Colonial Service Research Articles

The Languages of Landscape

In The Languages of Landscape, Mark Roskill employs a new approach to understanding Western landscape art, from antiquity to the present, by linking the concerns of its creators to the ways in which such art was viewed in successive periods or contexts. Roskill uses new methodologies deriving from sociology, anthropology, the study of rhetorical theory, and especially a version of visual semiotics for this analysis. The discussion covers artists not usually associated with landscape, such as Goya and Gericault, as well as major figures such as Bruegel and Durer. Roskill ranges over topics of current interest such as the gendering of art; art in the service of colonialism; popularized uses of landscape; and the imagery of war-scarred countryside. He addresses issues of intertextuality; audience awareness; response to social and industrial developments; the tropologies of rhetoric as they apply to visual imagery; and the problematic status of landscape art in this century. Thematically organized within a loosely chronological framework, The Languages of Landscape combines detailed analysis of specific examples with supporting material, related texts of the time, and a larger theoretical exposition. At the same time it serves as a reference work on basic topics such as the rise of independent landscape and the picturesque and the sublime. Eighty illustrations, including twelve in color, accompany the text, and an appended glossary of technical and linguistic terms is provided.

Independence in Kenya and the lost opportunity to build a people orientated library service

The article examines a report by an expatriate librarian on the library scene in East Africa in the 1950s and 1960s. According to the author, the report misses the climate of change that was sweeping East Africa at the time. The author provides an alternative interpretation of the struggle for a relevant information service in Kenya, linking it with the political and social struggles. He asserts that the opportunity for making fundamental changes was lost. Instead of challenging the basis on which library services were built, information workers allowed themselves to be manipulated into making cosmetic changes. The classes which were served by the colonial library service continued to be served after independence. The experiences, the cultures, the very language of working people remained outside the walls of library buildings. The struggle for an information system which serves the needs of all continues today. The author urges information workers not to isolate themselves from the broader social struggles taking place in their societies.

Primary Health Care initiatives in colonial Kenya

Most contemporary development practitioners have only passing familiarity with development strategies employed by their predecessors, especially for programs that occurred during colonial periods. An examination of the colonial medical system of Kenya reveals that many of the strategies now employed in Primary Health Care programs were preceded by comparable programs administered by the colonial medical authorities. The colonial system did not include universal or egalitarian access to health care, nor were the programs ever adequate to remedy many of the major threats to health, but the lessons derived from a careful review of this period validate the appropriateness of many Primary Health Care approaches now promoted. In particular, the emphasis on decentralized, preventive medical services, the use of comprehensive immunization programs, concerted efforts at improvements in sanitation, and promotion of health education were important components of the colonial medical services, that effected positive changes in the health of indigenous populations. Examination of specific colonial programs should inform contemporary Primary Health Care policies.

‘For better or for verse’: A Colonial Service retrieval project

I have been invited to talk about a Colonial Service (CS) retrieval project undertaken with the anointment of John Pinfold at Rhodes House Library and the blessing of Terry Barringer of the Royal Commonwealth Society Library (despite her emigration lock, stock and barrel to Cambridge). I launched it in October 1996 in the pages of the Overseas pensioner (giving me immediate access to some 5,000 readers). The collection closed in March 1998.

The Indochinese Communist Party and the Nam Ky Uprising in Cochin China, November–December 1940

This paper examines the causes, course, and consequences of the Nam Ky uprising in Cochin China in the final weeks of 1940. It argues that weakening French power both in Europe and in Indochina – the surrender to Germany in June 1940, compromise with the Japanese military in September 1940, and confrontation with the Thais over Cambodia during October and November – convinced the Indochinese Communist Party that the time was ripe for an insurrection. But the rising failed to materialize in Saigon, and was soon defeated in the rural areas. The principal reasons for these failures were that the communists had insufficient men and arms and that the colonial police and security services had broken into the party's communications networks. In the repression which followed the uprising, the party in the south lost its leadership – through execution and imprisonment – and its networks were virtually destroyed. As a result, the regional balance of support and leadership within the Indochinese Communist Party shifted decisively towards the north.

The location of Colonial Staff and Civil Service Lists in British libraries: a preliminary checklist

In an extensive survey of the published sources available for research into the biographical data of members of the British Colonial Service and its successor (1954), HM Overseas Civil Service (‘Colonial Service biographical data: the published sources’, ARD 46, 1988, 1-16), I identified five principal serial publications beyond such general but limited reference works as Who was who. Dictionary of national biography, The Times and Daily Telegraph obituaries, and my Biographical dictionary of the British colonial governor: 1, Africa (1980). These were:i.The Colonial Office Lists, 1862-1966ii.The Colonial Service Lists, 1933-1939iii.Territorial Staff Listsiv.Territorial Civil Service Listsv.Colonial Blue Books

THE 1913 MEMORIAL: A STUDY OF PROTEST AND DISCORD AMONG THE BRITISH POLITICAL OFFICERS IN NORTHERN NIGERIA

This study focuses on the protest, discord and dissatisfaction among the .. priviledged British Political Officers. in Northern Nigeria. Hitherto, it has been assumed that protest and discord were phenomena associated with the oppressed and deprived African people. In most of the published works on the British administrative history in Nigeria, enough light has been shed on the wide gap that existed between the British and the African staff in tenns of remuneration. housing and medical care (Nicolson. 1969; 90-150). However the problems faced by the British Political Officers especially in Northern Nigeria remain a neglected theme. Like the Nigerian staif, they were not entirely pleased with their conditions of service. In many instances. they were biller '.Vith the cold attitude of the Colonial Office to their problems. They also detested some obnoxious colonial regulations and often found the policy and style of the Northern political leadership unpalatable and cumbersome. In spite of stiff sanctions against erring political officers, entrenched in the British colonial civil service general order, many of them refused to remain silent over issues that ran counter to their interests.

Principals and Agents, Colonialists and Company Men: The Decay of Colonial Control in the Dutch East Indies

Patrimonial states and their chartered East India companies propelled the first wave of European colonialism in Asia during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The metropolitan principals of these organizations faced special problems in monitoring and controlling their own colonial agents. Focusing primarily on the Dutch United East Indies Company and secondarily on its English counterpart, I argue that the network structure of each organization affected the degree to which relationships between patrimonial principals and their agents could serve as a disciplinary device. Dutch decline was imminent when alternative opportunities for private gain, available via the ascending English East India Company, allowed Dutch colonial servants to evade their own patrimonial chain and encouraged its organizational breakdown. Features of network structure determined whether colonial agents saw better alternatives to the official patrimonial hierarchy, when they could act on them, and whether principals could respond.

Dams, Cows, and Vulnerable People: Anthropological Contributions to Sustainable Development (The Distinguishedl Lecture)

It is with considerable trepidation that I agreed to address so distinguished a gathering of development economists, theoreticians, and practitioners. I was enormously honoured when Professor Naqvi invited me to make this presentation, and at the same time impressed with my own temerity at having accepted. I am not an economist; at best, I contribute to the emerging discipline of economic anthropology, that subfield of anthropology that some have baptised as the “dismal science of the 20th century.” I locate my research within a subfield of that subfield, in a specifically development anthropology, making the claim that is still received in some quarters with only partial tolerance, that anthropologists–those curious people identified in the popular mind with the recovery and study of isolated people, bones, and potsherds–have also something useful to add to both the theory and praxis of development. As a self-conscious field of inquiry, development anthropology dates only from the last 20-25 years, though its roots can be found in the late 19th century, when scientists working for the United States Bureau of American Ethnology tried to understand the Ghost Dance, a great messianic movement that spread rapidly among subjugated Native Americans who were forced on to reservations by the government and in very large part deprived of the means of social and economic reproduction [Mooney (1965)]. Especially in Britain, a policy-relevant anthropology emerged in conjunction with its colonial service [Asad (1973)], and during the 1940s, some of the most prominent American anthropologists–including Margaret Mead, Geoffrey Gorer, Ruth Benedict, Robert Lowie, Alexander Leighton, and Conrad Arensberg–tried to apply an anthropology that had traditionally focused on tribal and peasant populations to the understanding of our Russian allies and our German and Japanese adversaries during the Second World War.

The French Colonial Service and the Issues of Reform, 1944–8

The problems of decolonisation in post-Second World War France have attracted renewed attention in recent years. A new generation of historians and political scientists has focused on why it was so difficult for the country's political and intellectual élites to accept the end of empire. This attention to the subjectivity of policy and opinion-makers has added a novel dimension to understanding how and why the end of the colonial era occurred with such difficulty and bloodshed for the French. This new orientation has largely displaced the old ‘Gaullist’ explanation for the failing of France's post-war regime, the Fourth Republic, in colonial policy. The older notion, articulated by General Charles de Gaulle himself during his twelve-year exile from political power between 1946 and 1958, blamed the unstable parliamentary coalitions and governing political parties of the era for the series of crises and disasters in colonial policy faced by a deeply fractured legislative regime. The rapid rise and fall of governments, the turnover of ministers, the constant governmental disputes on a range of questions, it was alleged, was the cause of inconsistent and weak policies incapable of meeting the succession of crises. The newer research, however, has demonstrated that the institutional problems of the Fourth Republic were not the key issue and that the essential problem lay with an inability of élites to recognise, accept and adapt to decolonisation worldwide. It has been shown that, far from having inconsistent or weak policies, the governing cadres of the Fourth Republic shared fundamentally similar concepts and goals in their determination to maintain the integrity of the French Empire. Yet this same historiography has focused on the political parties, pressure groups and shifting political landscape of French colonial policy while largely overlooking an important, though less obvious, player.

Legal Responses to State Corruption in Commonwealth Africa

Few countries in the world can claim to be free from corruption and none of these is to be found in Commonwealth Africa. Even though administrative incorruptibility was one of the boasts of the British colonial service, low-level corruption was common during the colonial period and indeed served to bolster the colonial system. Since African states obtained political independence, levels of corruption have markedly increased, regardless of official ideology or economic approach, and in many countries corruption is both pervasive and endemic. Changes of government are often accompanied and, in the case of military coups, justified by commitments to eradicate the corrupt practices that allegedly characterized the previous regime. Corruption is an obstacle to economic development and to political integration, and most African governments (cynically or not) avow the need to combat it. Pressure on governments to act has increased in recent years and comes from two sources. The emergence of pro-democracy forces has drawn large numbers of people into the arena of political debate and organization and this in turn has led to demands for openness and accountability on the part of government. Moreover, foreign donors and international financial institutions are today less willing to condone corrupt practices on the part of African governments. They stress the importance of good governance and accountability and the need to link economic reconstruction with institutional reform.

W.A.A.V.P. and Pfizer award for excellence in research in veterinary parasitology. Veterinary helminthology 1954–1993: a personal view of four decades of research

I have been involved with veterinary parasitology and in particular veterinary helminthology for close on four decades. At the request of the President of the World Association for the Advancement of Veterinary Parasitology, Dr Owen Slocombe, I have been asked to reflect on seminal research achievements during that period with emphasis where appropriate to my own work. By way of a preamble I will start by describing how I came into veterinary parasitology. As a young veterinarian I had joined the British Colonial Service in 1953 and was posted to the Veterinary Research Station at Vom, Nigeria. Although my remit was to work in the general area of animal production I soon recognised that apart from major scourges such as rinderpest, the biggest problems affecting animal production were parasitic infections and nutrition and the interaction between these. A vacancy occurred in the Parasitology Division of the Department of Animal Production and I joined the team led by Professor Rob Lee and Dr John Ross, both of whom are distinguished veterinary helminthologists; they were my mentors and my friends. Our laboratory concentrated on helminthology while another on the same station dealt with entomology and blood protozoa. I now propose to provide a personal view of research in veterinary helminthology over the past four decades, i.e. 1954-1993.

Oddi: the paradox of the man and the sphincter.

Ruggero Oddi was born of a modest family in the small town of Perugia, Italy, in 1866. While still a young medical student, he identified the sphincter and in addition characterized its physiological properties. At the early age of 29 years, he was appointed as the director of the Physiological Institute at Genoa, but a dalliance with drugs and fiscal improprieties resulted in his being relieved of this eminent position in Italian Physiology. He subsequently sought employment as a physician in the Belgian colonial medical service and briefly spent time in the Congo. The deterioration of his physical status and his use of Vitaline, a homeopathic preparation, led to the demise of his medical career. For reasons that are unclear, he then traveled to Africa where he died in Tunisia. In the last 50 years, the use of sophisticated methodology has allowed delineation of aspects of the neural and hormonal regulatory mechanisms of the sphincter. Its exact role in disease has not been determined, although its relationship to the putative entity of biliary dyskinesia has been suggested. The paradox of both the sphincter and its original discoverer remain to be resolved.

Domestic realities and imperial fictions: Jane Austen's novels in eighteenth-century contexts

The author contends that the sphere of domesticity associated with women during the late-18th century was constructed alongside - and in complex relation to - the changing socio-economic conditions of England as a whole. At the centre of the change was the British drive towards an empire. The book's double focus on home and empire illuminates the various ways in which imperialisn penetrated the daily lives of women. These were deceptively represented as remaining largely untouched by England's overseas trading, its conquest of India, and the cultivation of West Indian slave plantations. At the same time, the imperial enterprise challenged the social and ethical systems of the gentry. Stewart's point of entry to this material is a central theme found in the novels of Jane Austen: the struggle for mastery between the older son who inherits the traditional estate, and the younger sons who enter various colonial services, gain wealth, and return to contest the supremacy of the older brother. It is argued that this contest transforms the traditional, paternal country house into a maternal domestic space. Consequently, domesticity is revealed as a compensatory realm, a world of denials and false appearances, where imperial domination may be symbolically transformed. By placing the ideologically-charged domestic scene in the larger context of British imperialism, Stewart attempts to show how the construction of female subjectivity and female virtue functioned as both an antidote to, and a mask for, colonial aggression. Stewart's approach - post-structuralist, post-colonial and intertextual - calls for a revisionary reading of Austen's novels. The models she offers may also be used to re-read other texts, inviting fresh examination of the dominant cultural discourses at the beginning of modernity.

Angels in Africa: A Memoir of Nursing with the Colonial Service

Angels in Africa: A Memoir of Nursing with the Colonial Service

THE GEOGRAPHY OF POST‐COLONIAL AFRICA: SPACE, PLACE AND DEVELOPMENT IN SUB‐SAHARAN AFRICA (1960–93)1

ABSTRACTThis overview of human geographic studies of sub Saharan Africa begins with the contributions made by West European geographers to the colonial service, and the growing interest in post‐war ‘development’ and to the anti‐imperial movements in the late colonial period (1945–60). The paper provides an intellectual map of the contributions by European and African geographers to the broad array of development problems which emerged after 1960. North American geographers made significant contributions to the debate somewhat later, particularly in association with the growing involvement of U.S. development agencies in the 1970s. Particular emphasis is given to geographic studies in fields such as agrarian change, ecological degradation, industrialization, human mobility and patterns of urbanization and settlement.

The Medical Factor in Christian Conversion in Africa: Observations from Southeastern Nigeria

This article discusses missionary recruitment strategies from the perspective of missionary medical work in southeastern Nigeria. In other words, it examines missionary use of medical services as the bait to catch converts. Furthermore, the essay discusses the link between disease, missionary medicine, and Christian conversion. Attention is given to the role of culture in the conversion process, as well as to the impact of missionary and colonial medical services on African health care systems. The study is based largely on archival mission sources, including Catholic and Protestant archival materials collected from missionary societies in England, France, Rome, and Nigeria. Finally, it looks at the Catholic and Protestant struggle for dominance via the provision of medical services, and the persistence of traditional African health care systems despite missionary and colonial iconoclastic tendencies.

A biographical dictionary of the British Colonial Service, 1939-1966

A biographical dictionary of the British Colonial Service, 1939-1966

Forging a relationship with the colonial administrative service, 1921–1939

Forging a relationship with the colonial administrative service, 1921–1939

The Embodiment of Paradox: Yoruba Kingship and Female Power

When E. E. Evans-Pritchard published Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande in 1937, the anthropology of primitive thought learned that African notions of mystical agencies were complex, coherent, and logically consistent. In his detailed descriptions of poison ordeals, divination techniques, and native explanations of misfortune, the founder of Oxford anthropology related the conceptual premises of Zande witchcraft beliefs to the social situations in which they made sense. Such an approach seems quite conventional today, but placed against the conventional wisdom of his contemporaries, and of the Colonial Service that financed his research, Evans-Pritchard's impact was near revolutionary. Ideas that Africans possessed prelogical mentalities, that they thought with their emotions instead of their minds, were conclusively refuted by diligent ethnography. The conceptual principles of Zande witchcraft beliefs revealed an indigenous logic of social accountability (Douglas 1980:48-50). The dark continent was suddenly illuminated by the light of indigenous reason. Evans-Pritchard's now classic text inspired many studies of African modes of thought. By 1954, during the twilight of British colonialism, Daryll Forde could officially proclaim that in the same way as Europeans, have appreciated and successfully based their routines of living on principles of causation linking events, on the implications of ideas, and on an understanding of mechanical and organic process (1954:xi), and that Gods, spirits, and magical forces beyond the community, together with witches and sorcerers within it, are postulated in explanation of the workings of the universe . (1954:x). In their efforts to understand African worlds, British anthropologists applied the same standards to cosmology that their functionalism applied to social structure and action. If African societies possessed systematic coherence, maintaining equilibrium through reciprocal obligations and structures of authority, so did their systems of knowledge and belief. A new translation instrument emerged in the analysis of mystical agencies-the idea of social value (Forde 1954:xiii; RadcliffeBrown 1952:199-200). African ideas, based on whatever bizarre assumptions, might make sense to Africans, but their real meaning and necessity, ascertained by the social anthropologist, was their capacity to organize cohesive social groups. African thought was rational and coherent just in case it supported the social order.'