The Culture of Power in Southern Africa: Essays on State Formation and the Political Imagination (review)

Clifton Crais has rested his career on challenging conventional analyses of nineteenth- and twentieth-century South African history through the innovative use of poststructural methodologies. This book is no exception. Like White Supremacy and Black Resistance in Pre-Industrial South Africa (1991) and The Politics of Evil: Magic, State Power, and the Political Imagination in South Africa (2002), this collection of essays seeks to recast existing understandings of state and society in southern Africa beyond mainstream paradigms of political economy, in this case by focusing on local practices through which the state was constituted. Two essays in particular serve to anchor his approach: Philip Abrams's "Some Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State" (1988) and, more implicitly, Frederick Cooper's "Conflict and Connection: Rethinking Colonial African History" (1996). Similar to Abrams, Crais wants to complicate the state as an object of study, recognizing that its "effects," intended and unintended, are just as crucial to its being as its tactile institutions. Like Cooper, he and his contributors aim to examine how the effects of state power were not merely resisted, but understood and reconfigured for local purposes. Combining these two perspectives, this book blurs the categorical distinctions between state and society in order to reveal how Africans participated in processes of state formation: to interpret, undermine, and at times mobilize its power for their own purposes.

This goal is an ambitious and much-needed one, with results—though somewhat uneven here—that suggest the establishment of a new subfield for scholars to elaborate. Crais's contribution draws in part from a case study printed in The Politics of Evil, one that describes the ritual killing of an Eastern Cape colonial administrator in 1880. The particular manner of this murder—with its elements of authority, power recognition, and dismantlement through local method—illustrates a broader pattern of state installment and indigenous response that occurred in the Cape up through the early twentieth century. Expressions such as "surveillance," "mimesis," and "autoethnographic representation" are argued for to displace the more conventional terms of "domination" and "resistance" in explaining such events of translation and transculturation. Thomas McClendon extends this perspective, if with less conceptual verve, with an essay on Theophilus Shepstone, known locally as Somtsewu ("Father of Whiteness") and a key founder of the British system of indirect rule through his administrative measures in Natal during the nineteenth century. McClendon proposes that the African role in the initial creation of this system has been underestimated, thus offering the tantalizing suggestion that scholars have wholly misplaced the foundational role that chiefs and other Africans in Natal played in the definition of a system of rule that would eventually encompass much of Africa.

Two essays on the twentieth century follow, closing what I would call the first half of the volume. Aran MacKinnon, focusing again on Natal, provides an insightful case study of state intervention and its failure vis-à-vis policies of environmental "betterment" and their deployment through local chiefs. The variables involved were such that policy was just as dependent on luck as it was on power, at least during the 1930s and 1940s. Ivan Evans, in sharp contrast to the other contributions, concentrates on the inner workings of the South African state itself, particularly the bureaucratic transition from segregation to apartheid, thereby summarizing work from his larger monograph on the Department of Native Affairs to discuss the differences and institutional contradictions that took hold during the 1950s.

The last three essays are the best in the collection, in large part because they best illustrate the central argument of the volume. Timothy Lane's piece stands out among them. Interestingly and perhaps tellingly, the other two are by anthropologists, Deborah Durham and Eric Worby. Moving fluidly from chiefdom to household to courtroom, Lane's chapter succeeds by drawing causal connections between state intervention, the personal...