The Moving Location of Empire: Indirect Rule, International Law, and theBantu Educational Kinema Experiment

Abstract

Between 1935 and 1937, the International Missionary Council conducted the Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment. The objective was to produce silent educational films and screen them to ‘native’ people via mobile cinemas in the British territories in East and Central Africa. Embracing the principle of ‘indirect rule’, and its role in training colonial subjects in economic self-sufficiency and political self-rule, as then advocated by leading colonial figures and the League of Nations, the films strived to capture ‘the native point of view’ through an ‘ethnographic sensitivity’ towards local cultures, concerns and needs. Hoping to educate the natives from ‘within’, they used local actors, familiar locations and pedagogical instructions that were believed to meet the target audience's cognitive capacity. Though in many respects unsuccessful, the experiment cemented the use of cinema in the late colonial project and, more importantly, embodied the clear move at the time towards a more dynamic and disaggregated, yet perhaps never fully post-imperial, international order. I argue in this article that the Bantu Experiment is thus a telling instance through which to examine both the mobility and multiplicity of late imperial locations and the system of modern international administration that emerged during the interwar period. I suggest that this mobility and multiplicity continue to characterize the workings of today's international order, indicating the key role that ‘indirect rule’, as a silent principle of international law, still plays in its functioning today.

Frontier justice: international law and ‘lawless’ spaces in the “War on Terror”

“…The frontier territory concept as defined in this paper deepens our understanding of the mechanisms through which powerholders instrumentalize legal discourses and helps us to better understand how international law can bolster specific national security policies of powerful states. The modality of the frontier territory, lifted from the domestic state context, extends a growing body of critical international law literature that considers the “illiberal use of liberal law” (Eslava, 2018; Pahuja, 2013; Parfitt, 2018). These studies argue that through activities like humanitarianism and rule of law building in the Global South, international legal discourses can contribute to colonizing projects in the Global North (Eslava, 2018; Mattei and Nader, 2008; Nader and Savinar, 2016).…”

“…The modality of the frontier territory, lifted from the domestic state context, extends a growing body of critical international law literature that considers the “illiberal use of liberal law” (Eslava, 2018; Pahuja, 2013; Parfitt, 2018). These studies argue that through activities like humanitarianism and rule of law building in the Global South, international legal discourses can contribute to colonizing projects in the Global North (Eslava, 2018; Mattei and Nader, 2008; Nader and Savinar, 2016). The frontier territory concept, and its use as a discursive tool to secure the state through law, may show similar patterns of domination through the laws of armed conflict.…”

The Mythology of International Rule-of-Law Promotion

“…19. For another example of a colonial project that sought to create proper modern (legal) subjects by bringing about change "from within," see Eslava (2018).…”