60 years after the UN Convention - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

contextualising violence in colonial africa 67
essence, all normative developmental designs discussed here, whether
hypothetical or actual policy, implicated the state in particular mechanisms
of what one could term the ‘outsourcing’ of control for the
sake of national economic management. Transitive control provided
support for structural power. This could involve the quest to infl uence
production, tariff s and duties, and access to particular raw materials
for national currency; or the attempt to usher in a new global
order, such as in Amery’s conceptions of an imperial world order or
in Gini’s organicism. The eff ectiveness of control in terms of its function
often connected closely to the choice of means. The threshold
for the use of coercion and the acceptance of violence was arguably
lower in colonies than within a defi ned national core polity. The interference
in production methods, manipulation of tax and labour
was not governed to the same extent by national politics, and the use
of force, controversial as it was in some cases, was also of little political
consequence, at least as long as war did not undermine the imperial
state itself.
The quest for extra-economic control did not necessarily lead to confrontation,
though. Neither was control necessarily feasible. But it
was not neutral either. The frantic debates about the need for colonies
in some countries, especially Italy, Portugal, Germany (and outside
Europe, Japan), was stirred up under concrete global conditions and
constraints to economic management (Rimmer 1979). The African
grass could get trampled as a result of disputes between industrial and
(re)industrialising states over means to protect structural power or to
secure alternative control mechanism. Conversely, one could also argue
that the relatively casual approach in British politics to colonial
Africa in the interwar period, which stood in sharp contrast to the
late 1890s, was, among others, due to the realisation that vast areas
of the existing African empire were unfi t for a key economic support
role and that in specifi c areas control could be enforced if needed.
Historical constellations such as these projected patterns of distinct,
generative or isomorphic, incipient situations of confl ict onto colonial
Africa. The relevant lineages cut across the habitual taxonomy
of confl ict in textbooks of colonial Africa. To be sure, terms such as
anti-colonial resistance, millenarian and messianic protest, rural and
urban social protest action, colonial war, civil war, are all pertinent
characterisations of confl ict. But studying the articulation of confl ict
is not the same as fathoming its contextual dynamics. In disaggregating
the dynamics of state agency from the specifi c perspective of national
development, the aim here was to show how assumptions connected
to lineages that were distinct and varied in context.