse 2017).
I have often been asked what is the point in drawing parallels between countries as different as South Africa and Nigeria, or cities like Cape Town and Ibadan that have nothing in common. This work is part of this renewal of the comparison in urban studies. Jennifer Robinson invites us to think of a global comparative urbanism and to shift the research produced within the Western European world and the United States to take into account different urban experiences in the South and to produce South/South and South/North comparisons (Robinson 2016; Robinson and Roy 2016). She calls for thinking together scales, flows and peculiar histories and to compare iconic cities with more ordinary ones and thus to move out of any exceptional visions of cities (Robinson 2006). In the African continent especially, there is a need to rethink hasty classifications. African cities are often qualified as ‘colonial’, ‘post‐colonial, ‘informal, ‘in crisis’ and ‘neoliberal’ as if they were only laboratories or testing grounds for broader international dynamics over which local or national actors seem to have little influence (Fourchard 2011a). Comparative methods also limit the use of superlatives and distance ourselves from national debates (McFarlane 2010; Simone 2010). They are a way to move outside methodological nationalism, which, until recently, was common in urban sociology that carries the risk of reifying national experiences (Le Galès 2019, p. 34). South Africa and Nigeria are no exception, their historiographies are often nationally oriented, and have sometimes lent credence to the idea of incommensurable trajectories. The wish to move beyond an assumption of incommensurability follows some previous collective efforts to compare politics and policies in different cities of the continent (Bekker and Fourchard 2013). Comparing simultaneously avoids the pitfall of a ‘new localism’ commonly found in urban studies, which investigates local strategies, the capabilities of local actors, and local regulations, while overlooking more comprehensive national, regional or global transformations (Le Galès 2003, p. 27). There is a long tradition in sociology, geography and history informing the particularity of only one metropolis without using comparative tool; this work is also sensitive to a recent call for using more history and political sociology in comparative urban studies (Le Galès 2019).
Comparison is used here as a way to identify singularities: it means highlighting differences rather than dissolving them, sharing questions instead of answers. I do not intend to ‘compare one to the other’ but rather ‘one and the other’, to foreground particularities and contingencies rather than misleading likenesses (Bayart 2008a). It does not emphasise connections or flows between cities of the continent or elsewhere nor does it try to find variables of relatively similar cases. It wishes instead to allow each case to inform assessments of the other while pointing out particularities through a thorough description of practices and discourses in historically situated contexts. A creative attempt of post‐colonial approach opts for a view on fragmented urban lifestyles and worlding experiences that give preference to unstable practices, fluidity, informal relations and transnational connections (De Boeck and Plissart 2004; Fouquet 2014; Malaquais 2006; Nuttall and Mbembe 2005; Roy 2016; Simone 2001). While sharing a rejection of any linear or teleological vision of history I think that this ethnography of fragments does not always help to explore what Foucault calls historical discontinuities and events (Foucault 1971, pp. 1015–1017, 1972, p. 1141). ‘Event means not a decision, a treaty, a reign or a battle but a balance of forces that is reversed, a power confiscated, a vocabulary taken up and turned against its users, a domination that weakens, relaxes, poisons itself, another that makes its entrance, masked’ (Foucault 1971, p. 1016).8 How might the change of power relationships in its tiny details reflect specific configurations of institutions, transgression of established discourses and naturalised practices?
In other words, comparing a genealogy of classification, exclusion and police will bring to the fore the everyday practices of power in past and present urban lives. Three scales are privileged. While blatantly racial in South Africa, the administrative and legal apparatus of exclusion, implemented by the colonial and apartheid states, was, in urban areas, simultaneously based on residence, age and gender, and in both countries, re‐appropriated and subverted by the population (Part I). Similarly, over the long twentieth century, order was maintained in low‐income neighbourhoods more often by local organisations using coercion against those who appeared to threaten the cohesion of the ‘community’ than by the state security apparatus imposing us to rethink the very act of policing in low‐income neighbourhoods (Part II). Eventually, what may be striking to the observer of the contemporary precarious urban life in Africa is their uneven ability to join clientelistic networks and negotiate the terms of their economic life with local political patrons and street‐level bureaucrats (Part III). Each of the book’s three parts focuses on a common scale of analysis and temporal period: the metropolis during the colonial period in Part I; the neighbourhood from the 1930s until today in Part II; and central sites of the urban economy (the street, motor parks) and of bureaucratic and political power (a local government office, the residence of a political boss) since 2000 in Nigeria.
In Part I, I suggest that the genealogy of exclusion takes root in the classifying obsession of colonial and apartheid governments. Racial discrimination, city planning and segregation schemes designed to keep black native populations at a distance from white European populations have played a pioneering role in developing the concept of a segregated city (Home 1997; Nightingale 2012; Swanson 1977). For American historian Carl Nightingale, it is impossible to wish away the power of race in the history of colonial cities, whether it was during moments when planners did draw colour lines clearly on their maps or moments where they sought to hide race away (Nightingale 2012). He rightly insists, ‘the biggest problem with urban racial separation is the maldistribution of resources that disproportionally disfavours those racial groups that the colour line also helps to subordinate politically’. Actually, the construction of the modern networked city in the Western world from a fragmented provision of water, sanitation, electricity or transport in the mid‐nineteenth century to a standardised system in the mid‐twentieth century – or what is referred to as a ‘modern infrastructural ideal’ by Graham and Marvin (2001) – never happened in the colonies. Network of infrastructures has ‘always been fragmented’ in colonial Bombay (McFarlane 2008; Zerah 2008), it was a truncated modernity in colonial Lagos (Gandy 2006, p. 377) and even considered as a system of urban apartheid in the earlier literature (Abu‐Lughod 1980; Balbo 1993). An approach on colonial surveillance and control of conducts has simultaneously become an important reinterpretation of the colonial city inspired by a Foucauldian analysis. Some have suggested that disciplinary colonial power and the racist narrative behind the civilising mission were penetrating the smallest details of everyday life that could only be resisted by colonised social and political practices (Celik 1997; de Boeck and Plissart 2004; Myers 2003).
While the racial classification and the surveillance dimension of the colonial project are too important features to be brushed aside, it does not fully account for the role of bureaucratic, political and social engineering in shaping colonial classification, creating exclusion and producing violence.
The analysis of colonial cities as dual cities or areas in which coercion was tempered solely by forms of resistance misses the essence of what thirty years of historiography has taught us about Africa. Colonial societies cannot be understood merely as antagonism between Europeans and natives (Cooper 1994; Eckert 2006, p. 213), which reduces the colonial encounter to binary opposition (elites/subalterns, domination/resistance) (Bayly et al. 2006, pp. 1452–1456). The notion of the dual or racialised city overestimates the ability of administrations to implement steady public policy and ignore the dispersion of colonial power into a multitude of locales and authorities. It overlooks the capacity of local societies to circumvent, ignore or even conceive of such divisions differently and misses the pervasive social effects of other forms of colonialism in urban Africa.
First, the racial delusion of colonial power was articulated to other forms of classification based on residence, origin, gender and age, which together constitute a classifying obsession needed to govern urban areas. Colonial authorities were faced with contradictory injunctions. The first was the will to assign migrant populations to rural areas and the need for those same populations as manpower for the urban or the industrial economy. One of the solutions was to provide them with a specific place of residence and grant them different rights from the more permanent urban population even if this was difficult to implement as populations keep moving between urban and rural areas (what is referred to as the population flottante in French colonies). A second issue arose from the labour policies aimed at identifying and promoting an autonomous male working class, which became the standard against which a large part of the urban population became criminalised. ‘Unemployed’, ‘idle’, ‘unruly’ youth and ‘single’ women without wage jobs were increasingly seen as contributing nothing to the colonial economy, whereas their ordinary behaviour threatened the authority of chiefs, elders, husbands and wage workers. The invention of a nomenclature designed to rule by classification was central in governing the most dominated social groups in cities under the colonial rule.
Secondly, it is dubious to qualify the increasing forms of colonial surveillance over the urban population as a form of governmentality or in the words of Foucault as a process aimed to identify and reform individual conducts.9 Historians of Africa are sceptical. Colonial domination was based less on the creation of individualised subjects than on the reified notion of traditional authorities (Cooper 2005). The colonial states in Africa did not necessarily need their subjects to be individualised and identified by the state and colonial institutions complained more about the lack of collective adjustment than individual adjustment (Cooper 2005). The process of counting the population for tax or demographic reasons, or weighing, classifying and measuring them in the case of workers did not attest itself to the emergence of a governmentality based on individualised knowledge of the population; it was a process of ‘unitisation’ rather than the creation of individual subjectivities (Vaughan 1991, p. 11). Far from being driven by a ubiquitous scientific curiosity about the well‐being of the population, African colonial states were built in an informational void: there is an inadequacy of an account of the state motivated by the search for knowledge in colonial and post‐colonial Africa (Breckenridge 2014, p. 5). Without immediately ruling out the analyses of governmentality, Frederick Cooper and Megan Vaughan sought to assess the relevance of this interpretive framework with regard to specific environments and time periods. The first part of the book tries to look at this specific surveillance and attempt to discipline new identified urban groups and determine whether specific dispositifs of government were able to identify and reform their individual conducts.
Thirdly, resistance to colonialism or apartheid is a very ambivalent process that could not be reduced to an opposition between an elite cooperating with colonisers against groups qualified as subalterns or in the words of Gramsci (1971) individuals subject to the activity of ruling groups. Moving away from a binary opposition between colonisers and colonised does not consist in underestimating the colonial violence but rather in thinking about the inextricable entanglement between the governing and the governed.10 The new groups produced by the administration were not only abstract and fantasist bureaucratic categories but took roots in the urban social world. A detailed analysis of two notorious episodes of collective violence – the Kano riots in 1953 in Nigeria and the Sharpeville massacre in 1961 in South Africa – show not only resistance against colonialism or apartheid. Exploring the ways in which a set of various subaltern groups played different roles in these two episodes reveals how they could absorb many ideas from the ruling class while at the same time judging their everyday experience contradicted that domination. Administrative categories produced during the colonial period have actually been appropriated by a set of social and political actors and lasted after the end of colonial rule or the apartheid regime.
Part II retraces the genealogy of policing carried out by organisations in low‐income neighbourhoods from the colonial period to the present. In the policing literature, there is a distinction between law enforcement carried out by the ‘police’ – the name commonly used to designate a state organisation with a specific mandate – and ‘policing’ which designates a plurality of organisations including the police (Garland 2001; Jobard and Maillard 2015). This second part focuses on groups and individuals policing neighbourhoods often included under the term ‘vigilante’. It wishes to open up a nascent dialogue between comparative urban studies and the history and anthropology of policing to rethink the act of policing in low‐income neighbourhoods.
The anthropology of vigilantism on Africa has, on the one hand, largely focused on the relationship between vigilante groups and the various arms of the state, their role in building communities, their use of violence and the multiple threats identified by vigilante groups (Buur and Jensen 2004; Kirsch and Gratz 2010; Pratten and Sen 2007; Smith 2019). Contemporary policing by non‐state actors are to be found everywhere in Nigeria and South Africa but how this has emerged from specific struggles, alliances and conflicts remains unclear. There is actually a paucity of research on how the day‐to‐day work of these groups have reshaped ordinary urban experience over a long period of time, their role in exercising public authority in neighbourhoods, in excluding or including residents, and the ways in which they have participated in the regulation or banalisation of daily violence. A genealogical approach exploring what has been forgotten and what has been naturalised over time helps to reconsider the very act of policing in these cities. Joining historical and ethnographic methods enables answering key questions left aside in the literature on vigilantism. Is the violence manifested by these organisations the same when it is authorised (during the colonial period and apartheid) and when it is prohibited (today)? Are vigilante organisations regulated in the same way when bureaucratic resources are meagre (the colonial period) and when police forces have been significantly expanded (today)? How do they exercise power over the people residing there and who has the authority to govern the neighbourhood? Exploring past and present everyday policing helps to disentangle continuities and discontinuities from within the neighbourhood.
Vigilantism is sometimes understood as another form of neoliberal government (Comaroff and Comaroff 2006; Goldstein 2005). The delegation of security to private actors takes part in a move towards what David Garland rightly calls ‘responsibilization’ that is, the acceptance that individuals should be held responsible for their own security (Garland 1997, pp. 190–191). This well resonates with the neoliberal urbanisation argument in comparative urban studies. Since the 1990s, large metropolises have been identified as essential vehicles for the reproduction of neoliberalism – understood as a body of doctrines imposing the adoption of universal free market values. They are described as showcases for major macroeconomic transformations and privileged spaces for testing multiple schemes: areas granting tax exemptions, public–private partnerships, new strategies of social control and surveillance, multiplication of urban enclaves for the middle and upper classes (business clusters, shopping centres, gated residential communities and industrial parks) (Brenner and Theodore 2002; Caldeira 2000; Davis 1992; Peck and Tickell 2002). This privatization of urban space is closely connected to the geography of fortified enclaves while vigilantism is more especially associated with peripheral urban areas in which residents feel ignored by the legal state (Glebbeek and Koonings 2016, p. 8; Müller 2017; Rodgers 2006).
While I agree that ‘urban neoliberal order’ is marked by more systematic surveillance, the development of urban enclaves, and the delegation of security to citizens, it may miss other dimensions of urban policing in a poorer urban space that has not received the same scholarly attention (Jaffe 2012). Secured urban enclaves are common in wealthy Nigerian or South African neighbourhoods, but private security companies are rare or absent in low‐income neighbourhoods and if residents are involved in community police programmes, in Nigeria and South Africa, such programmes have often taken over earlier systems of security mobilisation by local residents. The neoliberal urbanisation argument marginalises or ignores other forms of urban transformation (Le Galès 2016; Pinson and Morel 2016). In our cases, the longer colonial and postcolonial trajectories of urban vigilante groups indicate that vigilantism cannot be fully explained by neoliberalism or weak state analysis.
In articulating comparative history and comparative ethnography in two specific large urban areas in the cities of Cape Town and Ibadan, I inform how policing is the product of a very specific urban environment of police of subalterns by other subalterns. This specific genealogy has roots in the colonial and apartheid periods during which the administration delegated or ‘discharged’ (Hibou 1999) its security functions to very large number of groups and organisations at conditions that they did not challenge the overall colonial order. These groups were tolerated or supported by the administration but enjoyed a large autonomy. In many instances, policing the neighbourhood often appears to be the other side of the classifying colonial obsession: youth, migrants or people unknown from the local residents were the main targets of vigilante groups. These power relationships between groups and those threatening the community have strongly persisted in the everyday routine of urban policing. New unexplored issues have also come up since the end of the colonial or apartheid periods such as politicisation, commodification and feminisation of vigilantism. In other words, scrutinising daily anxiety in urban areas neglected by the state opens up new avenues for empirical and theoretical research on low‐cost and harsh forms of urban policing.
Part Three moves from a genealogy of exclusion at the city level and police at the neighbourhood levels to dispositifs of power at the micro level on the streets and in office from the 1990s to date. It explores everyday relationships in bus terminals referred to as ‘motor parks’ and in local government offices between individuals in positions of authority (political leaders, civil servants, trade union members) and a host of subordinate actors (bus drivers, tax collectors, unemployed workers, ordinary citizens seeking a document) in three main metropolises of Nigeria (Lagos, Ibadan and Jos). Focusing on these places offers an opportunity to analyse everyday practices of exclusion and inclusion in a clientelistic network, a political community, or access to employment and forms of violence that such an exclusion might trigger.
A world of a dominant urban precarity has become the norm in many African and Asian countries (Simone and Pieterse 2017, pp. 33–36). With the implementation of IMF policies in the 1980s, public sector retrenchment and cutbacks in social programmes and subsidies eroded the number of wage earners while making the lives of the majority of workers increasingly precarious (Barchiesi 2019, p. 68). In the face of these policies, state governments and even more so municipalities, that were ill‐equipped to cope with the continent’s demographic challenge, could not have prevented the growing exclusion of poor populations from basic services and the wage job market (Koonings and Kruijt 2009). Nigeria is no exception in that regard: the level of urban poverty and extreme urban poverty dramatically increased in the 1980s and 1990s.11 Petty trading and petty craft have become the dominant sectors of employment for men and women in a city like Ibadan (Akerele 1997, p. 39; Guyer et al. 2002), transforming streets and public spaces into a major place to make a living.
In Nigerian metropolises like in many other cities of the south, relations between economic actors and state agents commonly labelled the ‘informal economy’ – usually refers to self‐employment, i.e. either non‐wage work or to activities that are not subject to taxation or state regulation – have acquired very different political meanings over time. Many studies on urban informality have emphasised the vitality of horizontal ties and tended to overlook vertical relations even if the literature has informed crackdowns, evictions and brutal harassment by local and national authorities (Lindell 2008; Potts 2008), stronger control of CBDs, sometimes by re‐enacting old colonial measures (Morange 2015; Steck et al. 2013). Less has been said on hierarchical social relations within networks of informal actors and political leaders (Lindell and Utas 2012), the ambivalent politics of street trader organisations (Bénit‐Gbaffou 2016), the fragmented mobilisations to access services or collective resources and urban spaces (Bayat 1997, 2000) and the complex interplay between politicians, urban population and their intermediaries in the city (Auyero 2000; Haenni 2005; Solomon 2008).
The politics of the street in Chapter 5 is not an additional chapter on urban informality but an attempt to account for the ambivalent role of bureaucratic and political domination in creating exclusion, in producing violence and uneven forms of politicisation. What is happening in streets and motor parks does not easily fit what a number of scholars would qualify as ‘political’ in its emancipatory dimensions. Following Weber (1978), Hibou (2011) and Lüdkte (2015a) it looks instead at politics as participating in power. This chapter explores how Lagos and Ibadan political leaders have used their networks to provide infrastructures and services to the urban population and how the thousands of motor parks in the two largest cities of the county have become central places of illegal tax collection. It scrutinises how subaltern actors in the parks participate to this collection and became politicised through conflicts and more daily practices. It tries more generally to understand the porous border between the legal and the illegal, state and non‐state actors, the circulation of petty cash in and out of official circuits and forms of daily policing and violent mobilisation for the control of urban resources. Chapter 6 interrogates the politics in office in looking at daily interactions between civil servants and citizens seeking a certificate of indigene in local government front offices in Ibadan and Jos, Plateau state capital in the central part of the country. A quota system that was started in the 1980s guarantees the representation of citizens in the various administrations according to their origin certified by local governments. Certificates of indigene embody the official – in its original meaning, produced in office – and illegal discrimination in Nigeria. In Jos, this process of delineating who is truly indigene of the place have led to mass violence claiming several thousands of deaths in the 2000s. In this final chapter, I will examine conflict and negotiation required to procure this document, what such transactions tell us about the forms of inclusion and exclusion that are approved by the local administration, and the extent to which this practice is perceived as discriminatory by the non‐indigene. I follow Matthew Hulls’ suggestion that bureaucratic documents are both constitutive of bureaucratic activities and of forms of urban sociality that extend beyond the office (Hull 2012). The last chapter links this detailed topic of producing documents from within the office to wider politics of urban exclusion. Behind the politics of exclusion of non‐indigenes, which is especially embodied in the graphic artefact of the certificate, there is a very unclear legacy of the past: in both cities, competing ancestral claims are rooted in the history of the city, in colonial urban planning and postcolonial administrations. Coming back to these different historical layers in a comparative approach helps to see the ways in which history has been used in more recent times as a political and bureaucratic tool to exclude non‐indigenes to access limited state resources. Changing the scale of analysis in looking at detailed places of encounters such as motor parks and local government offices allows to observe ordinary social practices and mass violence, to interrogate the legacy of a colonial past and to explore the thin, blurring and often invisible borders between civil servants and unofficial tax collectors and the embeddedness of state bureaucratic practices in urban society.
