By Philip Bonner
This is often the 1st full-length examine of the political economic system of 1 of the African states which have been shaped during the nineteenth-century Zulu revolution. The early chapters learn the evolution of the Swazi nation and the dynamics of its stratified platforms, paying specific consciousness to the 'layering' of inequality via marriage and inheritance styles, and the simultaneous integration of age regiments and the elaboration of a countrywide ideology in line with the Swazi royalty. Dr Bonner then units the Swazi nation within the wider context of south-eastern Africa and discusses its kinfolk with the encompassing Boer societies. The later chapters examine the position performed through the nice mining businesses and their white concessionaires within the partition of southern Africa and in bringing concerning the dissolution of the Swazi country.
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Their interest in reviving apparently anachronistic jurisdictional claims was not lessened by the fact that, since the British occupation, the land in question had been extensively planted in cocoa and increased in value many times over. "With the restoration of the Ashanti 36 HEGEMONY ON A SHOESTRING Confederacy in 1935 reasonably clear ... titles to land in return for regular payments gave way to a massive Kumasi Reconquista" (Dunn and Robertson, 1973:53). In western Nigeria, early treaties between colonial agents and Yoruba chiefs were supplanted, after 1916, by the designation of Yo rub a obas as native authorities.
From the nineteenth century, British officials had found it expedient to negotiate with Akan stools as semiautonomous states, rather than subsume them under the formal apparatus of indirect rule. This did not stop the British from working actively to undermine the power of Asante, first by military attack and, in 1896, by negotiating a series of treaties with neighboring states which placed them on an equal footing with Kumase in the eyes of the colonial regime. During the early decades of colonial rule, as the spread of cocoa raised the value ofland and the volume oflitigation over access to it, chiefs maneuvered to maximize their revenues from cocoa "rents" and judicial fees and fines by asserting claim to land and subjects which the British had allocated to other jurisdictions, and by reinterpreting customary rules concerning their prerogatives.
By the end of the First World War, however, official thinking was converging towards a standard "mental map of an Africa comprised of neatly bounded, homogeneous tribes" (Ambler, 1987:32) and an increasingly uniform conception of their own imperial mission and how best to realize it. Lugard's The Dual Mandate in Tropical Africa (1923) laid out the philosophy of indirect rule, and during the next twenty years, officials labored to replicate a common system of native administration across the map of colonial Africa.