A recurrent theme in our Behind the Scenes features is the intellectual payoff of returning attention to previous scholarship, sources, and field sites. (Recent examples include Catherine Alexander’s “From Thrift to Austerity,” Barbara Metcalf’s “Better late than never – and winding up better,” and Wale Adebanwi’s “Death and Burial: The Affinity of Journalism and Ethnography.“) Here, Steven Pierce shares how a side interest became central, and how reconsidering previously-analyzed subjects in his recent CSSH essay, “The Suffering Subject: Colonial Flogging in Northern Nigeria and a Humanitarian Public, 1904–1933” (66-2, 2024)), lead to more profound, if ultimately more modest, insights.
Of everything I have published to date, “The Suffering Subject” offers the most stereotypical origins story. It arises from a fortuitous discovery in the archives. My PhD research was on the history of land law in northern Nigeria. Interesting as that topic was—and its ethnographic portions were genuinely compelling—the necessary archival work was often dry. I spent a lot of time poring over policy documents. Luckily and unluckily, both the Nigerian and British archives had a host of flashier files to look at when I was sleepy or dyspeptic. The records on criminal law were vastly more exciting! In particular, flogging was clearly a preoccupation for colonial officials, and the publics in southern Nigeria and across the British empire, generating a record providing myriad snapshots of the politics of colonialism. Anxieties about racial hierarchy, protests against racial humiliation, fat reports that buried bodily violence in bloodless statistics, endless bureaucratic obfuscation. I justified these detours into the flogging files by promising myself I’d write about flogging one day.
Soon after I returned from my main period of PhD fieldwork, I was speaking by telephone to a dear friend, Anupama Rao, herself just back from research in western India. During that conversation, we discovered that we both had a treasure trove of files on colonial violence irrelevant to our dissertation projects, and the cases brought similar issues to mind. We asked around and discovered other friends with similar material. Soon we had plans for a panel at the American Anthropological Association annual meeting, then a journal special issue, then an edited book.[1] The collections reflected our preoccupations at the time. We wanted to excavate a colonial logic, one which we deemed recurrent, in which states took categories of difference like race as both marking and justifying different degrees of bodily violence. This lens, we thought, was revealing of a general process of hardening racial boundaries, and an analogous shift in other markers of identity. In retrospect, I think we paid insufficient attention to more fine-grained processes of change over time. Certainly my essay did. Rather, we were concerned with applying a Foucauldian logic in colonial contexts. Foremost in my mind was how to take seriously admonitions from scholars like Fred Cooper and Megan Vaughan about the pitfalls of applying Foucault in colonial Africa: power in Africa was arterial rather than capillary; many of the key transitions that Foucault documents had no obvious African analogs.[2] The instances of bodily violence in our collection, we thought, pointed to something important. Colonial regimes were indeed committed to paradigms of dispersed power, even while they also were acutely aware that the strategies such paradigms suggested were ineffective. Writing the history of violence and colonial difference offered key insight into the logic of colonial governance.
In the years since that collection, I have been fitfully working on a book project that emerged from its problematic. When I wrote the original article, what had seemed most urgent was the way in which flogging scandals in Nigeria, and more generally the colonial government’s dependency on and subsequent disavowal of bodily violence, worked and reworked the state’s codified doctrines of personhood. This relatively minor story about flogging was not just a story about colonialism; flogging and scandals about it forced debates about various markers of identity—race, religion, gender, ethnicity—that became central to how state institutions would treat different categories of people. Doctrines of court jurisdiction and criminal culpability during the early colonial period had operationalized the recognition of identity for the institutions of the Nigerian state.
The political legacy of colonial systems of rule has been an important theme in colonial history, as accounts of colonial inventions of tradition were understood to have constructed allegedly traditional political forms, and even entire ethnicities.[3] The flogging controversies emphasized the significance of judicial institutions. In northern Nigeria, the chiefly classes of the well-established Sokoto Caliphate and ancient empire of Borno were not invented by colonialism, even if the colonial regime allowed their extension to new regions and regularized their power. Looking at the micro-politics of court jurisdiction seemed key to tracing it as a lived category.
That history was more complex than I had previously realized. It could not be addressed simply by excavating a recurrent contradiction that fed colonial scandals. A 1933 court reform seemed to have brought the flogging scandals to a halt. The reason was clear. The reformed system tweaked the penalty at the interface between shari’a and British law: nothing could be punished more harshly under shari’a than in the Criminal Code. In that way, penalties deemed too harsh would be set aside. This had unintended consequences in homicide law later on, making the issue the topic of a book project, and one that has become somewhat unwieldy.
“The Suffering Subject” arose from my work on that book. It is my attempt to look more carefully at the evolution of being subject to flogging, and at how scandals over flogging continually shifted the ways in which the Nigerian state conceptualized identity as making accused criminals criminally culpable and susceptible to particular penalties. The more I looked at the records, the more government policy and strategies used to contain scandal seemed to be in flux. “The Suffering Subject” explores that morass. It is more diffident than my earlier attempt, though ultimately I hope the new piece asks a better set of questions.
Notes
[1] Anupama Rao and Steven Pierce, “Discipline and the Other Body: Correction, Corporeality, and Colonial Rule,” Interventions: The International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 3, no. 2 (2001); Steven Pierce and Anupama Rao, eds., Discipline and the Other Body: Correction, Corporeality, Colonialism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006).
[2] Frederick Cooper, “Conflict and Connection: Rethinking African History,” American Historical Review 99 (1994); Megan Vaughan, Curing Their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991).
[3] Scholars have been pointing to how colonialism resulted in invented practices of rule for a very long time; see for example A. F. Afigbo, The Warrant Chiefs: Indirect Rule in Southeastern Nigeria, 1891-1929 (London: Longman, 1972). The argument was generalized in T. O. Ranger, “The Invention of Tradition in Colonial Africa,” in The Invention of Tradition, ed. E. J. Hobsbawn and T. O. Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). See also Leroy Vail, ed. The Invention of Tribalism in Southern Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989); Sara Berry, “Hegemony on a Shoestring: Indirect Rule and Access to Agricultural Land,” Africa 62, no. 3 (1992); T. O. Ranger, “The Invention of Tradition Revisited,” in Legitimacy and the State in Twentieth-Century Africa: Essays in Honor of A.H.M. Kirk-Greene, ed. T. O. Ranger and Olufemi Vaughan (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1993); Thomas Spear, “Neo-Traditionalism and the Limits of Invention in British Colonial Africa,” Journal of African History 44, no. 1 (2003). One of the most famous articulations of the argument was that of Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).
References
Afigbo, A. F. The Warrant Chiefs: Indirect Rule in Southeastern Nigeria, 1891-1929. London: Longman, 1972.
Berry, Sara. “Hegemony on a Shoestring: Indirect Rule and Access to Agricultural Land.” Africa 62, no. 3 (1992): 327-55.
Cooper, Frederick. “Conflict and Connection: Rethinking African History.” American Historical Review 99 (1994): 1516-43.
Mamdani, Mahmood. Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996.
Pierce, Steven, and Anupama Rao, eds. Discipline and the Other Body: Correction, Corporeality, Colonialism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.
Ranger, T. O. “The Invention of Tradition in Colonial Africa.” In The Invention of Tradition, edited by E. J. Hobsbawn and T. O. Ranger. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
———. “The Invention of Tradition Revisited.” In Legitimacy and the State in Twentieth-Century Africa: Essays in Honor of A.H.M. Kirk-Greene, edited by T. O. Ranger and Olufemi Vaughan. Houndmills: Macmillan, 1993.
Rao, Anupama, and Steven Pierce. “Discipline and the Other Body: Correction, Corporeality, and Colonial Rule.” Interventions: The International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 3, no. 2 (2001): 159-68.
Spear, Thomas. “Neo-Traditionalism and the Limits of Invention in British Colonial Africa.” Journal of African History 44, no. 1 (2003): 3-27.
Vail, Leroy, ed. The Invention of Tribalism in Southern Africa. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. Vaughan, Megan. Curing Their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991.
