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Introduction
In the 1980s, an increasing number of historians began to critically examine the policy of indirect rule, which was implemented as the governing principle in most parts of British Africa in the 1920s and 1930s. The studies mainly focus on the concept of "invention of tradition" as developed by Terence Ranger in an article from 1983.1 Colonial governments not only relied on rural elites, but also were active in the creation of tribal identities and customary law. In more recent years, several scholars including Ranger have cast doubt on the usefulness of speaking of invention since it implies a conscious construction of identities and tends to exaggerate the powers of the colonial rulers.2 Nevertheless, indirect rule marked an ideological change in British Africa, away from more liberal and marketoriented policies towards social-conservative ideas of protecting rural Africans from modernity. Or, to quote the Colonial Office in Britain, indirect rule was an attempt to find an administrative system for people "not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world."3 Some scholars have even suggested that indirect rule partly aimed to consolidate pre-capitalist structures. In the case of Nyasaland, Joey Power for example, claims that by giving greater powers to local traditional authorities, indirect rule aimed to "thwart class formation" and leave the "petit bourgeoisie" in the political wilderness.4 In that sense, the British colonial authorities were "conservationists - of people as well as game" to quote Cain and Hopkins.5
In the analyses of the socioeconomic consequences of indirect rule, there is a tendency to neglect the fact that there are two sides to every story, one about preserving social structures and one about facilitating change. From the 1920s onwards, colonial administrations increasingly intervened in rural areas with the aim of changing farming methods lacking major technological and institutional changes. For this purpose, they planned to use chiefs and village headmen to disseminate information and propaganda. Grishow acknowledges in his discussion on chiefs in southern Ghana, that indirect rule became the solution whereby "development could be achieved without disrupting traditional community."6 The colonial rulers regarded indirect rule as a viable strategy to solve the dilemma of supporting a further expansion of African commercial agriculture and, at the same time, prevent...