Dr Timothy J Lovering
Research Fellow
University of the West of England, Bristol

Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
St Matthias Campus
Oldbury Court Road
Fishponds
Bristol BS16 2JP
United Kingdom

Telephone (Office): +44 (0) 117 925 4980 Ext 211
Telephone (Home): +44 (0) 141 554 2106
Email: Timothy.Lovering@uwe.ac.uk

Civil Military Relations and colonial armies

Scholarship on indigenous colonial service personnel in Africa has proliferated since the 1980s, notably including the work of Timothy Parsons on African, and Ashley Jackson on Southern African soldiers.  However, at root much of this work is concerned with internal struggle, including political struggle, within the social economy of the colonial army.  Little current scholarship engages with serving colonial soldiers (as opposed to ex-soldiers) as actors in wider colonial society, or particularly as active participants in conflicts.  In essence, there is a rift between accounts of African soldiers’ experiences as colonial subjects, and their role as enforcers of colonial authority.

With special reference to the case of Nyasaland (Malawi), this paper will examine the interaction between colonial soldiers’ formal and informal roles in support of colonial power on the one hand, and their relations with civil society on the other.  Officially sanctioned military activities in the period of conquest, including punitive actions, looting, and sexual exploitation, will be contrasted with unsanctioned and often harshly punished equivalent activities by soldiers in peacetime.  Unofficial violence by soldiers was often dismissed by military officials as a result of soldiers’ ‘unsophisticated’ origins (rural recruits were valued for their ‘warlike’ character), but it will be argued that such violence was in fact a corollary of the functions that the colonial state required them to perform.  This permanently affected the nature of civil military relations in a colonial and postcolonial context.