Governmentality and the fuzzy edges of African postcolonial civil society Kudzai Matereke School of History and Philosophy University of New South Wales, Australia Draft paper presented at the 'Building states and civil societies in Africa: Liberal interventions and global governmentality' workshop, Aberystwyth University, Wales, 26‐27 January 2011 I warmly welcome your comments ([email protected]) Introduction The conjecture that transition from colonial to postcolonial rule and democratic consolidation that should follow it can only be undertaken within a context of a clear separation of state and civil society has seen Western donor agencies’ efforts to strengthen civil society where it is weak or to ‘plant’ it where none existed. Proponents consider civil society organisations as important for socialising the citizens into the key values of democracy and conduct. The urge for a proliferation of more civil society activity emanates from the ways the African postcolonial state has been conceived. Joshua Forrest (1988, p. 423) utilises the term state ‘hardness’ to describe how since independence the entities that comprise the contemporary state in sub‐Saharan Africa have attempted to augment the political and economic power of the state. Forrest identifies the three dimensions to state ‘hardness’ namely; structural autonomy by which state institutions, leaders and officials effectively remove themselves from the influence of social forces; the political penetration of society leaders and governmental institutions to secure hegemony over intermediary and ground–level political actors and social units; the extraction of resources from the productive economic sectors; and, lastly, ideological legitimation or the promulgation of official doctrines to defend and justify the achievement of autonomy, penetrative, extractive, and legitimating efforts. Forrest is not alone in observing that the African state is penetrative. Other similar terms have been used to describe the African state: ‘over‐
developed’ (Alavi 1972) to show how the state apparatus inherited by the postcolonial 1 society lay in the metropole and that its task was to subordinate all the indigenous classes in the colony; bula matari (rock crusher) (Young 1994) and ‘decentralised despotism’ (Mamdani 1996) to describe both how the colonial state is coercive and the legacy of colonialism remains at the centre of the contemporary crisis of the postcolonial state institutions; and ‘vampire’ (Frimpong‐Ansah 1992) to describe the state’s potential to destroy productive sectors of the economy. However, other depictions of the same phenomenon have utilised dissimilar terms: ‘quasi‐states’ (Jackson 1990) to refer to those states, emerging in the Third World after 1945 as a result of the shifts in the rules guiding international relations system, which have negative sovereignty or no capacity to sustain themselves without outside assistance; and the ‘soft state’ derived from what Hyden (1980) describes as the state’s incapacity to sustain and reproduce the existing social order and exert controls on labour to push for economic growth which results in an ‘uncaptured peasantry’. As a result of the state’s incapacity, the peasantry, from which the majority of the population is derived, may choose to reject being integrated into the state system. This rejection promotes ‘an economy of affection’ that runs against the grain of the state’s macro‐economic policies thus threatening the modern capitalistic infrastructure from taking root. Thus while state softness points to the constraints that compromise economic development in African states, it does not entail that the state is not violent or lacks the repressive capacity when it comes into contact with antagonistic forces. Rather, the soft state is the foundation upon which predatory, violent and repressive forms of governance are bred. Thus the depictions of the state highlighted above are consistent with what Nietzsche conceives of the state: ‘the coldest of all cold monsters’ which ‘lies in all languages of good and evil; and whatever it says, it lies – and whatever it has it has stolen’ (Nietzsche 1969, p. 75). In this paper, I seek to respond to this array of depictions that present the postcolonial state as an entity that threatens to swallow all other political actors that it comes into contact with, including the civil society. These depictions form a continuity with the conjecture mentioned above which is based on the assumption that a life of freedom is only conceivable beyond the state. Thus this perspective gives rise to a conception of ‘civil society’ and state, and concomitantly the public and private spheres, as structured on the 2 basis of opposition. In order to understand civil society in contemporary African politics, it is important to look at how it emerged in the colonial context. This entails looking at some of the key historical moments which unfolded in the last century and how these developments have influenced the contemporary constitution of civil society and the political processes of the present. I appropriate Mamdani’s critique of what he terms ‘history by analogy’, by which Africa and African experiences are considered not only as ‘historical latecomers’ but ‘also ascribed a predestiny’ thus rendering them as only residue that lack ‘both an original history and an authentic future’ (Mamdani, 1996, p. 9). History by analogy has led to the assumption that ‘civil society exists as a fully formed construct in Africa as in Europe, and that the driving force of democratisation everywhere is the contention between civil society and the state’ (Mamdani 1996, p. 13). Rather than deploying civil society as a normative concept or an entity juxtaposed with the state as its counterforce target, there is need to understand it in its historical specificity or ‘in its actual formation, rather than as a promised agenda for change’ (Mamdani, 1996, p. 19). I consider this historical detour important for our understanding of the African political present. This paper seeks to add weight to the position that a clearer understanding of African civil society needs to focus on Africa’s historic specificity and the colonial experience. It also seeks to take issue with the characterisation of the state as monster and civil society as a wedge against which the citizens can secure their freedom from its debilitating effects. This will be done by an analysis of a state as a form of political power that is exercised through profusely shifting alliances between diffused and multiple centres in its bid to govern the mass of social, economic, political realms in which individuals and groups are entangled. In this vein, this paper considers the exercise of state power as lying beyond the mere imposition of constraints on citizens. Rather, the exercise of power is rooted in the personal autonomy and identification of interests of the governed such that the governed are implicated in the very operations of power that not only set limits on their actions but also allows them to exercise their freedoms. I seek to achieve this understanding of political power by mapping out the Foucauldian notion of governmentality and drawing out its implications on the civil society debate. It is hoped that a concise exposition of how political 3 power operated in the colonial context provides a fertile ground for the analysis of civil society in postcolonial Africa. Governmentality The term ‘governmentality’ was introduced and developed by Michel Foucault in his analysis of modern political power. Though the term runs throughout his different texts from the late 1970s, it is given a nuanced attention in the 1979 ‘Birth of Biopolitics’ lectures at the Collège de France in which he undertook a genealogical study of the art of government. Earlier in his 1978 course entitled ‘Security, Territory, and Population’, Foucault had defined the notion of government as ‘an activity that undertakes to conduct individuals throughout their lives by placing them under the authority of a guide responsible for what they do and for what happens to them’ (Foucault, 1997, p. 67). In his lectures, Foucault outlines a historical reconstruction of different practices of government from the Ancient Greeks to the modern neo‐liberal epoch. Foucault’s genealogical approach serves a teleological function. By undertaking a critical study of how the present forms of knowledge, power and subjectivity are configured, Foucault sought to make philosophical critique a problematisation of the present. He strongly suggests that his present critique of the modalities of power is imbricated in what Kant had started in his essay ‘What is Enlightenment?’ in which the writer dealt with ‘What is happening today? What is happening now? What is this ‘now’ which we all inhabit, and which defines the moment in which I am writing?’ (Foucault, 1993, p. 10). What Foucault’s terms ‘history of the present’ (Foucault 1977 p. 31) is important here to highlight what he thinks is the reason for embarking on history: it is to enable us to make judgements about our present circumstances; to be able to judge whether institutions and practices are tolerable. This paper explores Foucault’s idea of governmentality in a similar vein as it urges us to identify and rethink and expose limits that constrain our contemporary structures of experiencing and understanding things. Thus as we seek to go beyond the limits of the present, we need not only to find new ways of understanding the issues but also to reframe the questions. 4 Foucault’s preoccupation with a genealogical approach to the history of specific forms of knowledge and power explains why he was not interested with normative political philosophy and its attempts to provide reason for the justification of the exercise of power. Rather, Foucault delves to outline the theories of discourse power and ethics and how these shaped an infrastructural apparatus (dispositifs) and how it enabled individuals to govern their own conduct in specific ways. By looking at how power was exercised in different periods in human history, Foucault manages to highlight how each historical epoch distinctively gave priority or precedence to specific modes of power. Thus Thomas Lemke (2001, p. 190; 2002, p. 50), gives ‘governmentality a semantic interpretation by saying that it is made by ‘gouverner’ and ‘mentalité’, thus establishing a link between governing and modes of thought. For Lemke, this semantic rendition highlights the impossibility that inheres in any attempt ‘to study the technologies of power without an analysis of the political rationality underpinning them’ (Lemke 2001, p. 190). While this captures what Foucault had in mind, the concept has broader application. The historical exploration that Foucault undertakes highlights how the use of the term ‘government’ today has privileged the political meaning, yet prior to the eighteenth century the concept had a more general usage and application to other contexts like religion, medicine, philosophy and pedagogy. It is for this reason that the Foucauldian definition of government seeks to capture how the various forms of power are linked with processes of subjectification thus rendering government a notion centred on conduct. The relationship between government and conduct can be established from how Foucault defines conduct. He writes: ‘The equivocal nature of the term conduct is one of the best aids for coming to terms with the specificity of power relations’ and it ‘invokes both a sense of leading others according to mechanisms of coercion which are variably strict and also a way of behaving within a more or less open field of possibilities (Foucault 1983, pp. 220‐1). In this light, the exercise of governing involves the ability for one to act upon the possibilities for action for others and this involves either allowing or holding back their capacities or enabling or constraining the range of possibilities open to them. Understood in these senses, the term government becomes broader as it ranges from governing the self to governing others. 5 Conceptualising government in this way highlights how within the context of modern sovereignty, the sovereign state and the individual as an autonomous being have a relationship in which both are implicated in the exercise of power. In his quest to challenge the juridico‐discursive model of political power which took power to be coming from the above (sovereign or leader of government), Foucault (1978, pp. 88‐89) urged that in political theory, there is ‘need to cut off the king’s head’. As such Foucault conceives power not as a possession that one entity has and other entities lack. Power is relational, ubiquitous, mobile and unstable. It has no specific centre as it is exercised from multiple points. Rather than privileging discourses that describe modern state power as violent, Foucault highlights ‘how the modern sovereign state and the autonomous individual codetermine each other’s emergence’ (Lemke 2002, p. 51). This renders government as the array of measures by which to secure what Foucault terms ‘the conduct of conduct’. Therefore, the notion of government needs to be understood as an extension of an understanding of power that is distinguished from domination. In his response to the question about the relationship between power and domination, Foucault (1988, p. 19) argues that ‘those notions have been ill‐defined’. He maintains: ‘[W]e must distinguish the relationships of power as strategic games between liberties – strategic games that result in the fact that some people try to determine the conduct of others – and the states of domination, which are what we ordinarily call power. And, between the two, between the games of power and the states of domination, you have governmental technologies’ (Foucault 1988, p. 19). In discussing how various forms of governmental rationalities operated in the colonial state, a distinction between power and domination needs to be given a more nuanced analysis to see how the colonial state and the citizens and colonial subjects were implicated in the exercise of the forms of colonial power. This distinction stems from a conceptualisation of power as diffused and depersonalised and as such Foucault argues that power needs not be identified with a specific centre or locus. Thus in the Foucauldian scheme, power is rendered a broader conception which goes beyond ‘simply a relationship between partners’ to being ‘a way in which certain actions modify others’ (Foucault 1983, p. 219). If a conception of power that makes it not ‘a renunciation of freedom’ but an exercise of it (Foucault, 1983, p. 220) is to have any bearing on the notion of government, then it should conceive ‘to govern’ as all what is done to render individuals 6 amenable to control; the ability of those who govern to initiate and secure possible modes of action for the people who are governed. This is what Foucault refers to as the possibility ‘to structure the possible field of action for others’ (p. 221). What we seek, therefore, is to establish how a study of the colonial forms of power were facilitated by political technologies that guided, directed, and nurtured actions among the subject population, thus making power an affirmation rather than a destruction of the subjects’ agency. The genealogical approach Foucault employs helps to locate the rise of the ‘art of government’ thus resulting in his view that government is a historically changing ensemble of practices and that modern systems of government rely on a configuration of ‘micro‐
physical’ techniques whose target is the body and soul, and also ‘macro‐physical’ strategies of regulation that relate with people as legal and economic subjects and aim to enhance their well‐being. The former techniques are disciplinary and they employ an individualisation approach, while the latter are totalising and centralising. Thus Foucault makes an analysis of these techniques in order to establish how they came into being and how they have been maintained and transformed over time. This is called an ‘analytics of government’ and is a way of analysing those regimes of practices that try to direct, ‘with a certain degree of deliberation, the conduct of others and oneself’ and it ‘gains a critical purchase on regimes of practices by making clear the forms of thought implicated in them’ (Dean 2010, p. 52). One can note how in his analysis of the various governmental rationalities, Foucault attempts to highlight the significant aspects and dimensions that constitute the governmental rationalities. Dimensions of governmental rationalities From the emerging governmentality literature, we can identify that each form of rationality covers the following dimensions: (i) The reasons for the rationality entail the rationale behind the particular practice of government. For Inda (2005, p. 2) the reasons of government encompass all these forms of knowledge, expertise, and calculation that render human beings thinkable in such a manner as to make them amenable to political programming. As a set of intellectual resources, political rationalities allow those who govern to render the world accessible in 7 ways that allow them to compute and administer. They do so by naming ‘that field wherein lie the multiplicity of endeavours to rationalize the nature, mechanisms, aims, and parameters of governmental authority’ (Inda 2005, p. 8). Thus at the core of this are the ‘specific knowledges’ (Rose, O’Malley and Valverde 2006, p. 84) or ‘specific regimes of truth’ (Inda 2005, p. 8) by which the governing experts and authorities are guided to determine the institutional framework to govern efficaciously. (ii) The target or subject(s) for the application of the rationality refers to what Scott (2005, p. 25) describes as the point or points of application or the objects that the rationality aims at. Inda (2005, p. 2) defines the subjects as ‘the diverse types of individual and collective that arise out of and inform governmental activity.’ According to Dean (2010, p. 43), different practices of government presuppose not only the forms of person, self and identity but also what sort of transformations these practices seek to achieve. Therefore, a governmental rationality proceeds from some postulates of the position and capability of both the governor and the governed in an attempt to calculate and predict what capacities and attributes the rationality is to nurture. Thus if governmental rationality is about producing specific forms of agentive subjectivities, then the modern subjects within the context of a city, state or some global network is made, albeit through his or her own compliance, to become a member of an ethnic group, a gendered category, a consumer, a citizen or migrant, a worker, a (non)believer, etc. (iii) The techniques or instruments employed by the rationality involve the means by which a specific rationality aims to achieve its aims. Inda (2005, p. 2) defines the technical as ‘that domain of practical mechanisms, instruments, and programmes through which authorities of various types seek to shape and instrumentalize human conduct.’ For Inda (2005, p. 9) the techniques or ‘technologies of government’ entail ‘how government takes on a technological and pragmatic form.’ The term pragmatic highlights how government is context based, thus making it problematic to provide theoretical formulations that are divorced from the specificities of context and empirical inquiry. In his description of targets of governmental rationality, Scott conflates the object and instrument. He writes 8 that the target is the object or objects that rationality aims, and the means and instrumentalities it deploys in search of these targets, points, and objects (Scott, 2005, p. 25). This difference notwithstanding, there is agreement between the two that rationalities deploy and utilise instruments by which to effectively secure their specific aims. Techniques render and ensure the visibility and amenability of the target or subjects. (iv) The field is the area on which the rationality is operational; it is ‘the zone that it actively constructs for its functionality’ (Scott 2005, p. 25). (v) The aims, goal or telos that seem to be shared across all forms of governmental rationalities is to achieve a secure durable and effective government. These dimensions of governmental rationality can be summarised in the set of questions that Rose, O’Malley and Valverde (2006, p. 85) ask: ‘Who governs what? According to what logics? With what techniques? Toward what ends?’ Rather than requiring theoretical formulations about notions of power and governance, these questions require us to make empirical interrogation of the ways political power is secured, exercised and transformed by both the governors and the governed as political actors. Foucault argues that for each modality of power, there are distinct reasons, specific targets, different techniques and goals. For the Machiavelli’s prince, Foucault (2000, p. 205) argued, ‘the objective of the exercise of power is to reinforce, strengthen and protect the principality, but with this last understood to mean not the objective ensemble of its subjects and the territory, but rather the prince’s relation with what he owns, with the territory he has inherited or acquired, and with his subjects.’ Whereas the prince conceives the implementation of power as essentially to secure and buttress control over the territory or principality, the modern state targeted the problematic issues of population and its wealth. The problem of the economy began to be understood as in terms of how the father managed the household. This entailed that the good state, like the good father, was the one that managed the economy well. The emergence of the economy as an important domain to 9 be policed by the state entails that the traditional role of the father in the family was taken over by the state. What is central in Foucault’s theorisation of the rationalities is that the exercise of power in the modern state is not about a substitution of one form of rationality with another but it entails re‐articulating the various rationalities of power, thus making a triangle of sovereignty‐discipline‐government. Colonial governmentality The formation of the colonial state created a political space of public action in which political subjects began to interact and exchange. According to Young (1994, p. 222), this space is the sphere of exchange within which a civil society may germinate. Ekeh (1975) argues that with the creation of the African colony, there emerged not one but two public realms: on one hand, the primordial realm, where an economy of affection’ operates and the individuals consider it their duty to sustain their primordial affiliations; and on the other, a civic realm, associated with colonial rule and is configured as the focal point of popular politics. In my view, the currency of Ekeh’s two distinctions of public spheres lies not necessarily in highlighting the distinctions between Western and African socio‐political spaces, which points to Africa’s exceptionalism, but in pointing how the distinctions became a front for colonial state power. The notion of the two publics points to colonial power as a complex ensemble or configuration of rationalities that sought to effectively secure the interests of colonial governance by directing the beliefs and conduct of the colonised in ways that achieved colonial ends. In this section, I seek to map out the boundaries of the notion ‘colonial governmentality’ in an attempt to highlight how the colonial state, just like the postcolonial state it bequeathed, was a complex phenomenon which defies simplistic descriptions. As such, I seek to show that descriptions which privilege how it utilised forms of exclusion (race, class, sex etc.), or which stress how violence against the natives, their cultural beliefs and institutions, are too simplistic and risk to miss how colonial power operated and how the overall relations between the state and civil society are configured. What Foucault calls ‘liberal governmentality’ entails ‘governing less’; exercising self‐limitation by seeking the maximisation of the efficacy of that which is governed. The practice of governing less took a 10 laissez faire approach when the governing authority worked through the conduct of conduct of the governed. By making reference to Robert Walpole’s quotation of ‘let sleeping dogs lie’, Foucault highlights that it is an approach that urges people to be left alone to mind their daily lives, thus highlighting how the principle of ‘the self‐limitation of government’ is central to liberalism as a specific form of governmentality. For Foucault, liberal governmentality is a distinct governmental rationality committed to governing through the promotion of some kinds of free activity and the nurturing of certain dispositions and desirable habits among the governed which render them amenable to their self‐regulation or the conduct of their own conduct. Whereas sovereignty’s predilection is with territory, Foucault argues that the target of government is the complex of men and things constituted as population, understood as men insofar as their lives are implicated in the materiality of the world: ‘[M]en in their relations, their links, their imbrication with those things that are wealth, resources, means of subsistence, the territory with its specific qualities, climate, irrigation, fertility, and so on; men in their relation to those things that are customs, habits, ways of acting and thinking, and so on; and finally men in their relation to those still other things that might be accidents and misfortunes such as famine, epidemics, death, and so on (Foucault 2000, pp. 208‐209). This understanding of ‘men’ renders ‘population’ to be not just the sum of individuals who inhabit a territory but something which the state targets ‘not the act of government itself, but the welfare of the population, the improvement of its condition, the increase of its wealth, its longevity, and its health’ (Foucault 2000, p. 216). From this perspective, it can be argued that colonial statecraft was a complex assemblage of the routines that sought to construct new subjectivities by which to propel the colonial machinery towards its ends. Thus colonial power was an ensemble of rule that channelled interests of citizens towards certain ends so that the state relied on the autonomy and responsibility of citizens who now acted in pursuit of those interests. Foucault (2000, p. 211) considers the objective of government as ‘a series of specific finalities’ and to achieve various finalities, things must be disposed. Where sovereignty considered the law as the instrument to achieve its ends, that is, the obedience to the laws, on the contrary, governmentality sought ‘not of imposing law on men, but of 11 disposing things: that is, of employing tactics rather than laws, and even using laws themselves as tactics – to arrange things in such a way that, through a certain number of means, such‐and‐such ends may be achieved’ (Foucault, 2000, p. 211). The promulgation of colonial laws and their enforcement, the colonial institutions and the incorporation of traditional institutions into colonial governance were all tactics and instruments of government which the Africans were actively involved with by an admixture of resistance and support. As Hirschman (1977) argues, the colonial state was a ‘civilising medium’ and with prosperity as the major tenet of nineteenth century liberalism, the state that was expected to harness individual passions, transform the sentiments of the subjects and direct them towards the end of producing wealth and a level of subsistence that would reproduce the colonial society. If the state is a civilising medium, then it needs to be established how the colonial state followed from this European model, albeit under different circumstances, to map out some strategies and techniques of intervention by which to direct or manage the colonial subjects’ agency such that their being governed would be indistinguishable from exercising their agency. Mamdani provides a well‐articulated sketch of how colonial power rested on techniques of despotism that targeted to exclude the natives from the institutions of civil society. Here I seek to argue that the questions and issues that Mamdani raises can be fully nuanced by co‐opting the Foucauldian framework. Specifically, I seek to establish both the continuity and disjuncture between Mamdani’s and Foucault’s analyses. On one hand, Mamdani’s analysis identifies the ‘native question’ as the central dilemma of colonial rule. He frames the native question as follows: ‘how can a tiny and foreign minority rule over an indigenous majority?’ (Mamdani 1996, p. 16). The responses to the question were the two broad and overarching methods of direct and indirect rule, systems which relied on two types of segregation, namely, institutional and territorial segregation. By institutional segregation, Mamdani (1996 p. 77) refers the ‘policy of native control that would be mediated through native chiefs working through native institutions.’ Territorial segregation was a necessary step towards institutional segregation as it preserved and kept intact the bifurcated colonial state, which bequeathed the binary of citizen/subject. The bifurcated state operated on a two‐tier system of law: civil and customary. Under the former, settlers 12 enjoyed civil rights and full citizenship, thus it was a direct, centralised and unmediated despotism, while under the latter, natives were excluded from rights of citizenship, and thus they were under indirect, mediated and decentralised despotism. Colonial power worked by instituting various forms of exclusion, and the civil society emerged as a creation of the colonial state in its response to the native question. Stemming from this, Mamdani (1996, p. 19) identifies racism as colonial civil society’s ‘original sin’. On the other hand, Foucault’s central concern was to analyse the problem of governing in modern society. Thus the notion of ‘governmentality’ can be reframed in this way: how possibly can governments shape and direct the progressively more disparate and various subjects in such a way that effective forms of governance are achieved? The answer to Foucault’s question lay in the analysis of distinctive governmental rationalities by which those who govern seek to calculate, direct, predict, shape and guide the conduct of the governed. If it is applied to the colonial context, the Foucauldian notion of governmentality entails that colonialism needs to be looked at from the point of view of how colonial state power sought to cultivate subjectivities that would be implicated in their own governance. Thus colonial governmentality can be best understood in terms of the operations of colonial power of and how natives responded to them. The emergence of the colonial state saw ‘the introduction of a new game of politics that the colonised would (eventually) be obliged to play if they were to be counted as political’ (Scott 2005, p. 39). Within the reconfigured social and political spaces, the colonised emerged as new subjects with new interests and identifiable social and political options to achieve them. Within the context of a new game of politics, there emerges new interests, new modes of negotiating those interests, and possibly new alliances and rivalries. In his analysis of interests, John Plamenatz (1954, p. 7) writes: ‘A man’s pursuit of his interest is not a chase that does not change the nature of the quarry. It is as a competitor, a collaborator, and a negotiator with other men that a man acquires the ambitions and settled preferences he calls interests; and the same is true of classes of men. The pursuit of interest, unlike the hunt, is like war or marriage, where conflict and collaboration quite change the nature of the objects for whose sake they were first undertaken.’ If the colonial state is conceived as a terrain within which ‘a new game of politics’ was played, then it can be said that the state provided both limits to and possibilities of freedom of action to their subjects. 13 The Foucauldian analysis of power can be used to enhance Mamdani’s description of colonial power by highlighting how subjects are governed not necessarily by exclusion and violence but by the exercise of their own agency and the ways by which they sought to be counted political. This approach involves looking at the colonial state’s predilection with strategies and techniques to mark and delineate the territorial space and to transform and ‘improve’ the colonised population by altering their conduct and living conditions and how this produced, on one hand, an infrastructural and epistemological framework, and on the other, self‐governing subjects who would effectively secure their agency in determining and fulfilling their interests. Here I follow Scott (2005, p. 24) who argues that what should be the core of the analysis of colonial power should not be the exclusionary discourses and practices under colonialism, namely, the practices which excluded the colonised from humanity (colonialism’s racism), and the practices that excluded the colonised from the institutions of political sovereignty (colonialism’s false liberalism). The political and economic exchange introduced in the colonial state aimed at a ‘captured peasantry’ (Hyden 1980) so as to produce colonial subjects who entered into economic relations. Key here is how the colonial subject was conceived as an actor who exercises freedom. Thus the colonial state should be viewed as the emergence of a ‘political rationality in which power works not in spite of but through the construction of space of free social exchange, and through the construction of a subjectivity experienced as the source of free will and rational, autonomous agency’ (Scott, 2005, p. 32). In a similar vein, the emergence of colonial civil society, albeit the various forms of exclusion entailed in its operations, realised new strategies by which the field of the social was self‐regulated. The depictions of the colonial state and its aftermath that privilege how its excessive forms of government have stifled or threatened to overtake civil society fail to take seriously the specificities of the operations of power, especially that power operates according to specific rationalisations and is directed towards specific ends. Foucault’s notion of governmentality explores styles of thought that inheres the rationalisations and how they emerged and how they are allied with other forms of governing. Central to colonial governmentality was the exercise of power towards the end of demolition and reconfiguration of colonial space so to deploy governing‐effects on the conduct of the colonial bodies that occupied it. The 14 reconfiguration of colonial can be rendered in terms of what Scott (1998) calls ‘the tools or techniques of legibility’ to highlight how colonial statecraft entailed refashioning colonial space, which includes its colonial society and physical environment, to render it useful for the colonial project. There also emerged a variety of ‘publics’ that produced and contested opinion which ‘resulted in a novel mode of political action that combined accommodation and resistance to colonial power’ (Kalpagam 2001, p. 423). This makes colonial power a complex ensemble. Thus Scott argues that the there were different modes by which colonial power was organised, and that the modes depended on different rationalities. In this way, colonial governmentality entailed the cultivation and rehabilitation of colonial subjects so they would channel their interests towards the ends of colonial governance and be implicated in their own government. Thus the colonial state and the attendant institutions like colonial civil society constituted the techniques for the cultivation of the colonial subjects who would aid the colonial administrators to govern themselves. Despite the evils that have been attributed to colonial power in the many descriptions that have been made, a closer look at it would highlight that colonial power is not an original form of power. Colonial power can be described in the light of Foucault’s description of fascism and Stalinism. For Foucault (1982, p. 209) fascism and Stalinism are ‘pathological forms’ or ‘diseases of power’, that ‘used and extended mechanisms already present in most other societies’ thus they thrived the way did because they ‘used to a large extent the ideas and the devices of our political rationality.’ This can be instructive of the ways colonial power effectively secured government by coopting and directing a variety of rationalities commanded from multiple sites and for various objectives to achieve its own ends. Thus the colonial state was not a single entity but a configuration of entities that relied on multiple rationalities for its purposes. For example, the role of African customs in buttressing traditional institutions, beliefs and practices and the place of Christian mission education in propagating modernity and the Christian faith can help explain how the colonial state utilised technologies of power and self‐control and how these various institutions and practices articulated a language of command with which the natives both collaborated and resisted the colonial project thus making governmentality a power that is dispersed through the social body rather than a 15 power that is located in a single centre. Mamdani forcefully argues how segregation happened: all the natives were consigned to specific ethnic categories, customary law and upon these categories the colonial state attached cultural practices and traits thus rendering ethnic identities stable and differentiable. A perspective from the view of technologies of government would have provided more weight to Mamdani’s analysis. Following Rose and Miller (1992, p. 185), who use the term ‘inscription devices’ to refer to the ways by which to make specific domains susceptible to evaluation, calculation and intervention, the ethnic identities and the attendant characteristics that are assigned can be described as devices for the exercise of colonial power. One question that emerges from the governmentality debate is the place of liberalism in the colonial career. That effective colonial occupation in Africa took place in the late nineteenth century when liberalism had taken root in Europe suggests that liberal government provides a background to colonisation. Hindess (2001, p. 365) highlights the Janus face of liberalism as it presents us with opposed yet intimately connected faces. One of the faces ‘expresses the familiar liberal claim that government should rule over, and as far as possible rule, through the activities of free individuals’, and the other has a ‘less benign face’ and reflects the equally liberal view that substantial portions of humanity consist of individuals who are not at present capable of acting in a suitably autonomous fashion’ (Hindess, 2001, p. 366). At a normative level liberalism affirms that the individual subject has rationality and capacity for autonomous action, and therefore defended against infringement by the state. In its colonial career, liberal political reason justified decentralised despotism to rule over the colonial subjects for it considered the subjects as in need of improvement. The application of some forms of authoritarianism for the purpose ‘improving’ necessarily stem from the position that government takes effect through the activities of free individuals. Thus the native question was an approach characterised by a cautious mix of liberalism and authoritarianism; that is, since natives presently lack certain capacities, they should be allowed time to fully develop the capacities. However, colonial administrators disagreed both amongst themselves and with other functionaries, for example, missionaries, when the natives will be fully developed to be entrusted with unlimited freedom. Colonial administrators thus considered imperial rule in Kipling’s terms of ‘the white man’s burden’ – 16 a burden that the civilised races have to carry. Thus at the core of liberal governments is the notion of managing the behaviour of free persons and doing everything possible to secure the necessary conditions for their freedom by means of putting in place a vast array of governmental practices that construct the subjectivities of the governed. These subjectivities are constituted through the rationalities, strategies and plans that those who govern implement and operationalise. In this vein, the strategies are the modes ‘through which different forces seek to render programmes operable, and by means of which a multitude of connections are established between the aspirations of the authorities and the activities of individuals and groups’ (Rose and Miller 1992, p. 183). In this way, governmental exercise of power is behind the creation of subjects. How are subjects produced? Subjects are created through discourses and institutions and these require specific forms of knowledge and the experts who make possible the institutionalisation and implementation of the requisite policy agendas. Thus the colonial state, like the prison, asylum, or factory, which Foucault had described as spatialised institutions of control, had specific practices by which the colonial administrators managed the complex relations and practices between and amongst the colonial settlers and the colonised. Their interactions were mediated by the social, political and economic institutions that influenced the ‘conduct of conduct’ of both the natives and the settlers in very unprecedented ways. Conclusion Applying the proposition that civil society and state are separate entities to the African context has resulted in the perception that democratic consolidation can only take root once civil society is disentangled from state and also once the state is curtailed and limited so that it leaves some domains free. This proposition and the implications it carries misses the point of the origins of civil society in Africa. Civil society emerged at the behest of the colonial state, and as such was coopted by the colonial state as a mode of government. As a locale for the exercise or operation of the colonial settlers and subjects’ regulated autonomy, colonial civil society was imbued in a variety of modes of colonial power. As the Foucauldian approach highlights, the creation of subjects was tied to space since colonial state practices entailed the restructuring of colonial spatial configurations in order to make political processes amenable to the governmental action. Thus through the governmentality approach, we can be able to relate how the colonial experience was broader than the 17 simplistic descriptions that emphasise racial exclusion and state violence. 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