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21 1w  Native and Non-Native Colonial Urbanization and the Legal Foundations of Identity In British colonial Africa between the 1890s and 1940s, a person’s first legal identity was either native or non-native. While there was no one definition, in general “natives” were indigenous Africans, and “non-natives” were European and Asian immigrants. The legal ordering of colonial identities was thus first the mediation of relations between indigenes and immigrants . This chapter examines how legal identities and colonial administrative processes entrenched racial categories in interwar Dar es Salaam. The most important of these processes involved regulating interaction between “native” Africans and “non-native” Indians. Nominally intended to protect African “native ” interests, the implementation of Tanganyika’s colonial laws revealed two competing visions for urban Africa. One championed urban growth driven by non-African commerce and capital improvements; the other pursued the paternalistic protection of Africans from non-African market forces. Urban life, however, ran well ahead of either vision, and a distinctly reactive and ad hoc character of governance emerged during these years. Although the main actors of this chapter are British officials, their work and debates provided contradicting visions of urbanization that Africans and Indians would appropriate and reshape to make claims on urban life. This chapter investigates how colonial categorization shaped urban development . Legal and administrative categories of colonial rule have left lasting imprints on Africa’s subject population. The most influential author to stress this point has been Mahmood Mamdani, who argues that the legaladministrative complex of colonial states “framed and set in motion particular political identities,” which produced subsequent racial and ethnic identities.1 Like Tutsis in Rwanda, Indians in East Africa were a middle-ground “subject 22 w Chapter 1 race”; immigrants who enjoyed the partial fruits of “non-native” status without the full political power exercised by “non-native” Europeans. But the most important development was the colonial state’s initial inscription of “native” and “non-native” upon subject populations. “The greater crime of colonialism,” Mamdani stresses, “was to politicize indigeneity in the first place.”2 Legal privileges only underlined the essential foreignness of “non-natives.” Popularly stigmatized, these middle-ground communities found themselves vulnerable to the inevitable Fanonist violence that accompanied decolonization. This chapter argues that the colonial legal-administrative system was vital to the production of identities in urban Tanganyika, but—contra Mamdani’s uniform model—it was a system with multiple constituencies that forged competing sets of priorities. The path between colonial policy and internalized colonial identity was mediated by several factors, in particular the constant improvisation of colonial officials and the selective political appropriation of their colonial subjects. The resulting paths were rarely straightforward. In Dar es Salaam, the clearest physical inscription of colonial identity production lay in urban spatial planning. Following German precedent, the British colonial government divided the city into three zones, ostensibly based on economic activity but effectively legalizing racial patterns of residence. As we shall see, Dar es Salaam’s European, Asian (i.e., Indian), and African zones were formed by legal codes and administrative initiatives that sought to secure de facto if not quite de jure racial segregation. Yet, in practice, the power of the colonial state to specifically inscribe segregation and, more generally, ontological identity categories was limited by three principal factors. First, the state had limited resources to realize its visions; second, these visions were multiple and contradictory. Finally, colonial identity categories were selectively appropriated by colonial subjects themselves, who pursued political projects that exploited colonial contradictions in order to secure certain protections and to reject certain forms of authority. Legal-administrative categories were unavoidable tools of colonial bureaucracy. The goal of this chapter is to place the legal-administrative intent of urban policies in the context of the limited capacity of British colonizers to effect change. Though fundamental to the colonial project, “native” and “non-native” were not fully realized categories of colonial power, but instead a language of policy and administration used to justify and rationalize improvised action. native/non-native: the poli ti c s of an incomplete leg al proj ec t The legal categories of native and non-native in British Tanganyika (1919–1961) represent standard imperial tools reforged in the language of international paternalism of the immediate postwar years. Originally an anodyne reference to one’s Colonial Urbanization and the Legal Foundations of Identity w 23 birthplace, the term “native” had transformed into a British imperial category used to describe non-European subjects during the...

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