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207 Conclusion Subcolonialism, Ethnicity, and Memory There is, at least in the field of African studies, a rich and growing literature on imperial mediation, on the political repertoires of indigenous colonial elites, and on their brokerage of colonial relations. But we have yet to articulate in a coherent conceptual or empirical vocabulary colonial administrative arrangements that devolved colonial control to non-autochthonous groups of Africans. The analyses in the foregoing chapters fill this gap by positing subcolonialism as a poorly understood but consequential colonial administrative form. At the same time, I have wrestled here with, but have not fully resolved, the epistemological and political legacies that subcolonialism birthed or reinforced. Since the emergence of professional African history in the late 1950s and early 1960s, scholars have grown gradually familiar with how European colonizers implemented their colonial visions and how African communities responded to, recalibrated, instrumentalized, and inverted these visions of control. Studies of the colonial experience have furnished empirical evidence from different corners of the continent about the governing repertoires of colonizers, notably the use of indigenous—and thus supposedly legitimate—colonial insiders as mediators. This is an important epistemological baseline. However, when colonization is viewed exclusively through this lens, it leads to the inadvertent reproduction of the supreme rhetoric of indirect rule: that British colonizers tampered little with African societies and that the deployment of indigenous insiders as mediators ensured that life continued for Africa’s colonized people as before. We know now that this rhetoric is at best misleading, and that colonization, regardless of the shape it took, was much more disruptive of African lives than colonial texts admit. A willingness to contemplate the ruptures of colonial rule leads to a corresponding reflection on colonial arrangements that were less legitimate and thus more volatile than indigenous mediation or indirect rule. In the early period of professional African history writing, historians of colonial Africa posited a dualist, Manichean conceptualization, which in turn informed the reconstruction of the African colonial past. In this narrative, omnipotent European colonizers executed their administrative, economic, and so- 208 | Colonialism by Proxy cial fantasies on the blank canvas of African societies and on the backs of passive African colonial subjects. Africans, in this paradigm, were squeezed into three categories: oppressed African subjects, collaborating elites, and resistant nationalist heroes.1 Implicit in this analytical frame are notions of African colonial subjects as docile or resistant participants in colonial endeavors, and of European colonizers as the consistent and quotidian drivers of the colonial enterprise. This reading of the African colonial experience has since come under sustained critique mainly because it flattens the complex roles of African groups in colonial society. One mainstay of this critique is to call attention to the simplistic , dichotomous assumptions that underlie nationalist historiography. Scholars have since faulted its two premises: European political ubiquity and omnipotence in colonial rule, and a blanket assumption about African marginality in the mechanics of colonial rule.2 Critique notwithstanding, this much is true by consensus : Africans were marginalized by colonial rule because conquest and occupation gave European actors overwhelming primacy in colonial affairs. Europeans tended to be the drivers and architects of the overarching colonial ideology at work in a given context. Colonial rule would not be so colonial if it were different. Ultimate agenda-setting power resided with European colonialists. Even so, colonial authorities did not exercise quotidian administrative control everywhere or at every stage of the colonial encounter. They also did not always possess the physical capacity to consistently and evenly enforce their ideologies. This logistical handicap enabled some African groups to populate and drive the institutions of colonial rule in some contexts. It also gave them the leverage to author sociopolitical scripts useful to their own objectives. Empowered African elites deftly filled the gaps revealed by colonial personnel and logistical challenges. Yet, to posit certain groups of Africans as drivers of colonial rule in certain contexts is not to contend that African subcolonial actors replaced European colonialists as the ideologues of colonial rule, or that ultimate power and authority did not reside with Europeans even in regions like the Middle Belt where British colonizers preferred “alien” African colonial agents to indigenous mediators. In fact, in several instances discussed in this book, the invisible but powerful hands of European officials could be seen in the encounters between Hausa-Fulani subcolonials and Middle Belt communities. It is also true that the position of the Hausa colonials, their initiatives, and the political acts they carried out for...

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