60 years after the UN Convention - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

contextualising violence in colonial africa 59
One can fathom lineages of confl ict, fi nally, at this complex nexus
between imperial doctrines, colonial agency, and shifting material
subtexts in African locations. As practices of colonial rule were set
in train, direct confrontations occurred over methods of commodity
production and land, of which the most telling examples include
the controversies over colonial law and land rights in the British settler
territories Kenya and Rhodesia (Chanock 1998: chs 1, 2, and pp.
230-233). But, indirectly too, socio-economic processes triggered resistance
and engendered poverty and ‘silent’ violence. In the 1930s,
under conditions of low raw material prices, taxation lost its previous
role in controlling labour. Fiscal revenues instead became more
important in securing the self-fi nancing of the colonial state, which
had a devastating impact on livelihoods in some regions, notably in
French colonial Africa, and prompted tax rebellions (Martin 1989:
81-82). In this connection, one also ought to bear in mind the wellknown
argument regarding rural Kenya and the Mau Mau rebellion
(Bates 1989: ch.1, Throup 1987, Anderson and Throup 1989). Suffi ce
to say that the argument holds that Mau Mau was a civil war that had
its origins in rural socio-economic transformation during the depression
(Cowen 1972). The role of residential labour in the Highlands
diminished as the settler economy diversifi ed, while the colonial state
boosted smallholder production in Central Province, which had previously
been seen as rivalling settler producers (Kanogo 1987: 59-68).
Some Kikuyu found niches in the colonial economy and were able to
secure land as property. Other segments of Kikuyu society, especially
the squatters evicted from the Highlands, were becoming marginalised.
Colonial agency, as social change generally with regard to the
reordering of political authority (Bates 1990), engaged complex social
processes, and thus potentially instigated civil strive. These processes
do not fi gure as variables in any of the relevant European doctrines,
however. In these conceptions Africa was a clean slate.
Confl ict as contextual and contingent
Examining them through the lens of national development, one can
argue that the pertinent doctrines spawned generic distinctions regarding
the origins of violence. In the simplest terms, normative
agency was defi ned by the respective ideatic and epistemological constructions
of modernity in a nation state framework. Confl ict was also
engendered structurally according to specifi c priorities and boundaries
of colonial rule. But the analysis seems to suggests, too, that the
issues relevant to lineages of confl ict engaged the existing realities of
political organisation and social and economic conditions in a concrete
local, imperial and global environment. Meanwhile, the precise