Beyond citizen and subject: New perspectives on political thought, “tribe,” and “indirect rule” in Africa

Abstract

Despite the extensive literature on “tribe” and “indirect rule” in colonial Africa, historians have tended to confine their analyses to the economic and administrative pragmatism of empire‐builders, the domination of colonial knowledge, and the mediation of these factors by African culture‐brokers who brandished local “tradition” in order to satisfy a range of local material interests. This essay shows that these arguments replicate colonial views that bifurcated Africa into incommensurable spheres of “modern” European agency and “traditional” African response. Placing the existing scholarship of African colonial history in dialogue with Indian intellectual history and African film studies, I propose that dyadic understandings of “tribe” and “indirect‐rule” can be overcome in order to reposition Africa and its institutions at the heart of a global narrative of “modernisation.” In considering this new perspective, the essay invites students and scholars of African history and political science to recognise that—for some—“tribe” was a constituent part of a uniquely African vision of future progress rather than a premodern anachronism or a tool of Western epistemological dominance.