Body, Locality and Sovereignty
colonial biopolitics shared many rationalities and mode of intervention with similar policies in Europe but the methods of disciplining, of persuasion and negotiation did not aim at creating responsible and self-governing individuals as Cruikshank points out in the context of the early twentieth-century United States (Cruikshank 1999). By contrast, colonial biopolitics took the form of generalised indirect rule and generally aimed at governing groups and community at a distance. The world of colonial subjects remained somewhat opaque and impenetrable and were always approached through what was assume to be local and “natural leaders” of communities and localities. Motivated by important economic interests and attempt to continue racial domination, colonial forms of biopolitics received their most comprehensive form in South Africa,. As Steffen Jensen demonstrates in his exploration of a township in Cape Town in this Volume, multiple government reports have in the course of the twentieth century diagnosed “colored” people as inherently criminal and thus in need of both paternalist care and firm regulation. In spite of this massive governmental regulation, actual power over life and death in the coloured townships lies with local gangsters rather than a dreaded police force.