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Chapter 7. King and Chief on Ijwi Island
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M M M 7 KING AND CHIEF ON IJWI ISLAND All politics is local. But all political activity occurs within larger contexts. For this area of Africa there are few case studies available on local responses to the process of colonial conquest—and on the deeper effects that such a process initiated. This essay shows that even with overwhelming military power, neither the European conquest nor the colonial administration of the small community on Ijwi Island was easy. On the other side of the ledger, resistance, so often portrayed in ideological terms as heroic, was accompanied by political complexity and by material hardship: flight, taxes, epidemics, exile, and dislocation were all part of the experience. This chapter, however, is not only about conquest and resistance; it is also concerned with the more subtle effects of new political strategies and the presence of new resources in molding politics in the community. Drawing on a variety of sources (particularly oral testimony), it considers the differences between two political cultures—one based on local legitimacy and one based on external power—and the mediations between the two models. (These differences were manifest both in the modernizing agenda of the delegated “chief”—as distinct from traditional “king”—and in the resistance of the population in the different Cowritten with Catharine Newbury. administrative regions of the island.) Both locally derived “legitimate” authority and externally derived delegated power needed to address the questions of loyalty and power, but each did so in different ways. In a sense, Ijwi’s history provides a historical laboratory for studying such differences in political structure. It also traces the effects on the people of a system that responded primarily to an externally driven rationale—in this case the irony of the“civilizing mission” that drove colonial rule. By attending to local dimensions of colonial imposition, even in this small locale, the analysis shows that the effects of colonial establishment were momentous and the lessons important. O colonial rule in Africa was an academic focus on the process of elite formation in African societies. A product of the perceived political needs of the early independence period, this perspective generally emphasized manpower development as the critical element of bureaucratic stability and political modernization. It was postulated that individual leaders were progressive nation builders, in contrast to the backward and conservative masses, and therefore studies on the early postcolonial period devoted little attention to the specific interactions between members of the elite and the masses.₁ Still less attention was given to the significance of these relationships for the rural people involved. By the very fact of their powerlessness, these people were not considered part of the political nexus. However, as Joan Vincent has recently indicated, the character of a political system may best be understood by examining the nature of its impact on the powerless, rather than by describing its structure or stated objectives and focusing on the incorporation of elites into the hierarchical political framework.² Indeed, the very existence of a large relatively powerless sector of society is itself an important indicator of the quality and conception of politics within that society. Emphasis on the process of elite formation has also focused attention on the role of “traditional elites.” Wherever possible, Belgian colonial policy combined the two categories of precolonial authority and colonially imposed authority within the single concept of traditional elite, in an attempt to cloak colonial administrative personnel in the garb of legitimacy. Despite such attempts to forge a sense of continuity, the transformation from a precolonial to a colonial context was significant. It affected local authorities in two ways: in their loss of status (particularly in the loss of sovereignty) and in the extension of new powers applicable to the local context. The loss of sovereignty was felt most directly by the M M The Lake Kivu Arena elites themselves, while the new powers placed in the hands of the elites were realized at the expense of the population in general. But there is a sense in which these two aspects of the transition to colonial rule were intimately related, for the issues of sovereignty and legitimacy affected the quality of administration, and especially the nature of relations between elites and others, in ways that reinforced each other. These two themes—the different types of “traditional” authority in the colonial context on the one hand, and the relationship between local administrative authorities and the...