Postcolonial Authorities Research Articles

The Missing Pictures: Southern European Catholic Missionaries, Humanitarian Photography and the Fall of the Portuguese Empire in Mozambique

This article contributes to two sets of growing historiographies: one on the role of religious actors in the fall of European Empires; and another one on humanitarian photography. The article’s focus is on the visual campaign organised by a network of Southern European Catholic missionaries to denounce colonial massacres during the war of independence in Mozambique. Whereas the written reports made by the missionaries have been the object of lengthy research, the paper reveals the very specific use the missionaries made of humanitarian photography in a context characterized by the Estado Novo’s fierce censorship. Despite the missionaries’ atrocity pictures failed to persuade the Church hierarchy to publicly condemn the Portuguese crimes, the paper demonstrates how the leap of their images into the public domain had a major rhetorical and symbolic role both in facilitating the fall of the Portuguese Empire and in legitimising FRELIMO’s postcolonial authority. Moreover, given the concurrence of the denunciation campaign with the fall of fascism in Portugal and the global boom of the Human Rights movement in the 1970s, the paper also explores the particularities of the entangled history of decolonisation, humanitarianism and human rights when seen through the eyes of Southern European actors.

Keta Lagoon: Uncovering Suppressed Heritage Practices for Sustainable Wetland Management

Current efforts to integrate heritage practices in the sustainable management of wetlands in postcolonial nation-states assume that these practices have always existed in the forms they are now. The colonial order, whether deliberately or otherwise, suppressed many local traditional practices. The postcolonial authority’s adoption of Western science invariably continued the suppression, albeit in a more liberal form. In the Ramsar Convention, natural scientists were assigned the role of conserving wetlands ‘‘for the benefit of humankind in a way compatible with the maintenance of natural properties of the ecosystem.’’ This became known as the wise use principle. This article highlights the history of the Keta wetlands and proposes an integration of key knowledge holders into management plans for a wise use of wetlands in postcolonial states. The colonial and postcolonial regimes made the knowledge holders invisible. Modern imaginaries – Western legal institutions, Western science and Christianity – were privileged over local heritage practices. It therefore requires historical and heritage expertise to uncover local sustainable knowledge for integration into the Ramsar management plan, hence a wise use of wetlands in postcolonial states.

Evolution of Colonial Towns and Factors Influencing Toponymic Practices in Germano-Anglo Cameroon

The study examines Germano-Anglo colonial towns in Cameroon to determine factors accounting for the scarcity of infrastructure as well as streets and places with Eurocentric names. Using primary and secondary data, it demonstrates that the lack of infrastructure in the polity is a function of negligence by colonial and post-colonial authorities. With few pieces of public infrastructure, the authorities have had few streets and places to attribute names from Eurocentric lexical dictionaries. These findings contribute to knowledge of the relative impact of endogenous and exogenous factors on toponymic traditions as well as inter-country differentials in African countries’ development profiles.

The Aesthetics of Sand: Reclaiming Hong Kong’s Unsettled Grounds

Sand is a key material foundation of modern cities. In Hong Kong, a city founded in British mercantile imperialism, the extraction of sand needed for construction and reclamation projects has always been tied up with violent dispossession. Experimenting with the forms and poetics of postcolonial and new materialist critical theory, and thinking with sand’s distinctive materialities and forms of drift, this paper develops a speculative critique of Hong Kong’s sandy infrastructure. Hong Kong’s colonial and post-colonial authority is legitimized by a continual process of surfacing and resurfacing, claiming and reclaiming. By evoking the process of saltation, one of sand’s distinctive mechanisms of movement, the paper uncovers utopian potential in sand’s unsettled qualities, searching for a new ethics of ground-down grounds.

Indigenizing the Cold War in Malaysia and Singapore: Interethnic Decolonization, Developmental Syntheses and the Quest for Sovereignty

While local Marxist and neo-Marxist parties attempted to synchronize their revolutionary struggles with the centers of world communism during the period 1945–1991, political currents on the ground in Malaysia and Singapore were pushing for the establishment of postcolonial authority, social peace, and economic prosperity. The Cold War struggle between 'communism' and 'democratic capitalism' was highly refracted, even distorted, on the ground in these two Southeast Asian countries. This refraction was largely manifested in the struggles by nationalists of all ideological stripes to achieve a multiracial society through interethnic decolonization under the banner of waging 'class warfare' against colonial authority. For many anti-colonial political parties, siding with or joining leftist movements was a façade for revolutionary agendas that were not necessarily Marxist-Leninist in orientation. Secondly, the biographies and civil society narratives of contending political figures of the time suggest that they were less inclined to define their thinking about development along Cold War ideological orthodoxy than to defy the latter to make things work for prosperity. Finally, the successor elites who took the place of the colonial rulers were consistently obsessed with burnishing sovereignty in spite of the international Cold War. This can be seen in their slippery practice of nonalignment in foreign policy. The Malaysian and Singaporean cases strongly present the thesis of indigenization of the Cold War for local purposes.

Dimming the Seas around Borneo: Contesting Island Sovereignty and Lighthouse Administration amidst the End of Empire, 1946–1948

AbstractThis article examines issues of island sovereignty and lighthouse administration in maritime Southeast Asia in the context of post-war decolonisation. It does so by demonstrating how lax and complacent colonial governance in British North Borneo led to the construction of a lighthouse on contested island territory. By the late 1940s these islands became the focal point of a regional dispute between the Philippines, North Borneo's colonial government, and the United Kingdom. While lighthouses were, in the colonial mind-set, deemed essential for illuminating the coasts and projecting order onto the seas, the Philippine government sought to renege on colonial-era obligations and wrest a new sense of post-colonial legitimacy.The legacy of the Turtle Island transfer was therefore significant in recalibrating imperial lighting in the Sulu Sea, as well as giving rise to a Philippine post-colonial authority that was characterised by an acknowledgement of indigenous Suluk maritime heritage. Similarly, it reflected an extension of previous instances of transnational disputes in the region, where the island shoal had been simultaneously claimed and administered by the United States, the United Kingdom and the historical Sulu Sultanate. While the lighthouse remained destroyed, and the seas dimmed, by mid-1948 the Turtle Islands had attained a new post-colonial and transnational status. Utilising a range of archival sources, memoirs and published material, this article sheds light on an under-examined period of Southeast Asian history.

Evicting heritage: spatial cleansing and cultural legacy at the Hampi UNESCO site in India

ABSTRACT The Indian village of Hampi, site of a medieval Hindu Empire that is now a United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage Site, was until recently inhabited by a vibrant community of farmers-turned-small entrepreneurs reliant on tourism. However, since 2011 the village has been undergoing spatial cleansing resulting in the eviction of people and the demolition of their homes and businesses. The residents, portrayed in the official discourse as “illegal encroachers” and a threat to monuments, have been subjected to power relations imposed on them by postcolonial authorities guided by a hegemonic approach to material heritage. This paper analyzes what has happened at Hampi through a theoretical framework of the anthropology of colonial legacies as an effect of mimicry. It also demonstrates how villagers have countered the state claim of Hampi as an outdoor museum with the concept of living heritage. However, perceived by authorities as neither native nor traditional enough, they have failed to win claims to this heritage site.

Toponymic Inscription as an Instrument of Power in Africa: The case of colonial and post-colonial Dakar and Nairobi

This study analyses toponymic inscription, the exercise of street/place naming, as a tool for articulating power in Anglophone and Francophone Africa. The focus is on Dakar, Senegal and Nairobi, Kenya, which were respectively indispensable for the colonial projects of France and Britain in Africa. Dakar was for France’s West African Federation what Nairobi was for Britain’s colonial East Africa. It is shown that toponymic inscription was used with equal zeal by French and British colonial authorities to express power in built space. Thus, both authorities used the occasion to christen streets and places as an opportunity to project Western power in Africa. With the demise of colonialism, indigenous authorities in Kenya inherited the Western vocabulary of spatiality but speedily moved to supplant Eurocentric with Afrocentric street/place-names. In contrast, post-colonial authorities in Senegal remain wedded to the colonial tradition of drawing most important street- and place-names from the Eurocentric cultural lexicon. Consequently, although the vocabulary of spatiality in Nairobi projects African nationalism and power, that of Dakar continues to express mainly Western power.

“No Each, No Other”: Narrative Hybridity and Collective Action in Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things

The writing of Estha and Rahel's relationship in Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things (2007), where there is “No Each, No Other,” proposes an understanding of human being that is based on interconnection, an ethical stance that aligns with Gayatri Spivak's notion of being “planetary” and Dipesh Chakrabarty's notion of being “futural,” both of which challenge the totalizing logic of national historicism and global capitalism. While the dramatic action centers upon children, gender politics, and local governance, we will show that the greater political narrative of state and national power as well as the presence, position, and rights of hierarchical minorities occupy a central space to record postcolonial authority and challenge reactive ideals of postcolonial democracy in an increasingly globalized world.

The Tywerrenge as an Artefact of Rule: The (Post) Colonial Life of a Secret/Sacred Aboriginal Object

In this article, I examine an Aboriginal ritual object, the secret/sacred tywerrenge which in many respects lies at the heart of Central Australian Aboriginal religious belief. Given its ritual power, the tywerrenge has always held a special place in the administrative rationalities of both colonial and post-colonial authorities. For certain missionaries, the tywerrenge was seen as an object to be eliminated as it constituted an impediment to Aboriginal “salvation”. For early anthropologists such as Baldwin Spencer, they offered material evidence supporting social evolutionist theories regarding the “staged” transformation of “primitive” religious beliefs into science. More recently, tywerrenge have been subject to an intensive regime of inspection and evaluation by government authorities, museums, and land councils. Indeed, they have come to play a significant role in the enforcement of Australian law under the Aboriginal Land Rights Act since the possession of a tywerrenge can decide the ownership of traditional lands. In short, these religious objects—and the beliefs associated with them—have been co-opted and employed by a variety of authorities in order to achieve a range of governmental ends. In this sense, tywerrenge have been transformed into instruments of colonial and post-colonial rule.

HISTORY - Andrew Burton and Hélène Charton-Bigot, eds. Generations Past: Youth in East African History.Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010. vii + 301pp. Maps. Contributors. Index. $29.95. Paper.

HISTORY Andrew Burton and Helene Charton-Bigot, eds. Generations Past: Youth in East African History. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010. vii + 301 pp. Maps. Contributors. Index. $29.95. Paper.Originating at Kenyan conference in 2006, this collection examines youth and generation in East Africa (i.e., Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania) in historical perspective with nuanced insights drawn from anthropology. A well-argued introduction by Andrew Burton and Thomas Burgess leads to twelve chapters mostly by leading social historians trained in North American and British universities, whose seminal research is reflected here. Although these scholars have tackled some of the topics elsewhere, they are indeed essential to the volume's cumulative argument. One co-editor, who contributed chapter, is French historian; only two contributors-in literature and in religious studies-are from East Africa (Kenya).Drawing on extensive evidence (secondary works, state and missionary archives, oral sources, pamphlets, explorers' accounts, Swahili and English newspapers), the collection concentrates primarily on the twentieth century, with the first two chapters examining the precolonial period. This asymmetry might be explained by the lacunae of extant sources and by the scant studies of the earlier period, or it may stem from the book's thesis that colonialism engendered unprecedented tensions in generational relations in Africa, when adulthood had to be negotiated in new ways.The introduction sets the book's intellectual agenda in three key themes: the deep socioeconomic and political changes of the nineteenth century; the attempts by elders, colonial officials (often overlapping), and postcolonial authorities to control youth over the longue duree (18); and the methodology of studying youth and generation in Africa-is youth primary or secondary identity? is it homogeneous term? Although hardly straightforward and unproblematically defined grouping, youth is seen to be discrete social category that emerged mostly in the twentieth century. Besides being culturally specific, the notion of youth varies depending on the historical circumstances: when society experiences social crisis, new ideas of childhood and adolescence emerge.The shifting category of generation-which scholars should examine because it matters in African cultures-has long governed relations in the continent, where it has served to explain social and regulate customs (19). Gerontocracy and patriarchy served to maintain social order in Africa, where complex systems of obligations, submission, and sacrifice were used by seniors to exercise control over social subordinates. Although local differences make generalizations difficult, it is largely true that marriage in most agrarian societies afforded young man social advancement through access to women and reproduction. Generational tensions, then, resulted from changing expectations among youth regarding their obligations and responsibilities (18).Seen as marking turning point in relations between youth and elders, colonialism had significant repercussions for local ways of thinking about the generations. And yet colonialism notwithstanding, considerable continuities with the past and the resilience of local modes of thought persisted, particularly in rural areas where youth remained largely dependent on and deferential to elders.In the first chapter, Richard Reid shows that in the interlacustrine regions of Uganda and northern Tanzania the institutionalized exercise of violence and participation in war-often a young man's game- marked key moments of transition to adulthood amid the rapid changes of the nineteenth century. Across the region aggressive male youth were revolutionaries hubristically challenging the status quo, but without completely rejecting the existing social structure. Their recruitment of boys-at once victims and perpetrators of violence-is reminiscent of the seemingly recent phenomenon of child soldiers. …

Incarceration of chiefs: A colonial and post-colonial tool for the destruction of the sanctity of the chieftaincy institution in Ghana?

Using predominantly primary historical documents, supplemented by the appropriate secondary historical records, this paper examines political detention or the incarceration of chiefs as a measure or a tool employed by both colonial and post-colonial authorities to weaken and to eventually destroy the chieftaincy institution in Ghana. The paper evaluates the circumstances leading to the arrest and detention of the chiefs who suffered such fate. It analyses the socio-cultural impact of such detentions on the paramountcies affected and on the institution of chieftaincy in Ghana as a whole. Based on the findings of the study, the paper concludes that under both colonial and the immediate post-colonial eras, a big blow was dealt to the institution of chieftaincy in Ghana which helped shrink the power and status of the institution in the country.

‘To understand lessons, think through your own languages.’ An analysis of narratives in support of the introduction of indigenous languages in the education system in Senegal

Senegal has a complex multilingual set-up where there is interaction between 25 distinct indigenous languages and French, the language of the former colonial power. Throughout colonial rule the French language was imposed and the indigenous languages were marginalised and stigmatised. When Senegal gained independence from France, the postcolonial authorities who took over power were not able to redress the situation and promote their own languages. As a result, more than half a century after independence, the national languages of Senegal are conspicuously absent from the education system. French continues to rule the entire education system: it is the only medium of instruction and is a compulsory school subject. However, pressures from within and outside the country have had favourable echoes and efforts have been undertaken by successive governments to raise the profile of the national languages, but these remain insignificant. This article reports on an analysis of personal narratives in support of mother-tongue education.

Between Markets and Hierarchies: Law and the Constituting of Postcolonial Authority in the ‘Imagined’ American Republic, 1820–1850. From Discourse to Discipline

In the aftermath of the American Revolution, leaders set about reconstituting political authority for a new world of self-rule. This paper explores the challenges they faced as they did so. This process of consolidating democratic transition in postcolonial America has recently assumed special relevance in light of the formative challenges faced by postcommunist societies, the European Union and post-conflict or divided societies experiencing unification and/or democratic transition today. This paper probes the practices and micro-processes through which authoritative postcolonial rule at the local level was established in America and set in motion. My claim is that ideas articulated in common law shaped the vision of postcolonial political authority that developed in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century America. In moving to create a justificatory vision of state action in the new republic, leaders drew on both the imagery of the rule of law and traditional arrangements of hierarchical household and community governance that had historically been elaborated in law. The courts, like political officials, had embraced social ordering as a prime concern.

(Re‐)Forming stereotypes: Modes of mimicry in Helon Habila’s Measuring Time

Chinua Achebe’s seminal work Things Fall Apart inaugurated the project of writing back to empire that many subsequent African writers have continued to develop, disrupting and destabilizing colonial texts. With his novel Measuring Time, Helon Habila enters the intertextual arena, recuperating images constructed through colonial discourse and turning them back on themselves, at the same time appropriating these colonial stereotypes and using parody and caricature in order to censure the excesses of postcolonial governing structures. Even as he defetishizes colonial authority, Habila reduces representatives of local authority to figures of fun, caricatures that unwittingly mimic colonial constructions of themselves. With the annual performance of “The Coming”, local women self‐consciously play colonial figures, thereby representing an assumption of ownership in which the actors “contain mimicry" in Graham Huggan’s words, appropriating and reconfiguring meaning to produce something outside of the exploitative practice of colonial and postcolonial authority. Unlike the aimless and disillusioned inquisitors of Soyinka’s novel The Interpreters, and perhaps more like Beatrice’s improvisational ritual at the conclusion of Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah, these “new interpreters” hold out some hope for change, however much it may be qualified by the novel’s pervasive mood of disillusionment.

Boundaries in Eastern Africa

Boundaries in Eastern Africa reflect intricate compromises by colonial and post-colonial authorities to stabilize human habitation within territorial spaces. Although creatures of human contrivances, these boundaries have evolved into natural formations that delimit the external reach of power and delineate citizenships. Over the years, the instability occasioned elsewhere in Africa by border conflicts has dissipated in Eastern Africa, lending some semblance of permanence to existing boundaries. By the same token, however, boundaries are always permeable and flexible, responsive to emerging needs and priorities.

ON POST-COLONIAL AUTHORITY, CARIBBEANNESS, REITERATION AND POLITICAL COMMUNITY

This paper is a dialogue with particular threads of Hall's work on racialized subjectification and the words and other practices of a single respondent. Framed by re-emergent notions of fixed, unchanging identities and bounded, homogeneous ‘secular’ and ‘religious’ cultures and communities embedded in contemporary political discourse on the ‘rights’ and ‘responsibilities’ and ‘core values’ of ‘Britain's citizens’, this paper considers how post-colonial authority is interiorized or incorporated and re-emerges and re-circulates in our daily practical life. It further considers Hall's theorizations of cultural identity with which to understand an internally heterogeneous, obedient and defiant subject composed of different, dissonant, potentially irreconcilable selves. The paper considers particular strands of Hall's work to develop our understandings of a subject who polices their own practice and protects the experiential effect of a self-governing, internally homogeneous and bounded self. It further considers contemporary formations of political community in a late modern, post-colonial, neo-liberal disciplinary social order.

Visualising postcolonial cultural politics in Algeria: from state cinema to cinéma d'auteur

Born in the underground of the War of National Liberation, Algerian cinema has followed, and been closely entwined with, the country's political evolution, for the better and for the worse. As subjective pieces of testimony about the nationalist struggle, the sequels to an atrocious war, Algerian films initially provided a well meaning accompaniment to the challenging steps being taken to build a more ‘just’, more ‘social’ society, but gradually came to be liberated from the monolithic thinking of the one-party state. Since the end of the 1960s, filmmakers have taken wing in various directions, dealing with multiple preoccupations at odds with the ‘correct’ aesthetics imposed by the FLN (National Front of Liberation), the single party that dominates the state. In the past, restrictions often reflected the colonial and postcolonial authorities' concerns about the influence of cinema on the colonised – then liberated – population. For several decades, the French colonial regime and authoritarian post-independence governments held back the development of indigenous cinema. This article attempts to show that making cinema in the context of this post-independence culture involves a search for images free of one-dimensional and often derogatory stereotypes. It surveys the defining moment of Algerian postcolonial cinema history.

“A Land Outside Space, an Expanse without Distances”: Amitav Ghosh, Kamila Shamsie, and the Maps of Memory

Maps have long been invoked as allegedly objective representations of shared memory, and both imperial and postcolonial authorities have endeavored to either invent or affirm a community's past thr...

Development implications of colonial land and human settlement schemes in Cameroon

This article analyses the implications of colonial land-use policies for contemporary development efforts in Cameroon. The discussion draws extensively, but not exclusively, on the experience of five of the country's urban centres, Douala, Yaounde, Bamenda, Buea and Tiko, in which some of the most notorious colonial land acquisition and land-use planning schemes were implemented. It is argued that the residual effects of these schemes significantly impede contemporary development efforts, particularly in the following areas, transportation, urbanization, resource distribution, food self-sufficiency, and tradition/culture. It is concluded that, despite the tendency on the part of the post-colonial leadership to vigorously maintain these policies, they were never designed with post-colonial development endeavours in mind. Rather, they were crafted specifically to promote colonial and imperial development objectives. Therefore, post-colonial authorities will do well to enact more innovative land-use legislation in concert with prevailing socio-economic conditions and development objectives.