and unofficial tax collectors and the embeddedness of state bureaucratic practices in urban society.
Notes
1 1. A glossary at the end of this book explains specific terms with an asterisk following their first use in the text (author’s note).
2 2. These two scales should be kept in mind because they suggest that processes of inclusion worked elsewhere in the two countries. Fortunately, the vast majority of the townships in South Africa and cities in Nigeria did not experience this kind of tragedy.
3 3. Lagos was one of the main ports for slave trading on the Bay of Biafra in the nineteenth century, and the political capital of Nigeria from 1914 to 1991; Ibadan was the main city‐state in western Nigeria in the nineteenth century, the capital of the western region from 1946 to 1976, and the capital of the state of Oyo since 1976; Kano has been the economic capital of the Sokoto Caliphate since the nineteenth century, the capital of the northern region since 1900, and the capital of the state of Kano since 1967; Johannesburg has been the world’s capital of gold‐mining since 1890, the economic capital of South Africa, the provincial capital of Transvaal from 1910 to 1994 and of Gauteng since 1994; Cape Town was the capital of the Cape Colony in the nineteenth century, the country’s leading port, the seat of Parliament and the provincial capital of Western Cape since 1910.
4 4. An apparatus is a network comprising ‘a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions – in short, the said as much as the unsaid’ (Foucault 1977, p. 299 and for the translation Gordon 1980, pp. 194–228).
5 5. Based on the official censuses in these countries.
6 6. The research on ethnic identification in the twentieth century is dated, profuse and disputed (Spear 2003).
7 7. The volume of the sources is uneven, depending on the topics, which is why the sources used have been presented in detail in the introduction to each part.
8 8. Evènement il faut entendre par là non pas une décision, un traité, un règne ou une bataille mais un rapport de forces qui s’inverse, un pouvoir confisqué, un vocabulaire repris et retourné contre ses utilisateurs, une domination qui s’affaiblit, se détend, s’empoisonne elle‐même, une autre qui fait son entrée, masquée.
9 9. ‘By governmentality, I mean the ensemble formed by the institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, the calculations and tactics that allow the exercise of this very specific albeit complex form of power, which has as its target population, as its principal form of knowledge political economy, and as its essential technical means apparatuses of security. Secondly, the tendency which, over a long period and throughout the West, has steadily led towards the pre‐eminence over all other forms (sovereignty, discipline, etc.) of this type of power which may be termed government, resulting, on the one hand, in the formation of a whole series of specific governmental apparatuses, and, on the other, in the development of a whole complex of savoirs’ (Foucault 1978, p. 655, trans. Gordon 1991).
10 10. We are borrowing Gramsci’s methodological suggestions here rather than closely following his thinking, which was inspired essentially by an Italian context not easily transposable elsewhere. For a use of Gramsci in African urban contexts, see Choplin and Ciovalella 2016; Glassman 1995.
11 11. According to the Federal Office of Statistics, poverty levels increased from 28.1 per cent in 1980 (representing 17.7 million people) to 65.6 per cent in 1996 (representing 67.1 million Nigerians) (FOS 1999, p. 24). If the extremely poor people group was not important in 1980 in urban areas (around 3 per cent), in 1996 it affected a quarter of the urban population (FOS 1999, p. 26).
PART I Governing Colonial Urban Space
What do a temporary migrant, an urban dweller, a native, a non‐native, a delinquent, a single woman, and a child in need of protection have in common in the context of two countries such as Nigeria and South Africa in the early twentieth century? In principle nothing, except for the fact that these terms came into being at a particular time (the colonial period) in a specific environment (cities) and were part of a nomenclature for the instruments of power designed to govern populations by classifying them into categories. The aim of Part I is twofold: first, to analyse the environment that generated and introduced policies to identify groups to exclude them from access to urban space and its resources (housing, work, leisure activities) and second, to reveal the new social differentiations these policies produced.
The history of colonial domination has often been read as a profoundly violent and racist endeavour that robbed colonised people of their own history. But the internal contradictions of colonialism, its bureaucratic inefficiency, negotiation, mutual instrumentalisation and the capabilities of the colonised to take action have made it impossible to reduce this domination solely to its violence or its surveillance functions, including in South Africa.1
In this case as in others, the exercise of domination implied taking advantage of its ‘insidious gentleness’ or douceurs insidieuses, to employ Michel Foucault’s expression, recently used by Béatrice Hibou (Hibou 2011), i.e. the observation that it was often in the concrete, circumstantial and historically situated moments that the day‐to‐day practices of power and the ambivalent relationship between rulers and the ruled were manifest. Adopting such a perspective in the colonial context frees us from thinking in terms of oppositions such as collaborators vs opponents, racial coercion vs African resistance and the elite vs the people. For example, the forms of cooperation between townships, elders and apartheid police in security matters and the pragmatic acquiescence of Africans to the social housing programmes of the apartheid government (Evans 1997, pp. 155–159) cannot be understood as simply offsetting authoritarianism by social programmes (Hibou 2011). Similarly, contemporary – or colonial – bureaucratisation can be seen not so much as the result of strategically motivated public policies, coherent strategies or control and subjugation alone, but as the product of a constellation of interests – to use a Weberian expression – that unfolds through the many different actors who are stakeholders in this process (Hibou 2013, pp. 13–14).
An urban environment offers an excellent vantage point for observing the way such bureaucratic procedures and routines develop. Empirical knowledge about the so‐called urban populations of Africa expanded under the impact of social and political changes in the first half of the twentieth century. Until then, the colonial and South African authorities had been steeped in a dual vision of the continent, opposing the primitive African to the civilised European, the pre‐capitalist to the capitalist, the tribal system perceived as rural and the urban world perceived as modern – in which urbanisation was seen as a process of modernisation (Cooper 1983; Ferguson 1999, p. 86). Indirect rule2 in the British Empire, racial policy in French
