Colonial States and Civic Virtues in Africa: Essays in Honor of John Lonsdale

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

This special issue began as attempt to take up John Lonsdale's ideas about civic virtue-ideas put forward as he began to write about the political ideas behind Kenya's Mau Mau rebellion of the 1950s-in order to problematize ideas about civil society that planners and developers wanted to implant in Africa.1 The civic virtue of African communities was the generosity that adult men bestowed on their sons after years of those sons' loyalty and hard work: membership in a community, ethnic or imperial, colonial or postcolonial, was earned by labor that was often set by one generation and performed by another. In contrast civil society, John and Jean Comaroff observe, is an all-purpose placeholder that had little to do with vernacular cultures. It was a term intended to capture popular aspirations and moral concerns, but one that remained so inchoate and polymorphous that it had a broad international appeal.2 In practice, according to William Reno, civil societies were not necessarily what the donor community imagined; civil society could and did consist of loose associations of the same independent entrepreneurs who are called warlords by local people and foreign observers.3 In the two years-at least!-this journal issue has been in the works, hardly anyone was heard to preach civil society. The term may have been a casualty of war, and it may have been a casualty of its own generalization; in any case it seemed less worthy of attack than the concept of civic virtue seemed worthy of elaboration. Indeed, the authors presented here seem to have agreed with me. They have forcefully argued-in different ways and for different places-that African participation in cultural and political groupings was based on active and articulate ideas about power, about authority, and about responsibility: the local practices of civic virtues in Africa took place in many of the sites planners and developers had wanted to make into civil society. The articles here follow John Lonsdale's lead and argue that in Africa, ethnic groups in particular offered a forum for intense debate about the workings of culture and power, about marriage and inheritance and all the customs that shaped adult responsibilities. These articles all insist that no one stopped debating the meaning of adulthood and its responsibilities because they began to live in states (colonial or postcolonial) or empires (colonial or postcolonial). The relations between those who demanded the right to debate and the polities in which they lived were never easy in twentieth-century Africa, but the small spaces and contingent situations in which debates took place quickly became arenas in which local people contested new notions of civilization and citizenship, and argued about loyalties and responsibilities framed in terms of nations. The articles here depict the spaces, the situations, and the contests. This issue has three articles by former students, one by his co-author of many years, and one by a young scholar who has been greatly encouraged by John. All of us have benefited from the care, the conversation, the comments he has given us, and his exceptional generosity with time, with materials, and with ideas -as have a good proportion of the people reading this introduction-but all of us wrote to address John's work specifically, to show how important and useful his contributions have been, in some cases, and to push some of those contributions further, deeper into the fractures and complications in Kikuyu politics, and further south in Africa. What has inspired us here is not, I think, any particular loyalty to our degree program, or to the time John has given us, but to a vision of historical enquiry, to why we do this in the first place: that we need to honor, and pay homage to, the events we study; we need to understand them, of course, but also contextualize them to get some sort of handle on why Africa is the way it is, and how it could be made even a tiny bit different with a new apprehension of the past. …