"Governance and Citizenship in Colonial Ghana and Uganda"

by Jeff Grischow and Glenn McKnight

CASID Conference, 1996

Not for citation or quotation without written consent of authors

Introduction

Africa in the 1990s has little choice but to embark upon reforms

that create political conditions in which latent social energy can

be mobilized for progressive purposes. At the core of such reform

efforts are new styles and forms of governance.

An influential group of political scientists recently joined the World

Bank in recommending the reassertion of "governance" as a policy solution for

development failures in Africa. In the wake of global democratization,

Africans have supposedly now realized the need to overcome authoritarian

postcolonial politics by resurrecting good governance. This can be done by

reforming political structures and institutions so that political actors act

for the common good. More specifically, Goran Hyden speaks of "restoring a

civil public realm." This restoration makes mediation possible between the

state and civil society, resulting in a political structure in which

"everybody wins." This will allow Africa to replace it's "'bad' politics"

of personalized rule, human rights violations, centralization, and citizen

withdrawal with the good politics of citizen influence, respect by political

leaders of the civic public realm and the rule of law, and political equality

and tolerance. Good governance will be the result.

The writing on civil society in Africa appears to be ahistorical and

idealistic. As indicated above, Hyden assumes that the growth of civil

society will necessarily lead to good governance. His formulation, however,

ignores a number of important details about civil society in history. First,

civil society is historically a function of private property, developing

capitalism, and a bourgeoisie. Second, the growth of civil society

historically has been contradictory, complex, and disorderly. Third, that

this disorderly process has produced rather than solved problems of governance

particularly because of problems generated by property and developing

capitalism. Fourth, that governance is not an independent variable but is

itself a function of and subject to the social forces any system of governance

is supposed to control.

Goran Hyden reflects that Africa's challenge of governance is analogous

to Europe in 1789 -- "a watershed year in European history that marked the

victory of secular rationalism and the gradual emergence of bourgeois values

of progress." The fact that Hyden considers 1990 to be Africa's 1789

reveals that his model of good governance rests on the growth of the

bourgeoisie. Indeed, Michael Bratton (Hyden's co-editor) forthrightly

declares the middle class nature of civil society. Hyden's contrast of

Africa's "'bad' politics" with "good politics" echoes Bratton's comments and

points us to a type of bourgeois state and society. This type is composed of

three elements: a market system which operates largely independent of state

control and which is characterized by the maintenance of political order and

legitimacy with minimal state action both of which rest on the foundation of a

strong civil society. Hyden's idea of the "civic public realm," however, is

based on an ideal type of bourgeois state and society.

This ideal type ignores the fact that civil society is both historically

specific and is intimately connected to the institution of private property.

As Eboe Hutchful observes, ". . . it is not entirely clear that the concept

[of civil society] can be detached so easily from its historical moorings

without substantial repercussions." "Capitalist economy and private property"

he continues

were the critical parameters that simultaneously demarcated the

boundaries of state and society, subordinated the state to

society, and constituted the source of resistance to and autonomy

from the state. Ergo, according to Marx, no bourgeoisie, no civil

society. 'Public' ideas and morality were the ideas and morality

of the bourgeoisie . . . These underlying factors were key to the

way that civil society functioned in relation to the state in the

West. . .

In effect, a strong civil society requires private property and a capitalist

economy -- a fact that Hyden's comments on "bourgeois" values and Bratton's

admission of the middle class nature of civil society also reveal.

Analysts of civil society in Africa fail to recognize the connection

between private property, capitalism, and disorder. Despite Michael Bratton's

assertion to the contrary, the values of civil society historically have been

far from universal. As the institution of private property evolved so too did

the values of civil society. Improving landlords in England fostered the

ideas of private property and the labour market to help separate the labouring

population from the means of production which provided them with independent

subsistence. This was the real significance of the burst of parliamentary

enclosure acts from 1760-1830 and of the restructuring of poor relief by

the 1834 Poor Law Commission. Although both processes aimed to abolish the

social and economic independence of unskilled labour by subjecting it ever

more fully to the labour market, their bourgeois advocates justified enclosure

and poor relief reform differently. Enclosure was needed to eliminate the

'independence' common rights accorded potential and partial wage earners while

poor law reform was needed to establish the 'independence' of the "utter

reliance of the labourer upon the wages he or she could procure through the

market." Advocates of private property and wage labour defined

'independence' according to how it affected the creation of the labour market.

E.P. Thompson has argued, however, that these values did not become a

part of English capitalist economic morality without a struggle. Agricultural

labourers asserted their customary rights through perambulations and

exhortations as well as "unwritten beliefs, sociological norms, and usages

asserted in practice but never enrolled in any by-law." He also reminds

us that it was in the process of struggle with the growing capitalist class

that the English working class was made and made itself. As well, the

different phases of France's 1789 Revolution and the 1848 Revolutions in

Europe epitomize the struggle over the continuing growth of the values of

civil society. People in Europe did contest, often violently, the growth

of civil society specifically because that process involved struggles for

resources, threatened livelihoods, and often caused poverty and pain.

Examples from colonial Uganda and Ghana indicate that the growth of

civil society produced problems of governance rather than solutions to those

problems. Elements which present policy analysts of Africa would include in

civil society did develop during the colonial era but they did so in a

contradictory, complex fashion that produced social disorder and reactions to

that disorder. British colonial officials in Africa seem to have been more

cognizant of the problematic nature of civil society than do present policy-

makers. British officials in Uganda and Ghana did recognize the social

disorder side of private property and the development of capitalism. They

were aware of the consequences not out of altruistic concern but because they

realized that social disorder threatened the process of accumulation. The

British therefore came to Uganda determined to encourage the growth of civil

society in an ordered manner. In this they failed miserably. The disorderly

growth of civil society in Uganda provoked a crisis of governance for the

government in the early 1920s. Later, in northern Ghana, officials attempted

to prevent the growth of private property and civil society for fear that it

would produce contradictions and crises similar to those that had developed in

England and had begun to appear in the Gold Coast Colony and Ashanti. The

growth, or potential thereof, of civil society in colonial Uganda and Ghana,

founded as it was in private property and the development of capitalism,

created governance problems rather than governance solutions.

Uganda

Few would disagree, we suspect, that development practitioners want to

achieve progress with the minimum of social dislocation. Recently, the

Makerere Institute for Social Research and the University of Wisconsin Land

Tenure Centre published a study which expressed this sentiment in the context

of land tenure and agricultural development in Uganda. "Most African nations

have multiple goals for land tenure policy," observe the authors.

African governments hope "to stimulate agricultural development while

protecting the uniquely African concept that all individuals should have

access to enough land for subsistence production." The study suggests

that Uganda's land tenure system must be flexible enough to allow "progressive

farmers" to consolidate holdings and employ advanced production techniques and

"access to land for people who have no income earning possibilities outside

the agricultural sector of the economy." Without this protection, people

would be forced off the land before industrialization could absorb the labour

and cause social problems "such as crime, and a large unemployed urban

population [which] can create political instability." The MISR/UWLTC

prescription for progressive farmers and access to land for labour is at heart

an attempt to hold order and progress together.

While the unbridled growth of private property and capitalism sets up

contradictions for a capitalist state, so too did attempts by the colonial

state to hold order and progress together. The MISR/UWLTC study would have

fit comfortably in the confines of Britain's colonial development project in

Uganda. Sir Harry H. Johnston premised his 'civilizing mission' to Uganda on

the idea that the British needed to create a moralized capitalism in Uganda.

It was the job of the colonizers simultaneously to create the conditions for

capitalist accumulation as a means to make Uganda productive and to order that

development of capitalism to prevent the social abuses which characterized

late nineteenth century industrial capitalism in Britain. In keeping with

much turn of the century English social commentary, Johnston perceived

labour's landlessness as a prime cause of crime, poverty, and poor

productivity. Johnston thus envisioned combining food self-sufficiency

through workers' small plots with large-scale commercial agriculture in order

to prevent a residuum from developing in Uganda. To this end, Uganda's

Protectorate government endeavoured, in the twelve years or so following the

signing of the 1900 Uganda Agreement, to create and control markets in land

and labour.

The Uganda Agreement divided land in the kingdom of Buganda roughly

equally between Buganda's ascendent bakungu chiefs and the British Crown. The

1903 Crown Lands Ordinance established the rules for sales in freehold of

Crown land. The 1908 Native Land Law (Buganda) established that mailo

land was individually owned, alienable, and heritable. Mailo owners were to

be given a clear, individual title to their land under the Torrens

Registration System. The 1908 law created freehold tenure for 'native'

8land. Neither piece of legislation, however, created a pure freehold

title. On the contrary, both pieces of legislation were designed to

facilitate colonial control of markets in Crown and 'native' land. The Crown

Lands Ordinance attached development conditions to the sale or lease of Crown

lands. Buyers had to have a certain amount of capital subscribed, had to

agree to invest a set amount in a certain period of time, and to bring a

certain amount of land into cultivation over that time. Sales of 'native'

land could only proceed with the agreement of both the Crown and the

Lukiko. The Colonial government strove to ensure that land would be sold

to people who would use it productively and attached conditions to the sale to

ensure that productivity. Ordered progress meant that landowners would be

required to use the land productively while guarding against landlessness by

ensuring workers' access to land.

The nature of private property proved, however, to be a powerful solvent

to the colonial attempt to order progress. Mailo owners used the ownership of

their land to hinder the colonial development project. The Protectorate

government's attempt to attract capital to Uganda hinged on its ability to

define and alienate Crown land. Mailo owners slowed the survey process to a

crawl and won a legal battle with the Crown which enabled them as landowners

to choose the best land Buganda had on offer. European planters who

bought land in Uganda were forced, due to the scarcity of labour, to protect a

potential work force by allowing workers to settle on plantation land for

minimal daily task assignments and/or shares of crops. This enabled workers

to avoid poorly paid public works jobs, forced labour, and helped sever ties

of dependence to chiefs on which colonial officials depended for labour.

More importantly, private property and the development of the cotton and

coffee crops enabled landowners in Buganda to push people off their land and

extort ever higher rents from tenants. After nearly twenty years of labour

scarcity, Kampala and Entebbe regions experienced unemployment problems and

strikes in the early 'twenties. The "'unemployment' problem" was due in

part to mailo owners trying to get rid of squatters "who [did] little work but

[stole] food continually." 1921 Kampala was characterized, according to

Labour Commissioner E.L. Scott, by the "large floating population of Banyoro,

Banyankole, Batoro, Bagishu, Badama, Kavirondo, etc., etc. who constitute[d]

the supply of unskilled labour." It was also characterized by strikes.

Scott went on to say

how important and pressing is the need of close attention to

labour affairs in Kampala. (1) At the end of last month an

employer committed an indiscreet act in reducing all the wages of

his staff, without apparently adequate explanations of its

necessity. The result was a cessation of work, which may be

regarded at the worst as a 'strike', or at the best as a concerted

movement to stabilise conditions of employment. (2) Early in

this month there was a mass meeting of Baganda Clerks and Artisans

in Kampala, which there is reason to believe was organised by

Indian agitators. Certain influential Chiefs attended this

meeting and several foolish speeches were delivered. (3) To-day,

I am informed by telephone, all the P.W.D. artisans in Kampala

have struck work.

Tenants on mailo land suffered directly at the hands of landlords as the

cash crop economy grew. Before the cash crop economy took hold in the early

twentieth century, peasants were obligated to give chiefs tribute both in

labour and in kind. As it grew, however, these tributes became commoditized

and the new landlords increased the amount required as demand for land

increased. Tenants on mailo land owed landowners busuulu, envujjo, kasanvu,

and luwalo. Busuulu had been one month's labour which a peasant paid a chief

primarily for road maintenance. By 1921, landlords had turned this into a

ground rent of Shs. 10/-. Envujjo had been a tribute in kind on food and beer

a peasant produced. By 1921, landlords were charging this tribute on

cotton and in some places were extorting as much as a third of the crop.

Mailo owners also put a moratorium on sales of land to Europeans in 1921 -- a

move which pushed lease rates on mailo land even higher. On top of this,

the Protectorate government used chiefs to "encourage" tenants to participate

in voluntary wage labour for planters and government and to "exhort" small

farmers to grow ever more cotton. As chiefs, the members of the ruling

elite stood between the small farmer and the colonial government. As

landlords, the same people directly appropriated a part of the tenant's

labour. Their participation in both roles focused peasant discontent on the

Lukiko and landowners.

It was this kind of discontent and threat thereof which became focused

in the 1922 bataka crisis. The 1921 and 1922 fall in world prices for cotton

and coffee temporarily increased stress on peasant growers. A group of

bataka or clan heads argued that they had been wrongfully dispossessed of clan

lands when mailo owners chose their estates following the 1900 Agreement.

The Bataka Community appealed directly to the Colonial Office and the British

public and peasant occupiers of mailo land. It's leaders argued that

butaka land had been held under communal tenure before the colonial period and

that the very apparent discontent of the early 1920s was caused by the

bataka's landlessness. They used the theme of landlessness and claimed to

represent the heart of peasant discontent to appeal to British fears of

disorder. They used the idea of communal tenure as the focal point for

peasant discontent. Communal tenure was the ideological counterpoint to mailo

tenure -- the very system which seemed in the eyes of direct producers to

enable landlords to extort what belonged to the tenant. The Bataka Community

provided a political focus for the disorder private property and the

uncontrolled development of capitalism had been producing.

It was this problematic growth of civil society which forced the

government into a reactive position. The actions of private landowners in

Uganda had restricted the state's ability to order progress and in turn had

produced an explosive mixture of unemployment, strikes, high rents, extorted

surpluses, and the political representation of this disorder. Despite the

best of intentions, the colonial state had been unable to order the creation

of civil society. The state was forced to choose between order and progress.

It chose order in the early 1920s and moved to restrict the power of Uganda's

'native' landowners.

The bataka crisis enabled Uganda's colonial state to move against mailo

owners. Officials 'tribalized' labour in the Protectorate as a means to

produce a controlled flow of migrant labour from the north and west, into

Buganda for government public works, and back again. This was to help solve

the Public Works Department's labour supply problem specifically by cutting

into the supply of labour that was hired by Baganda landowners who grew

cotton. Colonial officials also used the bataka crisis to stop the spread

of mailo tenure to parts of the Protectorate which did not have it. In

it's place, areas outside Buganda were to have 'native' reserves under a

system of communal tenure. Communal tenure in this case was designed as a

way to reduce the potential for social disorder that so evidently accompanied

mailo tenure and the development of Uganda's productive forces. Finally,

officials used the peasant discontent the bataka controversy had mobilized to

legislate caps on busuulu and envujjo in 1927. The state moved to prevent

potential further discontent by restricting the rights of freehold property

owners to extort peasant surplus.

The Northern Territories of the Gold Coast

Colonial officials implemented community development in Uganda in

reaction to the disorganised and contradictory growth of civil society in the

colony. In the Northern Territories of the Gold Coast, the colonial

government adopted a similar policy in reaction to the emergence of capitalism

in the Gold Coast Colony and Ashanti Protectorate. The northern Protectorate

had been starved of investment, personnel and development activities from its

inception in 1901. By the 1920s the colonial government considered this lack

of development a positive achievement. During this time, Governor Guggisberg

declared that the north was clean slate on which to build development along

"African" lines and thus avoid the mistakes made in the south. This goal

prompted the nationalisation of most northern land in 1927, the cutback of

education, and the implementation of Indirect Rule and direct taxation in

1935. In the late 1940s, Local Government replaced Indirect Rule as the

administrative policy, and the government planned and implemented several

large scale development projects. These new activities, however, explicitly

sought to foster development while maintaining the peasant character of the

Northern Territories. In short, between 1927 and 1957, the Gold Coast

government consistently acted to block the emergence of capitalism by planning

against the growth of private property and wage labour. This planning sought

to guard against capitalism's tendency to produce social upheaval which would

threaten the state's control over accumulation. By 1950, co-operation and

community development had emerged as the two major pillars of this colonial

project.

Shortly after World War Two, the Northern Territories of the Gold Coast

gained international acclaim for its programme of community development.

At first glance the programme's focus on small, locally-initiated rural

projects seems at odds with the large-scale development efforts normally

associated with the "second colonial occupation." In fact, community

development coincided with the arrival of South African and American

conservation and mechanisation experts seeking to produce a massive

transformation of the northern countryside. The simultaneous appearance of

these two very different approaches to development was no mere coincidence.

In fact, in 1949 Colonial Secretary Robert Scott stressed the necessity of

community development in the wake of the larger commercial programmes. For

Scott, this necessity arose out of the need to localise rural economic

benefits immediately while waiting for the large schemes to pay off. Community

development provided the means for this short term goal.

A look at the Gold Coast's community development literature, however,

reveals more than a simple need for short-term, localised economic gains.

Instead, colonial officials feared the more general dangers of revolutionary

economic change, especially the social upheaval which had occurred in

Britain's experience with the development of industrial capitalism. Indeed,

many Gold Coast officials looked back to the Industrial Revolution to

emphasize the need for village-level community development during the

implementation of larger schemes. Specifically, colonial officials wanted to

avoid the negative aspects of the growth of capitalism in Britain. One

official in the Gold Coast referred to "mistakes" that Britain had made in

failing to stem the decay of rural life and the problem of emerging class

divisions caused by the Industrial Revolution. According to Gold Coast mass

education experts, these problems could have been avoided in Britain if rural

development had been planned properly. What had emerged instead was a

rootless mass of unemployed, landless people who had been wrenched from their

rural lives. Drawing on the British experience, therefore, the Gold Coast

government was quite aware of the threat to order posed by the growth of

capitalism and the consequent need to order progress in the Northern

Territories.

This very threat had in fact plagued the Gold Coast administration since

the early 1930s. By the late 1940s, the colonial state recognised that

its plans for mechanised agriculture, conservation and hydroelectric

development would exacerbate the problem. That is, the projects threatened to

transform subsistence farmers into wage labourers. "The systematic

development of agriculture and industrial projects," wrote one mass education

officer,

inevitably affects and will continue to affect, the whole

social structure. The old tradition by which a man works on land

belonging to his people in order to provide himself and his

dependents with food, clothing and shelter, is forced to give way

increasingly to a new method of work - to the system of employer

and employees, in which one man receives a wage in return for work

done for others.

Along with the stagnation of rural life caused by large-scale, commercial

development schemes, therefore, came the landlessness, unemployment and social

dislocation caused by the transformation of the peasantry into wage labourers.

Inextricably bound to the emergence of wage labour was the danger of

individual accumulation and the growth of private property. The growth of

palm oil and cocoa production had produced a class of "youngmen" who

challenged the authority of the chiefs and hence the basis of British

Rule. Governor F.G. Guggisberg reacted against the threat of individual

accumulation near the end of his tenure. In 1925, a group of Gold Coast

Africans approached Guggisberg with a request to establish an agricultural

bank in order to provide credit to individual African farmers. Guggisberg

rejected the proposal and opted instead to create a co-operative credit

society. These actions must be seen in the larger context of British

policy in West Africa, which by 1917 was designed to block the growth of

individual property in favour of preserving "traditional" African

communalism. Guggisberg succeeded in implementing the West African Policy

in the Northern Territories after 1919.

From Guggisberg's plan, the 1927 Land and Native Rights Ordinance

declared most northern areas "native land" and blocked the development of a

land market. Education policy reduced northern schools to Standard Three

and demanded that the schools be run solely by northern teachers, thus

blocking the development of northern education. The 1935 implementation

of Indirect Rule shored up the power of the chiefs and shut out educated

"commoners" from local administration. Missions were reprimanded for teaching

Western individualism to "traditional" Africans. All of these policies

grew out of the perceived need to avoid the problems which had emerged for the

British in the south.

It was with this history in mind that the Gold Coast government set out

to formulate its post-war development schemes. The Damongo groundnut scheme,

for instance, was located on unoccupied land and organised along peasant

lines. But co-operative organisation in itself only partially eased the fears

of British West African administrators. In the post-war period, several

colonial governments in British West Africa had balked at implementing similar

large-scale development projects out of the fear of social disorder. In the

Gold Coast, however, colonial officials believed that they could minimise the

negative aspects of development through the careful application of mass

education and community development. The point here is that colonial

officials recognised that development necessarily implied upheaval, but also

believed that it could be managed in order to guide the process along organic,

and thus positive, lines.

Peter Worsley has demonstrated that this response was generalised across

many colonies after World War Two. That is, many colonial governments invoked

community development in response to peasant resistance to the development of

capitalism. Cast in this light, community development appeared as one

element in a package through which the British tried to achieve large-scale,

commercial development without transforming the Gold Coast peasantry into wage

labourers. In effect, then, community development and co-operative

agriculture acted as post-war tools in the continuing effort to implement the

Dual Mandate. On the one hand, co-operative projects such as the Damongo

groundnut scheme sought to generate large-scale cash crop production on

peasant lines. On the other hand, community development projects sought to

provide enough incentive to preserve village organisation without permitting

enough individual accumulation for the growth of a middle class. In both

programmes, the British tried to achieve development without the emergence of

private property and the rise of an indigenous petty bourgeoisie.

The Gold Coast colonial state thus introduced community development in

order further to guard against the social problems likely to grow out of the

development of capitalism. This programme represented a continuation of the

state's attempt to block the growth of private property and the formation of

an indigenous petty bourgeoisie. Ironically, the state invoked the very

measures which Hyden would point to as an indication of a flourishing civil

public realm in the late colonial period -- co-operatives and community

development -- in order to stifle that realm because of its very real threat

to the ordering of progress.

Conclusion

"In recent literature on African politics" concludes Hyden

it is clear that the prime contemporary challenge is how to

restore a civic public realm. The trend of postindependence

politics in most African countries has been to disintegrate the

civic public realm inherited from the colonial powers and replace

it with rivaling [sic] communal or primordial realms, all

following their own informal rules.

Without giving any concrete examples, Hyden calls the late colonial state's

forms of governance "good." We are apparently supposed to think that the

colonial post-war state in Africa was characterized by citizen influence,

respect by political leaders of the civic public realm and the rule of law,

and political equality and tolerance. In this conclusion Hyden is wrong.

In fact, what he describes as the "bad politics" of the postcolonial era

(personalized rule, human rights violations, centralization, and citizen

withdrawal) that Africa must now overcome were in fact more characteristic

of the colonial state than were "good politics." That colonial forms of

governance in Africa were "bad" rather than "good" was due to the problems of

governance created by the contradictory, conflictual, and disorderly growth of

civil society.