Full Description
A system of colonial administration, associated primarily with British colonial administrator Frederick Lugard in Nigeria, in which colonial powers governed territories through existing local rulers and institutions rather than direct European administration. Indirect rule reduced the costs of colonial governance and utilised local legitimacy, but it also froze and distorted pre-colonial political structures, preventing modernisation and often empowering chiefs whose authority had been limited before colonisation.
Critical Perspective
Indirect rule is often described as a pragmatic compromise, but Mahmood Mamdani’s work shows it was also a system of political control that deliberately divided colonised populations into “citizens” and “subjects” along ethnic lines, entrenching identities that later fuelled post-colonial conflicts. The “traditional authorities” empowered by indirect rule were frequently collaborators whose power depended on the coloniser — making colonial governance dependent on local intermediaries who had every reason to sustain it.
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