Clifton Crais

Chiefs and Bureaucrats in the Making of Empire: A Drama from the Transkei, South Africa, October 1880

Scholars are beginning to develop a new history of the state that brings to the study of power and politics the rich offerings of cultural studies. This development in part reflects a commitment to rethinking contemporary topics such as authoritarianism, civil society, ethnic conflict, and political instability. It also marks an attempt to extend the now considerable body of recent work on the cultural history of nineteenth-century imperialism produced over the past two decades.¹ Comparative literature specialists, many encouraged by new historicist approaches, have produced numerous studies on the imperial imagination, particularly on European representations of non-European peoples. Inspired by the work of Edward Said and other postcolonial critics, they have historicized seemingly static categories such as race and have provided important historical depth to issues ranging from sexuality to the social sciences. This rich literature has advanced more than simply our understanding of colonial history. Studies of Mughals and missionaries, of explorers and entrepreneurs, have reshaped metropolitan studies, including the character of imperial expansion itself.² One recent study, for example, has explored how the missionary experience in Africa created an "imperial culture" within England, in which a domestic middle-class "missionary spirit" racialized the English poor and working classes.³

What unites these diverse studies is a common fascination with culture—the ways people produced meaning and understood their world in diverse settings typically characterized by highly unequal relationships. These studies form part of a broader historiographical trend shaped by scholars such as Clifford Geertz and more generally by history's discovery of anthropology.⁴ This concern with culture has shaped recent work on the making of the colonial order itself, that is, on the local structures of dominance within the vast areas that came under European control in the nineteenth century. As Nicholas Dirks put it, "culture was what colonialism was all about."⁵ The historical anthropologist Ann Laura Stoler, for example, has argued for the importance of studying the constitution of colonial categories, for bringing anthropology's classic concern with culture to the study of the colonial past. In this and in other similar works, scholars have centered their research on identity, power and knowledge, discourse, sexuality, race, ideology, religion, even clothing—colonial culture read as so many texts amenable to anthropological and new historicist perspectives.⁶

The state specifically, and politics more generally, has had an uneasy position within the new cultural history of empire. Jean and John Comaroff, for example, have argued that the new literature proves "that colonization was everywhere more than merely a process of political economy—or one vested primarily in the colonial state."⁷ Less glamorous are the studies of institutions, the lives of bureaucrats, or analyses of the causes of empire exemplified some three decades ago by Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher's monumental Africa and the Victorians: The Official Mind of Imperialism.⁸ To the extent that the state has been the center of analysis in the new cultural history of empire, it has been primarily in terms of analyzing the discursive strategies of rule, the epistemologies and techniques by which Europeans ordered and understood their colonial subjects and the lands they inhabited. The emphasis has been more on strategies than on practice, more on the accumulation of knowledge than on the daily relationships of colonizer and colonized.⁹ Particularly where the emphasis on missionaries is strongest, the state enters later, after the colonization of consciousness, after the damage has been done, to regulate a world reshaped in the name of empire and modernity.¹⁰ Yet as Frederick Cooper and Ann Stoler have cautioned, understanding the "working of the colonial state" remains centrally important to comprehending the rise and fall of European colonialism.¹¹

This article is concerned with bringing the state back in without leaving culture out, much as a new generation of scholars has revitalized the study of state formation and political culture in twentieth-century Latin America.¹² The article focuses primarily on the earliest moments of state formation that began with conquest itself, as the state, as it were, came into being. The challenge, as Philip Corrigan has put it generally, is to focus "not [on] who rules but [on] how rule is accomplished."¹³ Looking at state formation this way relates recent anthropologically oriented history concerned with culture to an older politically centered literature committed to understanding precisely how it was that Europeans extended control over such vast areas of the world so quickly and ruled with relatively few people. I am especially interested in exploring colonial conquest as quintessentially a cross-cultural encounter of a political kind. Conquest as cross-cultural encounter highlights how state formation consists of "a claim that in its very name attempts to give unity, coherence, structure, and intentionality to what are in practice frequently disunited, fragmented attempts at domination."¹⁴ There is, I suggest, much to be learned from the encounters of bureaucrats, whose charge was to create a new political order, and their sometimes recalcitrant colonial subjects, who were trying to make sense of their occupation by outsiders.

At first glance, this may seem unsurprising, especially along the edge of empire, where European claims to rule could be very weak indeed. Scholars of early European expansion in the period before the administrative revolution of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries have long been attuned to the often bewildering complexity of cross-cultural encounters. Richard White has written of the necessity of people having to "arrive at some common conception of suitable ways of acting," as he has suggested, a "middle ground."¹⁵ Studies of Africa in the nineteenth century, however, usually have emphasized the differences separating European administrators from their African charges.¹⁶ Scholarship produced during the era of decolonization was inclined to see colonialism in terms of foreign imposition, the monolithic intrusion of Europe into other parts of the world. With few exceptions, the trend has continued. The recent literature concerned with culture not surprisingly has gravitated toward individuals like early missionaries, whose exciting lives and rich texts offered the possibility of complex readings of early colonialism. In contrast, the lives of bureaucrats, beyond mere conveyors of policy, seemed relatively wearisome.¹⁷ There has been a tendency to foreclose analysis of the creation of nineteenth-century colonial rule, including moments of violence, as a "dialogue of cultures"¹⁸ and the emergence of African understandings of a political world in which they became the subjects of a colonial state. Colonial conquest and rule, it is suggested here, were just as much cross-cultural encounters as were the interactions of Africans with European missionaries and traders. For conquest involved peoples with often radically different conceptions and practices coming together and struggling to make sense of what was happening to themselves and to others. Seen this way, resistance is thus not simply oppositional but, rather, represents part of a historic conversation Africans had about power, authority, and legitimacy, a conversation that engaged with colonialism but significantly extended beyond it.

The article centers on a drama of power and politics in the nineteenth-century Transkei, South Africa, played out in the relationship between a colonial magistrate and an African chief, the representatives of two different polities. The last quarter of the century saw rapid British expansion in South Africa and, indeed, across the continent. International rivalries partly motivated British expansion in the Transkei. The discovery of diamonds in Griqualand West in 1865, and the granting of responsible rule to the Cape Colony in 1872, however, created an environment for more spirited expansion. Most of the Transkei came under colonial rule in the space of about ten years. In 1868, the British high commissioner annexed nearby Basutoland, which was taken over by the Cape three years later only to be returned to British control. Widespread resistance began in the late 1870s and had engulfed much of the Transkei and Basutoland by 1880, largely because of the introduction of the magistrate system and the attempt to disarm Africans under the infamous 1878 Peace Preservation Act. To the northeast, tensions erupted in the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879, in which the British suffered one of their worst defeats in the nineteenth century during the Battle of Isandlwana. On the subcontinent, the pace of imperial expansion and consolidation quickened after the discovery of gold in the 1880s, ending in one of the great wars of the age of empire, the 1899–1902 South African War.¹⁹

Map: The University of Wisconsin Cartographic Laboratory.

Bureaucrats played a central role in imperial expansion into the Transkei. In 1862, the Department of Native Affairs (NAD)—what would soon become the most sophisticated bureaucracy within the Cape government—was created to manage conquered African territories. With responsible government granted in 1872, the NAD emerged as a far more powerful bureaucratic agency.²⁰ In the 1870s, the department sent its employees into the Transkei to establish treaties, survey land, and proclaim British control. This move into the region entailed more than simply the presence of weapons and the proverbial Gatling gun. Bureaucrats brought with them papers, pens, forms, stamps, rules, legislation, law books, and especially telegraphs into unconquered lands. While colonial control remained tenuous, the material presence of the state became unmistakable. The instrumental power of the state might not be hegemonic, but its material artifacts were everywhere.²¹

The relationship between African chiefs and colonial officials represented a principal feature of the emerging political order of colonialism. These sorts of cross-cultural encounters between officials and chiefs took place across the continent, shaping in powerful ways the colonial order within an expanding British Empire in Africa. Officials arrived with new forms of power and communication, and of course entirely new institutions and procedures such as courts, trials, and jails. Their mission was to establish areas of control, if need be to "pacify" their new subjects, and to create orderly systems of administration among "barbarous" peoples. Africans, especially chiefs, had their own ideas. They pursued avenues of self-strengthening, an African "race for power" often in direct conflict with European intentions and aspirations.²² The situation on the ground, as it were, could be considerably messy, blurring what might appear at first sight to be so many clear differences and distinctions. As we shall see, for example, Africans perceived officials using a political grammar that connected authority and legitimacy with magic and agricultural fertility. Bureaucracy could become positively bewitching.

"Go on I will follow," the Mpondomise paramount chief, Mhlontlo, told the British magistrate, Hamilton Hope, in early days of October 1880. And "where you die I will die." In the north, war had broken out in Basutoland. A punishing drought had brought widespread crop failure. Nearby, the chief's wife lay ill, slowly perishing from a long disease. Mhlontlo had been busily organizing his warriors as the moon reached its fullness and showered the land with shadows and then began to wane. Ritual specialists, the "witch doctors" responsible for protecting the chief and his people, ministered magic to make the warriors strong, to defend them in battle, to vanquish their enemies. Hope expected the ritually strengthened warriors to be British allies in the colonial war against rebel Basotho. The white magistrate also had been preparing himself: dashing letters and telegraphs off to colleagues and superiors, forging alliances with African chiefs, amassing a considerable arsenal of modern weapons, and asserting in ways both banal and ritualized the political supremacy of the British Empire.²³

Hope remained somewhat apprehensive of his dealings with the paramount chief. The magistrate reported he had been warned that he "was plunging blindfold into a trap laid for me by" the Mpondomise paramount chief. "I shall be rather amused," Hope wrote, if the chief, "true to his reputation disappoints everybody's expectations; if he does not I shall no doubt have convincing proof that everybody is right. My own opinion," he concluded, aware both of the moment's drama and contingency, "is that as in a game of cards, having led my King of Trumps if anybody in the game holds the Ace I lose the trick, if not my King wins."²⁴

On October 20, 1880, Hope departed from his offices for Mhlontlo's location and the seat of the Mpondomise paramountcy at Sulenkama. The day before, Hope had written that "I meet Umhlonhlo and his Impi [warriors] tomorrow at Sulenkama, and take as many [men] as I can with me from here; but though I go without hesitation, it is as well to provide for contingencies." "I go strengthened," he continued, "by the feeling that I am doing right, and that the Almighty will guide me ... I have done my utmost to steer a straight and proper course in these matters, and if I fail, and have been deceived, I shall have shown that I backed my opinion."²⁵

Hope took with him three white officials, four African policemen, and a Khoikhoi servant. The nine men proceeded on horseback and with two-wheeled carts (Scotch carts) along the wagon road that stretched north to Natal and south to Umtata, the colonial capital of the Transkei. Just over five kilometers out from the magistracy, the men turned left and onto the narrow path that led north into foothills and to Mhlontlo's residence. The men, carts, and horses lumbered up a broken and uneven path. Rain further complicated their journey. By now, the drought was finally coming to an end, replaced not by light rains but by furious downpours that turned rivulets into rushing streams and made the track the men were traveling slippery and unstable. They stopped and made camp for the night. Rain was not the only complication hindering their progress. For the men brought with them fifty-one Snyder rifles, 7,000 cartridges, percussion caps, and gunpowder, in addition to a substantial provision of food. This was a not inconsiderable supply of weaponry. All told, the men were transporting more than 1,000 pounds of weapons and supplies. A far larger quantity of weapons was in transit to the magistracy and arrived there early Saturday morning.²⁶ Mhlontlo had requested the arms in return for agreeing to fight as allies of the British against the Basotho rebels in what became known as the Gun War of 1880–1881. In return, Mhlontlo assured Hope that he would assemble his warriors at Sulenkama, where chief and magistrate, ruler and subject, would gather in preparation for war.

Hope arrived in Sulenkama on the morning of October 21. He anxiously wanted to press north to Matatiele. He was, after all, a conqueror in the great age of British imperial expansion in South Africa and around the world.²⁷ To not press immediately to battle was for Hope to acquiesce to barbarism. But delays ensued. Hope suspected treachery. Were the warnings correct? Mhlontlo assured Hope that his army would collect on Friday. Thursday evening, the chief dined with the magistrate and spent the night sleeping under the Scotch cart filled with ammunition.²⁸

By Friday morning, only some 400 men in arms had arrived. Hope "addressed a few words to them," explaining his intention and his desire "to make as much haste as possible." The chief intervened. Not all his men were present, he told the magistrate. Mhlontlo suggested, and Hope agreed, reluctantly, to wait until the following day, Saturday, October 23. On Friday evening, the chief again dined with Hope, along with his brother and four other men. Chief and magistrate "had a long conversation." Hope again explained to Mhlontlo the urgency of departing from Sulenkama on Saturday to make war on the rebel Basotho.

Saturday morning, the number of armed men had nearly doubled. The rains had stopped. The army, including the "principal men of the various clans," formed a "great curve a short distance" from Hope's encampment.²⁹ Warriors continued arriving during the day. In the early afternoon, Mhlontlo "came to Mr. Hope and sat down in the Marquee with us all, and after partaking of a friendly glass of Brandy and water, asked us all to go up to the 'Umguyo'" ritual celebrations that fused agricultural fertility and chiefship and "where he said it would be decided upon what number of men would be enrolled" to fight in the colonial war.³⁰

Hope saw the event as affirming the political supremacy and power of the magistrate, another moment when Africans recognized the power and legitimacy of the British Empire. This was not the first but the second time the magistrate had attended, indeed had participated in, the ritual ceremony. To garner so many warriors would unequivocally demonstrate the magistrate's mastery over a chief who had too long resisted acknowledging the fact of colonial subjugation. The chief asked the magistrate to address the warriors, many of whom were then performing a war dance. Hope agreed. The men—chief, magistrate, Hope's clerk, and two other white men—entered the great curve. Hope and another official seated themselves on the rug of Hope's favorite horse. Another man stood behind them, while the last was "a short distance away watching the men as they danced and sang their war songs," the warriors with weapons in hand pretending to stab their victims.³¹

Suddenly, a great piercing whistle followed by a loud shout rang through the air. Everyone "stood still."³² "Pondomise there is no word from me," Chief Mhlontlo told his people, "the words you will hear [are] from your Magistrate." "We are Government people in the true sense of the word," the chief continued. "Government is our rock and shade." If Hope found these words comforting, what the chief then said mystified the magistrate, reversing in his mind the very semantic logic of the chief's declaration. "I am going to inform Sunduza [A. E. Davis, one of the white men]," Mhlontlo declared, "the words which I wish Mr. Hope to say."³³ The chief led Davis away from the magistrate, out of the great curve of assembled men. Some thirty feet from where Hope and the other whites sat, the chief stopped and turned around. He pointed to Hamilton Hope, and cried out "You Pondomise! There are your chiefs!"³⁴

Six men, all ritual specialists, rushed Hope and the two other white men. Mhlangeni, who also served as one of the chief's counselors, "seized" the magistrate by his long white beard and, "so drawing upwards his head, stabbed him in the breast." Within minutes, all three men were dead. The remaining white, Davis, survived; Mhlontlo saved him because Davis's father and now his brother served as missionaries to the Mpondomise.³⁵ Mhlontlo, Davis reported, "was fighting only against the Government."³⁶ "The English government," Mhlontlo said,

has either entirely changed from what it was doing a few years ago, or it must be ignorant of what its Magistrates are doing. We are harshly treated. We came under the Government in order to gain peace and quietude, instead of which we have been in a continual state of unrest from the treatment we have received. Faith has been broken with us over and over again ... Our cattle are to be branded; our arms are to be taken away; and after that our children are to be seized and carried across the water.

"I shall not be taken alive," Mhlontlo ended, "a man can only die once."³⁷

The chief later refused requests by Davis and his brother to bury the mutilated bodies. They were to remain there as fallen enemies, as carrion for birds and scavenging animals, their bones scattered to the winds; "the bodies must be eaten by birds, or their medicines would not act."³⁸ Mandondo, one of the chief's ritual specialists, mutilated the body "for war purposes."³⁹ Hope's beard was cut off, and his clothes stripped. Mhlangeni wore Hope's trousers and donned his beard. He subsequently led attacks on colonial troops.⁴⁰ A few years later, he was arrested but miraculously managed to escape from the Kokstad jail. Another ritual specialist took the magistrate's coat. On October 24, this man led an attack on the Maclear magistracy, where a colonial official shot him dead. He was wearing the "great bull's" coat.⁴¹

On the day of Hope's death, Mhlontlo organized an escort to bring Davis back to the magistracy. There he packed his bags and fled to a nearby mission station. The telegraph wire had been cut, a few poles destroyed, the telegraph stolen; rebels would destroy most of the telegraph wires that were webbed across the Transkei. Mhlontlo had confiscated the munitions that had arrived the day of Hope's murder: 265 Snyder rifles and 15,750 rounds of ammunition. By October 29, the magistrate's offices and jail had been destroyed by fire.

Before the destruction of the buildings, Mhlontlo briefly occupied the magistracy. He sat in Hope's "great chair," before the law of the man and empire that had ruled over him. The "great table from the house of trials (court-room)" lay before the chief. On it sat "that great book, the book of causes (criminal record book)." A man "turned over the leaves of the book and read aloud from it: 'So-and-so charged with the crime of so-and-so; found guilty; sentenced to so-and-so.'" "And then there would arise a great shout, and the armed warriors would rush upon the book and stab it with their spears, the while they shouted the death shout ... [T]he warriors exulted and laughed aloud and made mock of the Government, who, they said, was now dead."⁴²

Scholars have tended to separate the violence of conquest from the "cultural technologies of rule."⁴³ Maps, censuses, and other statistical operations, the accumulation of ethnographic information, and so on typically follow the crude force of foreign intervention. What is striking about nineteenth-century colonial conquest in the Transkei, however, is precisely how central these technologies were to conquest itself, and to African resistance to imperial expansion. Mapping, censuses, and telegraphy represented a crucial part of conquest.⁴⁴ Africans were as much conquered by bureaucrats as by soldiers, by procedures as by bullets, by institutions, techniques, and Enlightenment rationality as by Snyder-Enfield rifles and the Gatling gun. Culture was from the beginning an essential feature of colonial state formation, not something the state later "discovered" in formulating its policies of segregation and apartheid. What Michel Foucault described as the "science of government" was an integral feature of conquest and state formation, much like the magistrate in J. M. Coetzee's luminous novel, Waiting for the Barbarians, who has accumulated "shelves and shelves of paper ... the records of decades of humdrum administration."⁴⁵ For the most part, violence took place after magistrates had subjected new regions to the technologies of the modern state. The relative absence of initial large-scale violence meant that the principal encounters Africans had were with bureaucrats charged with creating a colonial state.

Certainly, military force remained a possibility. Bureaucrats, however, preferred conquering with paper, forms, censuses, and law books. Officials were instructed to render Africans and the landscape they inhabited cognizable to law and to regular administration. As Hope put it in 1879, his job was "to take cognizance of everything that goes on."⁴⁶ Officials such as Hope typically rendered Africa cognizable through the application of political technologies such as censuses, surveying, and mapping, the application of law, and detailed descriptions of social life.⁴⁷ With the mapping of space came the counting and classification of bodies; the two were closely associated.⁴⁸ Drawing lines and counting people—a preoccupation of the state, indeed, its "classificatory logic"⁴⁹—were among the first duties of new resident magistrates. As with maps, over the course of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries censuses became more accurate and more detailed. To count was to know. To do both involved the creation of fixed categories. As magistrates drew maps, they also collected statistical data so that they could then "fix" colonial subjects on a spatial grid.⁵⁰

The most stereotyped image was that of tribal society. The map and census were important instruments in the creation of a model of African society on which officials could act. Maps and numbers, space and numeracy, made possible the creation of colonial categories that could be fixed spatially, thus allowing for a state-sponsored territorialization of culture. The ethnographic diagram of chiefs' genealogies and the maps of native reserves represent the two endpoints of the fixing of culture in space; in one sense, the latter circumscribed the former. Power and control lay at the center of both. The genealogy is precisely a schematic representation, indeed an instrument, of power and jurisdiction premised on a putative "common characteristic or interest."⁵¹ This location of culture in space constituted an intrinsic feature of conquest and early colonial rule, of rendering Africans cognizable, for example through sedentarization and attempting to create ethnically pure districts. Early state formation entailed bureaucratic attempts to organize space on the basis of homogeneous tribal designations demarcated by administrative boundaries; in fact, early colonial officials forcibly removed Africans designated as belonging to a different "tribe."⁵²

Imperial expansion during the Transkei colonial rule generally proceeded in two waves. The first wave, depending on the area, roughly in the period between the 1850s and the 1870s, consisted of a series of political agreements in which African rulers nominally accepted British rule. In so doing, the British expected them to end political conflicts, glossed in the archive as "tribal wars." Until the late 1870s, the British were not always clear how they intended to rule these new possessions. In some respects, early rule in areas such as Thembuland and further to the east was similar to a protectorate. Few in number and their control nominal, resident magistrates ruled "principally through their own Chiefs and in accordance with Kaffir laws and customs, when not opposed to justice or humanity."⁵³ Chiefs thus retained much of their power. In many areas, chiefs in effect appropriated the first magistrates as part of their attempts to consolidate and extend their power. Generally in this early period, magistrates evinced "an unwillingness to measure" their "power and authority with that of the Chief under" them.⁵⁴

Conquest proceeded mainly through a series of agreements between chiefs and officials. Again, violence typically took place after, not before, colonial rule had been extended over a given area. Chiefs initially agreed to have their people "placed ... under the protection" of the Cape government. Chiefs saw these agreements as so many alliances and, importantly, not recognition of colonial status. Technically, Africans were not colonial subjects, even if "the colonial government had been exercising de facto jurisdiction." And magistrates, including the chief magistrate, the head NAD official in the Transkei, "had no legal status independently of the will of the Chiefs."⁵⁵ This muddled situation changed toward the end of the 1870s, when bureaucrats received instructions from their superiors definitively to reduce the power of chiefs and, in their place, to create an orderly system centered on resident magistrates who would no longer have to act on the sufferance of African rulers.⁵⁶

In 1878, Hamilton Hope became the third magistrate appointed to the Mpondomise. As with other magistrates, Hope spent much of his time gathering statistical data, demarcating boundaries, collecting information on African custom, and, of course, extending the British rule of law.⁵⁷ In the early 1870s, following a period of political expansion and contraction, Mhlontlo and a number of other chiefs in the East Griqualand area had accepted British suzerainty. Hut tax first became payable in 1875. In a long report written at the end of 1877, the second magistrate, William Shaw, confidently asserted, "Magistrates now occupy the position formerly held by the Chiefs."⁵⁸ The official exaggerated; the situation was far more complex. Mhlontlo was not so compliant; indeed, he remained very much committed to expanding his authority. In an 1878 witchcraft case, Mhlontlo had confiscated the property of one of his subjects. The magistrate had intervened, fining the chief fifteen head of cattle. While "he has not refused to pay the demand," Mhlontlo "greatly embarrassed me by his passive opposition and non-compliance."⁵⁹ In other respects, the chief seemed cooperative; officials often had difficulty understanding why a chief might appear pliant in one instance and intractable in another. The chief, for example, "personally afforded" the magistrate's "clerk every assistance in making" a census of his people "as accurate as possible, and in which he evidently took considerable interest."⁶⁰ In this and other instances, the chief was attempting to use the British in such a way as to enlarge his political domain, even as colonial officials were concluding that the chief was submitting to their control.

Hope previously had served in nearby southern Basutoland, where he ruled as the first magistrate over Chief Moorosi. There Hope did his duty as a bureaucrat, deploying the political technologies of the modern state and, if necessary, flogging his subjects. Hope earned the dubious "reputation for being cruel and vindictive."⁶¹ The next magistrate would inherit a discontented people who rebelled shortly after his arrival and then, again, in the Gun War of 1880.⁶²

Hope's reputation surely would have reached Mhlontlo. His arrival among the Mpondomise created some considerable concern. It also offered an opportunity to roll back some of the previous magistrate's efforts to erode chiefly rule. In late August 1878, Mhlontlo called a meeting with the new magistrate. This itself was important. Colonial rituals of subordination usually entailed a new magistrate first calling a meeting of his subjects. Equally important, Mhlontlo attended the meeting, instead of sending his chief counselors and ritual specialists.

The Mpondomise leaders wasted no time. "We are here today about the letter sent by Government appointing you as our Magistrate," said Tyali. "We have not come for anything else." Next, the recently appointed headman Zenzo raised the central issue of the jurisdiction of chiefs and headmen. "We thank Government ... Our first complaint we made to the first Magistrate [Joseph Millerd Orpen] who said your ground is your inheritance. Well I don't see the ground today. Again, I was once a chief, but when Government came I had to give up my chieftainship. I was a chief under Umhlonhlo[;] I am now no longer able to get any fines."⁶³ Others continued in much the same vein. When another headman criticized Shaw's rule, Hope chastized him. He was not deterred: "We want all cases to be taken first to Umhlonhlo." Then Noranga added: "Why do you stop us when we talk about Shaw? He ruled us wrong—he beat us with the 'cats' without the word from the Chief."

Hope was unimpressed:

Some of you have spoken very well, but you are all making one mistake—it is this: That although you admit you are under the Government you seem to expect Government to come down to your level and adopt your customs and let you dictate to the Magistrate ...
You want me always to consult Umhlonhlo—who is the leader—but I will not ... So long as he behaves well and is willing to assist me, I will consult him ... [H]e and the other headmen may act as arbitrators in civil cases, but must not use force to carry out their decisions, and every man may appeal to me before he complies with the judgements of chiefs and headmen—but you must not expect me to send cases to the Chief.

The magistrate ended by saying "that the Government is first and the chief second."⁶⁴

Finally, Mhlontlo spoke. "I asked Mr. Shaw to show me the first letters from Government, those that refer to our being taken over so that we could discuss them, but he declined to go into old matters ... We want you in the presence of the Minister to take those first letters and read them to us so that we can understand the law. The letters are still here, let them be read—they are not dead." Hope ended the meeting. "You were only trying a new horse, to see if you could tease him, and whether he was likely to buck if you were not careful—each [speaker] has had a little ride on him to try, and now that you have seen what sort of horse you have got, I hope you are all satisfied." Laughter followed. The people dispersed.⁶⁵

The meeting in fact had settled little. A November 1878 case of witchcraft accusation raised again the division of power. The case began near the homestead of headman Mtoninzi, who, three months earlier, had publicly criticized Shaw's rule, only to receive the magistrate's sharp admonition. A "man of some importance" had fallen ill. Accusations of witchcraft followed. Hope rescued the accused, who had been "very much injured from the tortures" inflicted by the witch doctor and others, and arrested all the men with the exception of the "wizard" Cekeso. Hope alleged that Mtoninzi "encouraged" the men "to torture her till she produced the charms," and thus had contravened colonial law.⁶⁶

Hope demanded that Mhlontlo attend the trial. The accused "admitted their guilt but said that Mtoninzi had said that I [Hope] had given him authority to torture any one who might be "smelt out" provided he stopped short of killing them." Unimpressed by this argument, Hope fined the men and sentenced them to hard labor, including Mtoninzi, once a chief, then colonial headman, now a convict "breaking stones and wheeling a barrow."⁶⁷

Hope's efforts to accumulate power for himself and for the empire proceeded. In January 1879, he spoke to Mhlontlo concerning the "Mguya" that had just been performed at the chief's home. The Mguya, a central ritual moment for the Mpondomise, celebrated authority and fertility and reaffirmed the heroic status of chiefs as the descendants of men who slew leopards and who brought nourishing rains. The chief explained to Hope that Orpen, the first magistrate, had allowed his people to conduct Mguya. He further explained that, "besides Doctoring the people to strengthen them in case of war," Mguya offered the opportunity for the chief to discuss pressing matters with his people. Nonetheless, Mhlontlo assured Hope "that the ceremony ... had no political significance."⁶⁸ The magistrate was concerned with what he considered to be the political implications of doctoring the army. In short, Hope feared conflict. He left the interview reassured of Mhlontlo's fealty.

Some nine months later, Hope attended a Mguya, at the chief's invitation. For Hope, the ensuing months had been taken up with the collection of hut taxes, land demarcations and resultant boundary and other land disputes, reports to his superiors and discussion of the Moorosi Rebellion taking place in nearby Basutoland, legal cases, and the more mundane duties of bureaucrats living on the frontier.⁶⁹ Hope clearly knew that the ceremony related to issues of political authority; he saw his presence there as part and parcel of his magisterial duties but also as an indication of the superior position of the magistrate vis-à-vis the chief. What Hope did not sufficiently appreciate was the fact that he was entering the most intimate domain of Mpondomise power and ritual, and especially the relationship between the ceremony and agricultural fertility and chiefship.

Confident of his position, Hope redoubled his administrative efforts. He began a campaign of assiduous collection of taxes, including arrears dating back to 1875. Mhlontlo complained in February. In May, the issue had become serious enough for Hope to call for a meeting with the chief, accompanied by about 400 men.⁷⁰ Hope began the meeting by demanding the payment of "all arrears." Mhlontlo immediately countered by demanding "to know where is the record of any meeting called by Mr. Orpen or Mr. Shaw to pay the Hut Tax for 1875." From here, the meeting became rancorous. The government "has not shewn us anything," pronounced one man, who spoke in vino veritas,

or any reason why we should pay the Hut Tax, [W]e have not obtained ground yet to shew we have come under Government ... I have only paid Hut Tax once. I do not see the truth of the Government in not giving us the ground we wanted. This ground has been given to other chiefs. We would like to get some of our ground back. We must grumble, we always do grumble. I will pay Hut Tax when Mhlonhlo pays. Government has him round the neck and is strangling him.⁷¹

Others continued in much the same vein. "We will never hear the truth of our words," Zenzo asserted. "How will people accept a law that has never been proclaimed." At this point, Hope read an extract from an 1874 meeting of Orpen and the Mpondomise concerning hut taxes as a condition of British colonial supremacy. Zenzo promptly fainted.⁷²

Hope began collecting taxes in July, beginning, significantly, with the chief. The chief and his people paid Hope £157 in two days, a considerable sum. "[S]ince then the people generally have come freely to the office" to pay their taxes. Hope "received every assistance from the Chief Umhlonhlo in the collecting of the Tax and the discovery of defaulters."⁷³

In September 1879, one year after becoming magistrate, Hope and his clerk attended a spring Mguya to bring rain and fertility to the land. Hope authorized the ceremony, to which he was invited by the chief. About 400 to 500 people attended, most arriving by horse. In the morning, they "gathered in front of the cattle Kraal and had a dance." In the afternoon, Hope asked the chief "to put his men through some military manoevres which he did with considerable skill and precision."⁷⁴

After a few men of influence spoke, the chief began his speech. He had called "these sons of the great English Bull" to the ceremony. "We are thankful," Mhlontlo said, "that the Magistrate has had sufficient confidence in us to allow us to stretch our legs in a dance, for although our enemies are still saying that we wish to fight against the Government, we are not such fools, and our [Mguya] is a time honored custom amongst us and we guyn [celebrate] in times of peace, and for our harvests." Mhlontlo then instructed his people to pay their taxes. "This is the chief thing that ensures you the protection of Government."⁷⁵

Ever the committed bureaucrat, Hope now believed that his efforts to build the British Empire in the distant Transkei were finally bearing fruit. The land had been mapped, districts and sub-districts demarcated, the people counted and taxed. Hope saw the Mguya as a moment of submission, as affirming the political supremacy and power of the magistrate. What he scarcely understood was that Africans had been busily attempting to appropriate his power so as to bring rain. In doing so, they were placing an important burden on the white official and potentially exposing Hope to new kinds of criticism.

The spring Mguya failed to bring nourishing rains. By the end of the year, large parts of the Transkei were experiencing a severe drought.⁷⁶ In December, Mhlontlo complained of Hope's conduct in criminal proceedings, especially Hope's generous use of the whip. Again, the chief returned to the earliest years of colonial rule. Mhlontlo asked "that Mr. Orpen should be here, and we wish to talk to him ... as our first Magistrate + Governor. We wish to speak to him before our good Magistrate" Hope.⁷⁷

Crisis loomed by March 1880, when green maize is eaten and Africans throughout the Transkei celebrate first fruits —a central ceremony in the creation and reconstitution of political society. The crops, as Hope later wrote, were an "entire failure."⁷⁸ Nor was this all. Mhlontlo's principal wife had fallen ill early in the spring and was "slowly dying of a lingering disease."⁷⁹ Hope was also unwell. He had been sick for some time and was finding his work "very exhausting."⁸⁰

In March, as drought gripped the land and the chief's wife lay sick from a disease that lingered like the dry days, chief and magistrate again locked horns, again around the resolution of disputes. One of the chief's sisters had been slighted "on her way down to her husband," an important moment in the marriage ceremony. Moreover, "a lot of young men attacked and rather maltreated her [bridal] escort."⁸¹

Mhlontlo leapt into action, fining the attackers and sending a leopard's tail to a man who had made insulting remarks to the bridal party. The brouhaha constituted a "blood case" and thus involved fines. Not surprisingly, the magistrate learned of the conflict and, especially, that the chief had acted "with his usual impetuosity."⁸² Hope informed the local headman that no one "but myself had the power to enforce any fines" and was soon threatening people with humiliating flogging. But Hope went one step further. Not only did the magistrate order his chief constable to confiscate the leopard tail, he had it returned to Mhlontlo.

Sending the leopard tail, a sacred emblem among the Mpondomise, back to the chief was a great insult and outrage. The chief "had flown at" the policeman "in a great rage, refused to hear any message and ordered him off the premises with the tiger tail, which he was to take back to where he got it." But the policeman refused, leaving the leopard tail at the chief's residence. Only after some of the chief's men threatened him with death did the functionary take the tail away.⁸³

The affair of the leopard tail involved complex and highly charged meanings. For Hope, the chief's sending the leopard tail meant that, once again, Mhlontlo was refusing to recognize British rule. For the chief, as for other Africans, the tail meant much more, particularly in the context of drought. It symbolized not simply chiefship but also, and importantly, the mytho-historical relationship between authority and the land. Not surprisingly, and indeed seemingly inexorably, the fracas of the leopard tail led to a large meeting of the magistrate and his subjects, which about 900 people attended, roughly twice the size of Hope's previous meetings with the Mpondomise. Chief Mhlontlo did not attend, although his principal praise singer and war doctor did. Both spoke. So, of course, did Hamilton Hope, who reiterated that only the magistrate could levy fines. He also took possession of the leopard tail, the use of which he declared was illegal. Hope admonished the chief and instructed all assembled that they "must look to the Magistrate for [their] orders."

Coming armed as you did the other day. My Police have been insulted. The people have come here armed. No one must insult or come armed. I will tell you when to come armed ... There are some things I wish attended to. You must pay up your Hut Tax.

The tax, Hope argued, was the "grease of the wagon" of rule. The magistrate ended his disquisition by banning Sunday beer drinks.⁸⁴

The chief's praise singer saw things somewhat differently. He pointed out the relative impotence of headmen. Soon, the meeting began unraveling; Hope's threats to flog people did not help matters. The men in effect began arguing the case and, at the same time, protesting the position of headmen and the banning of Sunday beer drinks. One man pointed out how Hope and Mhlontlo "were friends and they now seem at variance. Speak you wizards who did this." He had spoken of what had been silent: the use of magic in the creation of political conflict. For the drought, Mhlontlo's wife's illness, and the rising political temperature all indicated the use of powerful and malevolent magic. Hope concluded the meeting, returning to the issue of the powers of headmen. "The Headmen wanting more power is an old tale," he began.

All they want is to be able to "eat up" people's cattle. You Headmen have power to settle garden disputes, to bring people to the office who have delayed in paying their Hut Tax, that is enough power for you to have, and that is all you will get ... I am over the Headmen, and not they over me ... "Smelling out" [witchcraft accusations] I hear is in existence, if I find out such a thing I will inflict a very severe punishment.

Hope then announced he was going away, and that his clerk would be collecting hut taxes.⁸⁵ He would return to his death. In the meantime, drought continued ravaging the area. Mhlontlo's crops had failed; he was forced to sell a considerable number of his cattle to purchase £200 worth of grain. His wife's illness progressed. But August is usually one of the driest months. Would the spring rains come?

Mhlontlo's wife died in early October 1880. By this time, war had broken out in Basutoland and in neighboring Griqualand East, the Gun War of 1880. Soon, virtually all of Basutoland and much of the Transkei was in open rebellion, the largest conflict ever to have engulfed this region. By the middle of the month, the chief was busily "organising his tribe and Doctoring them." Hope reported seeing "armed parties ... hovering round on the hills." The question for the magistrate was whether the Mpondomise would rebel or ally themselves with the British.⁸⁶ Heavy spring rains were falling. Hope still felt unwell. On October 19, Hope received a letter from the missionary Stephen Adonis warning him that Mhlontlo "meant treachery" and that "mutiny had been all along intended and on a certain day [would be] carried out."⁸⁷ Three days later, the magistrate at nearby Maclear had "grave reasons from reliable information" of "an intended plot."⁸⁸ Yet Hope pressed on to Sulenmaka through a rain that, to him, seemed "incessant."⁸⁹ Clearly, Chief Mhlontlo was rebuilding his power. Hope may not have fully known it, but by the end of the second week of October the magistrate was "now dancing to" the chief's "fiddle in every possible manner." The chief was "delighted to wait a little bit."⁹⁰

It was in a setting of quenching rains and incipient rebellion that Hope met his death before the largest assembling of Mpondomise the magistrate had ever witnessed. Mguya were moments when the institution of chiefship was exposed and potentially open to criticism as well as reaffirmed and expanded. Hope as chief was overthrown so that Mhlontlo's chieftaincy could be reaffirmed. The morning before Hope's death, Mhlontlo had sat apart, the once vanquished and now exalted chief participating in and surveying the reconstitution of the chiefship and the return of social health before a grand and extremely charged political ceremony. Messengers moving between the army and the chief crawled to and from him, in movements of exaggerated deference.

Hope's murder, then, destroyed at least temporarily the colonial accumulation of power and the attempt to build legitimacy on the edge of empire. His demise, already indicated by his ill health, rebuilt the chiefship, strengthened the Mpondomise army in their coming war with the British, and brought rain. Hope was not only killed but also was ritually murdered, or should I say sacrificed, a "great bull" killed to renew society and polity.⁹¹

Hamilton Hope had at his disposal the political technologies of the modern state. He used them assiduously. He mapped the land and created administrative districts based on the fiction of pure tribes. He counted people and property. He presided over legal proceedings. Hope also issued passes for Africans traveling out of the district. He communicated with his superiors through letters and the telegraph—an indispensable technology in addressing that "great question of the government of the Natives"⁹²—that had been installed in the magistracy the year before he assumed his command at Qumbu. Like bureaucrats elsewhere, Hope pushed a lot of paper.

Even if the state's control remained weak, by the late 1870s its presence had become ubiquitous. The political technologies of conquest and colonial rule had a conspicuous place in the African resistance of the early 1880s. Rebels stole telegraph machines, telegraph wires, and the paper on which a bureaucratic order rested. Africans also appropriated colonial procedures, particularly the criminal trial. Mhlontlo became Hamilton Hope when the chief occupied the magistracy and oversaw a mock trial. This was not the only case of such mimicry. In Thembuland to the west, warriors looted and burned to the ground the magistracy of Walter Stanford, who later became chief magistrate for Griqualand East, central member of the 1881 Native Laws and Customs Commission, undersecretary for Native Affairs, chief magistrate of the Transkei, and knight of the realm— in short, a man of exceptional status, to African and European alike. But not before a "high festival" in his office overseen by the rebel chief Dalasile.

A blanketed warrior representing Ndabeni (myself) occupied the judicial bench. Another on a chair below was addressed as Lufele (Daniel). Then a mock prisoner was placed in the dock and the form of a criminal trial was mimicked with keen humour. Nor was Webb (Umquwu) the chief constable left out of the piece. At the conclusion of the dramatic entertainment, the offices, our houses, and the police huts, were set on fire.⁹³

We now know that the languages of the dominated were never simply its own. What is less clear is how the "hidden transcripts" of resistance came to be written, as it were, using the material culture and institutional practices of a political order the colonized critiqued and contested.⁹⁴ South Africa has a rich tradition of such appropriation, extending from the birth of the modern state in the nineteenth century well into the twentieth-century triumph of segregation and apartheid.⁹⁵ Luise White recently has written of the stories Africans in East and Central Africa told each other about firemen and vampires, employees of the colonial state who people believed practiced a most malevolent magic. White explores the emergence of vampire beliefs as a rich and malleable commentary on people's anxieties, their concern with evil and misfortune, and the ways they imagined themselves and others in the colonial period. What is especially striking in this envisioning of the world is the centrality of state institutions and practices. The most commonplace administrative features of the colonial state—firemen, police, game rangers, surveyors—helped sustain the most extraordinary conceptions of how the world worked.⁹⁶

Precisely because of these complications, precisely because colonial rule was never simply an act of foreign imposition, the state became an ineluctable part of the subaltern political imagination. Fascinated with modern power, especially the bureaucratic power of the state, Africans sought the locations of modernity's magic. This was not without irony. By entering into a conversation with modern power, Africans participated in its dissemination. Resistance necessarily entails the production of difference in the constitution and reconstitution of political subjectivities, but these were ambiguous productions because of their intimate relationship to state formation. The inclusion of Hamilton Hope—his body and the world of which he was a part—into the political imagination of the Mpondomise also marked "the assumption of subaltern status."⁹⁷ A quintessential act of resistance became also the remembered moment of colonial subjugation.

David Cannadine has ably demonstrated how the British transferred their conceptions of status and hierarchy to their relationships with indigenous rulers, and in so doing he has emphasized what they had in common with kings and princes instead of what separated them. In the Transkei, and elsewhere in Africa, the recently colonized were doing much the same, by translating Europeans into their own conceptions of the world. Particularly striking are the ways in which Africans believed that Europeans, including bureaucrats, used malevolent magic, in short, that officials were witches, or more precisely witch-chiefs.⁹⁸ Michael Herzfeld has written, "Bureaucrats work on the categories of social existence in much the same way as sorcerers are supposed to work on the hair or nail clippings of their intended victims."⁹⁹ Much of the insidious power of witches stems from their panoptic surveillance of the victims. Unencumbered by ethical or moral obligations, their cool calculating behavior has as its goal the attainment of a single object—selfish appropriation at another's tragic expense. Witches, and of course the modern state as well, depend on the accumulation of detailed and often intimate information. The very political technologies Hope so energetically deployed awakened in Africans the specter of witchcraft.¹⁰⁰

An interest in culture thus might usefully be turned to the study of politics, state formation, and African resistance in the colonial era. Recent emphasis on the capillary forms of power not surprisingly had led to a sense that the study of the state was old-fashioned. When scholars have analyzed the state in Africa, they typically have seen it as the "geographical extension of the metropolitan state,"¹⁰¹ its specificity determined by how the state grappled with capitalist development and especially the "native question."¹⁰² It is certainly true, as Cooper has argued, that the "political base" of the colonial state, "and the point from which the cultural and social background of its officers emanates, is distinct from the social formation in which it acts."¹⁰³ The death of Hope, however, suggests a more complicated picture, a blurring of the foreignness of colonial domination. Focusing on conquest as cross-cultural encounter offers historians a way of understanding the nature and daily exercise of domination and resistance and the imbricated histories of ruler and ruled, as Africans translated the European political world into indigenous concepts and practices and Europeans intentionally or inadvertently wore the political mask of the very people they were busily conquering. In so doing, it offers one way of transforming older approaches to both social and political history, by focusing on state formation and on the ways in which various historical actors made claims to dominance and control.¹⁰⁴

What of Mhlontlo? The chief fled into the mountains of Lesotho, where he lived for some two decades in exile and as a fugitive. In 1903, however, the colonial authorities apprehended him. In a long trial ending in May 1904, Mhlontlo faced charges for the murders of Hope and the other white men. The case received widespread attention. Under colonial South Africa's bifurcated legal system, Africans were members of tribal groups and liable to customary law in civil matters. In criminal matters, however, Africans were tried as individuals, and the law was, in theory at least, culture blind. Before the white man's court, the chief's actions were in effect removed from their cultural context, a context in which a different set of rationalities had been operating. Not surprisingly, after deliberating only twenty-five minutes, the jury returned with the verdict of not guilty. The chief, after all, had never laid a hand on the deceased. According to one account, the "verdict was received with breathless interest and elicited shouts from the natives in Court, which were immediately suppressed." Mhlontlo thanked the judge and, outside the court, received "many congratulatory remarks and offerings from natives. So ended a trial," the local newspaper concluded, "which has evoked no small interest on account of the revival of a tragedy which at the time of its occurrence thrilled both Europeans and natives."¹⁰⁵ In 1906, Mhlontlo returned to his home, not as a chief but as a simple commoner. He died in 1912, living on barren land, "poor, in debt, and having to purchase grain for his family."¹⁰⁶

The death of Hope and the memory of Mhlontlo continue to breathe life into public discourse on the past and present during a time of important political transition and reconstruction in South Africa. Mpondomise tribal leaders have called for the "restoration of its lost kingdom,"¹⁰⁷ in effect a return to imagined pre-colonial borders and a heroic history. Increasingly, people have spoken publicly of a Mpondomise past, of valorous chiefs, and especially of the loss of land at the hands of British conquerors. In August 2000, plans were being made to honor Mhlontlo in order to correct "those historical imbalances and restore back to the community what is truly theirs ... His only crime was to resist oppression and the death of the then Qumbu magistrate, Mr. Hamilton Hope."¹⁰⁸ People have invoked sacred symbols and have awakened a vision of politics that connected historical and political legitimacy to the land and the rains that originate high in the hills and mountains of Lesotho, a politics not of evil but of fertility and social health. Indeed, at one celebration, five molesnakes "made a mysterious appearance at the laying of a tombstone." The serpents' appearance was a harbinger of "peace ... and an occasion for joy." In welcoming the snakes, "prayers for rain were also offered. Before the end of the day, it was raining cats and dogs."¹⁰⁹

I presented earlier versions of this article at the 2000 Northeast Workshop on Southern Africa and at the "Reimagining South Africa and the Political Imagination of South Africans" conference at the University of Michigan. I would especially like to thank the editors and readers at the AHR for their comments and suggestions. The National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Stanford Humanities Center provided research support. Unless otherwise indicated, all archival references are located in the Cape Town Archives Repository, Cape Town, South Africa (hereafter, CTAR).

Clifton Crais is a professor of history at Kenyon College. He received his PhD in 1988 from Johns Hopkins University. His research and writing have focused on colonialism and resistance in South Africa, slavery and emancipation, political culture and political movements, and the history of vulnerability and poverty. He is the author ofWhite Supremacy and Black Resistance in Pre-Industrial South Africa (1992), and The Politics of Evil (2002), editor of The Culture of Power in Southern Africa (2003), and co-editor with Nigel Worden of Breaking the Chains (2001). He is completing a book-length project on rural poverty and, with Pamela Scully, is co-authoring a biography of Sarah Baartman, more famously known as the "Hottentot Venus."

Notes

¹�For Africa, see, for example, Achille Mbembe, "The Banality of Power and the Aesthetics of Vulgarity in the Post-Colony,"Public Culture 4, no. 2 (Spring 1992): 1–30;Jean-François Bayart, The State in Africa: The Politics of the Belly, Mary Harper, trans. (London, 1993); Clifton C. Crais, ed., The Culture of Power in Southern Africa: Essays on State Formation and the Political Imagination (Portsmouth, N.H., 2003). On ethnicity, see Carolyn Hamilton, Terrific Majesty: The Powers of Shaka Zulu and the Limits of Historical Invention (Cambridge, Mass., 1998). For a more traditional approach, see Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton, N.J., 1996).

²�Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York, 1978). See also Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel and Transculturation (London, 1992); Stephen Greenblatt, ed., New World Encounters (Berkeley, Calif., 1993). Said'sOrientalism was the subject of a symposium in this journal:AHR 104 (October 2000). Quite explicitly criticizing Said and those who have followed in his footsteps, David Cannadine recently has questioned the scholarly predilection to find an imperial world rife with race and difference. Cannadine, Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire (Oxford, 2001).

³�Susan Thorne, Congregational Missions and the Making of an Imperial Culture in Nineteenth-Century England (Stanford, Calif., 1999).

⁴�Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York, 1973). See also Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession(Cambridge, 1988), 548–55.

⁵�Nicholas B. Dirks, ed., Colonialism and Culture (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1992), 3. See also Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, N.C., 1995), 16.

⁶�See, for example, Jean and John L. Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, Vol. 2: The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier (Chicago, 1997), 218–73, which addresses clothing. Other chapters look at writing, cultivation, currency, architecture, and medicine. This is the second of a planned three-volume project. The first volume is titled Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa (Chicago, 1991). Both volumes were the subject of special reviews in the AHR108 (April 2003).

⁷�Comaroff and Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, 2:16.

⁸�Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher, with Alice Denny, Africa and the Victorians: The Official Mind of Imperialism(New York, 1961). The book went through numerous reprintings. Current events may lead to a return to political history as scholars and others contemplate an American empire. See, for example, Emily Eakin, "'It Takes an Empire, Say Several U.S. Thinkers,"International Herald Tribune, April 2, 2002; Robert D. Kaplan, Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos (New York, 2001); Chalmers A. Johnson, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire (New York, 2000); Joseph S. Nye, Jr., The Paradox of American Power: Why the World's Only Superpower Can't Go It Alone (New York, 2002).

⁹�See, for example, Arjun Appadurai, "Number in the Colonial Imagination," in Carol A. Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer, eds., Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia (Philadelphia, 1993). See also C. A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge, 1996); Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton, N.J., 1996); and, most recently, Nicholas B. Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton, 2001).

¹⁰�See, for example, T. O. Beidelman, Colonial Evangelism: A Socio-Historical Study of an East African Mission at the Grassroots (Bloomington, Ind., 1982); Comaroff and Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution; Paul Stuart Landau, The Realm of the Word: Language, Gender, and Christianity in a Southern African Kingdom (Portsmouth, 1995). For one critique, see Terence Ranger, "Africa in the Age of Extremes: The Irrelevance of African History," in Simon A. McGrath and Christopher Fyfe, eds., Rethinking African History (Edinburgh, 1997). Particularlyin South African historical studies, political historians continue to analyze the state according to the promulgation of policies and the success or failure of its intervention in rural and urban society, terms very much established by the state itself. See, for example, Adam Ashforth, The Politics of Official Discourse in Twentieth-Century South Africa (Oxford, 1992); Belinda Bozzoli, The Political Nature of a Ruling Class: Capital and Ideology in South Africa, 1890–1933 (London, 1981); Saul Dubow, Racial Segregation and the Origins of Apartheid in South Africa, 1919–36(Houndmills, 1989); Deborah Posel, The Making of Apartheid, 1948–1961: Conflict and Compromise (Oxford, 1991). Social historians remain largely preoccupied with detailing who did what to whom when, and how that who—defined as peasant, worker, tribesman, or on the basis of gender—reacted to European imposition. In the best work, the colonized are shown to have either accommodated themselves to rule or reacted against an external imposition that remained intrinsically foreign. See, for example, William Beinart and Colin Bundy, Hidden Struggles in Rural South Africa: Politics and Popular Movements in the Transkei and Eastern Cape, 1890–1930(Berkeley, Calif., 1987); Fred T. Hendricks, The Pillars of Apartheid: Land Tenure, Rural Planning and the Chieftaincy(Uppsala, 1990); Peter Delius, A Lion amongst the Cattle:Reconstruction and Resistance in the Northern Transvaal(Portsmouth, N.H., 1996).

¹¹�Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, eds., Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley, Calif., 1997), 21.

¹²�See, for example, Allen Wells and Gilbert M. Joseph, Summer of Discontent, Seasons of Upheaval: Elite Politics and Rural Insurgency in Yucatán, 1876–1917 (Stanford, Calif., 1996); Gilbert Joseph and Daniel Nugent, Everyday Forms of State Formation:Revolution and Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico (Durham, N.C., 1994).

¹³�Philip Corrigan, "State Formation," in Joseph and Nugent, Everyday Forms of State Formation, xvii.

¹⁴�Derek Sayer, "Dissident Remarks on Hegemony," in Joseph and Nugent, Everyday Forms of State Formation, 371. Sayer is here discussing Philip Abrams, "Some Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State," Journal of Historical Sociology 1, no. 1 (March 1988): 58–89.

¹⁵�Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge, 1991), 50. See also Stuart B. Schwartz, ed., Implicit Understandings:Observing, Reporting, and Reflecting on the Encounters between Europeans and Other Peoples in the Early Modern Era (New York, 1994). The administrative revolution is discussed in Philip D. Curtin, The World and the West: The European Challenge and the Overseas Response in the Age of Empire (Cambridge, 2000).

¹⁶�Magistrates often commented on the social and cultural distance that separated them and the political system they were creating from indigenous political structures and processes; after all, they felt they represented islands of civilization in a sea of barbarism.

¹⁷�For one important exception, see Michael Crowder, The Flogging of Phinehas McIntosh: A Tale of Colonial Folly and Injustice; Bechuanal and, 1933 (New Haven, Conn., 1988).

¹⁸�Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other, Richard Howard, trans. (New York, 1984), 250.

¹⁹�For a general history of the region, see T. R. H. Davenport and Christopher C. Saunders, South Africa: A Modern History, 5th edn. (London, 2000).

²⁰�For an overview, see Howard Rogers, Native Administration in the Union of South Africa (Johannesburg, 1933).

²¹�From the end of the nineteenth century, the Transkei became especially important as a testing ground for new colonial policies ranging from indirect rule to agricultural management, particularly as Transkeian migrants came to represent a larger and larger proportion of an emerging migrant working class. In the apartheid era, the Transkei represented the lynchpin for the "homeland" policies of separate development. For background, see John S. Galbraith, Reluctant Empire: British Policy on the South African Frontier, 1834–1854(Berkeley, Calif., 1963); Jeffrey B. Peires, The House of Phalo: A History of the Xhosa People in the Days of Their Independence(Berkeley, 1981); Clifton C. Crais, White Supremacy and Black Resistance in Pre-industrial South Africa: The Making of the Colonial Order in the Eastern Cape, 1770–1865 (Cambridge, 1992); Beinart and Bundy, Hidden Struggles. See also Mamdani, Citizen and Subject.

²²�On the African race for power, see John Lonsdale, "The European Scramble," in J. D. Fage and Rolan Oliver, eds., The Cambridge History of Africa, vol. 6 (Cambridge, 1985). See also John Lonsdale and Bruce Berman, Unhappy Valley: Conflict in Kenya and Africa (Athens, Ohio, 1992).

²³�I explore this story in greater detail in Clifton Crais, The Politics of Evil: Magic, State Power, and the Political Imagination in South Africa (Cambridge, 2002).

²⁴�CTAR, Chief Magistrate, Kokstad (hereafter, CMK) 1/152, Hamilton Hope to Chief Magistrate, Kokstad, October 14, 1880. See also CMK1/152, Hope to Chief Magistrate, Kokstad, October 19, 1880; Resident Magistrate, Maclear, to Chief Magistrate, Kokstad, October 22, 1880.

²⁵�Hope to A. E. Davis, October 19, 1880, in "Historical Record of the Murder of Hamilton Hope," typescript originally compiled by W. C. Henman, photocopy in possession of author.

²⁶�CTAR, Native Affairs (hereafter, NA) 20, Davis to Secretary for Native Affairs, October 29, 1880.

²⁷�See Michael W. Doyle, Empires (Ithaca, N.Y., 1986), 142, for statistical material on British imperial expansion.

²⁸�CMK 1/152, Hope to Chief Magistrate, Kokstad, October 22, 1880;W. T. Brownlie, Reminiscences of a Transkeian(Pietermaritzburg, 1975), 82.

²⁹�NA 20, Davis to Secretary for Native Affairs, October 29, 1880;Brownlie, Reminiscences, 82.

³⁰�NA 20, Davis to Secretary for Native Affairs, October 29, 1880.

³¹�Brownlie, Reminiscences, 83; Fort Beaufort Advocate, November 5, 1880, in "Historical Record."

³²�Brownlie, Reminiscences, 83.

³³�Emphasis mine. NA 20, Davis to Secretary for Native Affairs, October 29, 1880.

³⁴�Brownlie, Reminiscences, 84.

³⁵�Brownlie, Reminiscences, 84; NA 20, Davis to Secretary for Native Affairs, October 29, 1880.

³⁶�NA 20, Davis to Secretary for Native Affairs, October 29, 1880;(University of Cape Town, hereafter UCT); BC 293, Walter Stanford to[?], November 23, 1880.

³⁷�Eastern Star, November 23, 1880, in "Historical Record."

³⁸�Eastern Star, November 23, 1880, in "Historical Record." "The fowls of the air (aasvogels) should eat them, or the witch doctor's medicine would not act." Port Elizabeth Telegraph and Eastern Province Standard, November 26, 1880, in"Historical Record."

³⁹�(UCT) BC 293, B116.39, William P. Leary to Stanford, June 29, 1922. This also occurred in the Bhambata Rebellion of 1906–1908 in Natal, where a European's body was mutilated to strengthen the warriors. See Benedict Carton, Blood from Your Children: The Colonial Origins of Generational Conflict in South Africa(Charlottesville, Va., 2000), 134.

⁴⁰�CMK 1/94, Leary to officer commanding, May 2, 1881.

⁴¹�(UCT) BC 293, B116.39, Leary to Stanford, June 29, 1922; Brownlie, Reminiscences, 112, 84.

⁴²�Brownlie, Reminiscences, 88. Hope was not the only magistrate whose power was mocked in the great rebellion of 1880–1881. See below and Crais, Politics of Evil, 39.

⁴³�Dirks, Castes of Mind, 9: Dirks is aware of the role of this cultural history in making colonialism possible, but still holdson to periodization that emphasizes the crude brutality "of conquest that first established power on foreign shores."

⁴⁴�On shipping and telegraphy, see Daniel R. Headrick, The Tentacles of Progress: Technology Transfer in the Age of Imperialism, 1850–1940 (New York, 1988), 18–48, 97–144; see also Rudolf Mrazek, Engineers of Happy Land: Technology and Nationalism in a Colony (Princeton, N.J., 2002). Jeremy Black, Maps and Politics (Chicago, 1997); see also Mary Poovey, "The Production of Abstract Space," in Susan Hardy Aiken, et al., Making Worlds: Gender, Metaphor, Materiality (Tucson, Ariz., 1998). On the earlier period, see Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of Possession in Europe's Conquest of the New World, 1492–1640 (New York, 1995), esp. 16–40.

⁴⁵�J. M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians (New York, 1980), 23; Michel Foucault, "Governmentality," in Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller, eds., The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality; With Two Lectures by and an Interview with Michel Foucault (Chicago, 1991), 99.

⁴⁶�CMK 1/94, minutes of meeting, December 23, 1879. The study of knowledge and colonialism has been of particular importance to scholars of Asian history. See, for example, Appadurai, "Number in the Colonial Imagination." See also Bayly, Empire and Information; Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge; and, of course, Said, Orientalism.

⁴⁷�See Said, Orientalism; Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge; Dirks, Colonialism and Culture; Stoler, Race. On surveying, see D. Graham Burnett, Masters of All They Surveyed: Exploration, Geography, and a British El Dorado (Chicago, 2000).

⁴⁸�Silvana Patriarca, Numbers and Nationhood: Writing Statistics in Nineteenth-Century Italy (Cambridge, 1996), 50.

⁴⁹�Appadurai, "Number in the Colonial Imagination," 315.

⁵⁰�"The modern colonial state," Appadurai has argued with respect to the British in India, "brings together the exoticizing vision of orientalism with the familiarizing discourse of statistics. In the process, the body of the colonial subject is made simultaneously strange and docile ... [S]tatistics are to bodies and social types what maps are to territories: they flatten and enclose.""Number in the Colonial Imagination," 333–34. See also Richard Saumarez Smith, Rule by Records: Land Registration and Village Custom in Early Punjab (Delhi, 1996); Martin Moir, "Kaghazi Raj: Notes on the Documentary Basis of Company Rule: 1773–1858,"Indo-British Review 21, no. 2 (1993): 185–93. Moregenerally, see Mary Poovey, Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 1830–1864 (Chicago, 1995); Poovey, History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago, 1998).

⁵¹�Black's Law Dictionary, 7th edn. (St. Paul, Minn., 1999).

⁵²�See also Dirks, Colonialism and Culture, 3; Stoler, Race, 16, on the importance of culture and the creation of colonial orders. This concern with locating culture geographically grew inversely to the rise of migrant labor, which spread people from the reserves over the entire expanse of South Africa. As capitalism seemed to lead to the dispersion of people, raising in the twentieth century the specter of detribalization, officials redoubled their efforts to ensure that colonial subjects could not escape their tribal appellations. See Crais, Politics of Evil, 145–64.

⁵³�(UCT) BC 293, D10, manuscript of Rev. E. J. Warner containing the history of his father, Rev. Joseph Cox Warner, n.d., typescript.

⁵⁴�(UCT) BC 293, B2631, Edmonstone Judge and Col. J. M. Grant to Secretary for Native Affairs, December 30, 1872. Early policyis described in Colonial Office (hereafter, CO) 4521, John James Graham, "Unannexed Tembuland," August 16, 1881; CO 1156, James W. Leonard, Opinion, April 23, 1881.

⁵⁵�CO 4521, Graham, "Unannexed Tembuland," August 16, 1881.

⁵⁶�In 1877, the colony annexed Griqualand East and the region between the Kei and Bashee rivers. Griqualand East had received its first magistrate six years earlier; annexation formalized a prior process of colonial conquest, making de jure what was in many respects already defacto. In 1884, Mqikela, the Pondo paramount chief and son of Faku who had led Pondoland on the road of political centralization, quite literally sold Port Saint Johns in return for a yearly subsidy. In 1885, the colony annexed Thembuland, Emigrant Thembuland, Gcalekaland, and Bomvanaland. The following year saw the incorporation of the rest of the Transkei barring Pondoland, which was annexed to the colony in 1894. By this time, with the exception of Pondoland, the Cape had annexed the entire Transkei, a region of over 20,000 square miles. See also F. Brownlie, The Transkeian Native Territories: Historical Records (Lovedale, 1923).

⁵⁷�See CMK 1/94, Hope to Brownlie, September 4, 1879; CMT 1/94, Hope to Davis, August 6, 1879; CMT 1/53, Hope to Henry Elliot, July 24, 1879; Crais, Politics of Evil, 68–95.

⁵⁸�NA 158, William Shaw, Report, January 1878.

⁵⁹�NA 158, Shaw, Report, January 1878.

⁶⁰�NA 158, Shaw, Report, January 1878.

⁶¹�Anthony Atmore, "Moorosi's Rebellion: Lesotho, 1879," in Robert I. Rotberg and Ali A. Mazrui, eds., Protest and Power in Black Africa (New York, 1970).

⁶²�See Atmore, "Moorosi's Rebellion"; Judy Kimble, "Labour Migration in Basutoland, c. 1870–1885," in Shula Marks and Richard Rathbone, eds., Industrialisation and Social Change in South Africa (London, 1982), 119–41. The colonial administration had introduced a new policy aimed at disarming Africans.

⁶³�NA 158, minutes of meeting, August 22, 1878.

⁶⁴�NA 158, minutes of meeting, August 22, 1878.

⁶⁵�NA 158, minutes of meeting, August 22, 1878.

⁶⁶�NA 158, Hope to Secretary for Native Affairs, November 26, 1878.

⁶⁷�NA 158, Hope to Secretary for Native Affairs, November 26, 1878.

⁶⁸�CMK 1/94, Hope to Chief Magistrate, Kokstad, January 17, 1879.

⁶⁹�See below and CMK 1/94, Hope to Brownlie, September 4, 1879; NA18, Grant to Elliot, March 5, 1880.

⁷⁰�CMK 1/94, Hope to Brownlie, February 21, 1879; CMK 1/94, Hope to Brownlie, April 5, 1879; CMK 1/94, meeting of May 3, 1879.

⁷¹�CMK 1/94, meeting of May 3, 1879.

⁷²�CMK 1/94, meeting of May 3, 1879.

⁷³�CMK 1/94, Hope to Chief Magistrate, Kokstad, May 21, 1879.

⁷⁴�CMK 1/94, Hope to Chief Magistrate, Kokstad, September 19, 1879.

⁷⁵�CMK 1/94, Hope to Chief Magistrate, Kokstad, September 19, 1879.

⁷⁶�See, for example, NA 18, William G. Cumming to Chief Magistrate, Tembuland, January 10, 1880.

⁷⁷�CMK 1/94, Mhlontlo to Hope, December 20, 1879.

⁷⁸�CMK 1/94, Hope to Chief Magistrate, Kokstad, August 25, 1880.

⁷⁹�CMK 1/94, Hope to Chief Magistrate, Kokstad, August 25, 1880.

⁸⁰�CMK 1/94, Hope to Chief Magistrate, Kokstad, March 13, 1880.

⁸¹�CMK 1/94, Hope to Chief Magistrate, Kokstad, March 13, 1880.

⁸²�CMK 1/94, Hope to Chief Magistrate, Kokstad, March 13, 1880.

⁸³�CMK 1/94, Hope to Chief Magistrate, Kokstad, March 13, 1880.

⁸⁴�CMK 1/94, meeting of March 23, 1880.

⁸⁵�CMK 1/94, meeting of March 23, 1880.

⁸⁶�CMK 1/152, Hope to Chief Magistrate, Kokstad, October 14, 1880.

⁸⁷�CMK 1/152, Hope to Chief Magistrate, Kokstad, October 19, 1880.

⁸⁸�CMK 1/152, Resident Magistrate, Maclear, to Chief Magistrate, Kokstad, October 22, 1880.

⁸⁹�CMK 1/152, Hope to Chief Magistrate, Kokstad, October 19, 1880.

⁹⁰�A215, Hope to John R. Thomson, October 19, 1880. Thomson was magistrate at Maclear.

⁹¹�CMK 1/94, Hope to Chief Magistrate, Kokstad, September 19, 1879.

⁹²�NA 158, Shaw, Report, December 31, 1877.

⁹³�J. W. MacQuarrie, The Reminiscences of Sir Walter Stanford, 2 vols. (Cape Town, 1958), 1: 131. See also 1/ECO 4/1/1, statement of Mangele, March 8, 1881.

⁹⁴�James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance:Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, Conn., 1990). For Mikhail Bakhtin, the carnivalesque was "the ritual location of uninhibited speech ... the only place where undominated discourseprevailed." Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, 175. See also Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, Helene Iswolsky, trans. (Bloomington, Ind., 1984).

⁹⁵�See Crais, Politics of Evil.

⁹⁶�Luise White, Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa (Berkeley, Calif., 2000). On witchcraft in Africa, see, for example, E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande (Oxford, 1937); Max Gluckman, ed., The Allocation of Responsibility (Manchester, 1972); Mary Douglas, ed., Witchcraft Confessions and Accusations(London, 1970). See also Peter Geschiere, Modernity of Witchcraft: Politics and the Occult in Postcolonial Africa(Charlottesville, Va., 1997); Adam Ashforth, Madumo: A Man Bewitched (Chicago, 2000).

⁹⁷�Marshall Sahlins, How "Natives" Think, About Captain Cook, For Example (Chicago, 1995), 188.

⁹⁸�Historians have written of the paradoxical nature of authority and its relation to magic. We have noted the importance of precedence, that chiefs descended from pioneers and thus were considered to have a special relationship to the land and to the forces that protect it and make it bountiful. Access to and control over magic was connected to their pioneer status. Jan Vansina, Paths in the Rainforest: Toward a History of Political Tradition in Equatorial Africa(Madison, Wis., 1990), 97, has written that leaders "had extraordinary powers, identical with and often superior to those of witches ... A battery of charms helped him to repel the attacks of witches, and his own witchcraft killed competitors or subjects." And yet, paradoxically, witchcraft was both "an ideology of equality and cooperation" and central to political competition and the centralization of power. Equally paradoxically, the chief embodied collective identity and was simultaneously the most individualistic of figures, capable of behavior that could extend well beyond ethical norms. They both made and unmade the world. See also Igor Kopytoff, ed., The African Frontier: The Reproduction of Traditional African Societies (Bloomington, Ind., 1987). On magic and agriculture in Europe, see, for example, Carlo Ginzburg, The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, John and Anne Tedeschi, trans. (Baltimore, 1983).

⁹⁹�Michael Herzfeld, The Social Production of Indifference:Exploring the Symbolic Roots of Western Bureaucracy (New York, 1992), 62. Ashforth, Madumo, 132, quotes a healer who says,"People, they know that there is witchcraft. So if the government says 'There is no witch,' this means that they are protecting this witchcraft so that it must grow, grow, grow." For a parallel, see chap. 6 on suspicions that the state was protecting thieves who used magic.

¹⁰⁰�In the 1920s, people called the poll tax, theimpundulu, the lightning bird and a classic witch familiar;and in the 1970s, Africans in the Western Cape believed that whites"were either under evil influences or were possible witches themselves." Quoted in Crais, Politics of Evil, 4–5.

¹⁰¹�Mahmoud Mamdani, Politics and Class Formation in Uganda(London, 1976), 142.

¹⁰²�Mamdani, Citizen and Subject.

¹⁰³�Frederick Cooper, Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa (Cambridge, 1996), 264.

¹⁰⁴�On state formation, see Gilbert Joseph and Daniel Nugent,"Popular Culture and State Formation," in Joseph and Nugent, Everyday Forms of State Formation; Wells and Joseph, Summer of Discontent, Seasons of Upheaval; Abrams,"Some Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State." For important contributions to the study of the state in Africa, see Lonsdale and Berman, Unhappy Valley; Mamdani, Citizen and Subject. For one synthesis of new work, see John L. Comaroff,"Reflections on the Colonial State, in South Africa and Elsewhere:Factions, Fragments, Facts and Fictions," Social Identities 4, no. 3 (October 1998): 321–62. For a study of administrative history, see Ivan Evans, Bureaucracy and Race:Native Administration in South Africa (Berkeley, Calif., 1997).

¹⁰⁵�Graham's Town Journal, May 19, 1904.

¹⁰⁶�Beinart and Bundy, Hidden Struggles, 121.

¹⁰⁷�Daily Dispatch, November 7, 1998; see also January 7, 1999.

¹⁰⁸�Daily Dispatch, August 25, 2000.

¹⁰⁹�Daily Dispatch, December 24, 1999.

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