The Boma and the Peripatetic Ruler : Mapping Colonial Rule in German East Africa, 1889-1903

Historians of European colonialism in Africa sometimes tend to erase large areas of the colonial state’s territory. What they describe is much often a history of colonial rule’s main places, it is a history of towns and administrative centres, of plantations and mines, of mission stations and governmental schools. This focus comes from a notion of the colonial territory as a coherent entity, in which like in Europe the state had a continuous presence. Although the colonial state was modelled along patterns of modern nation-states in Europe, the African version differed in some important ways from its European model. Not only the colonial territory was in most cases an arbitrary construction drawn on the negotiation tables by European diplomats. The colonial state was in most cases born out of military conquest. Brought to Africa with military force, the colonial state was not a product of a local history, but an invention without roots in the culture and social world of the region. Modern states are products of a shared history of the state and its subjects. The modern state mirrors its society, and the society produces its state. For modern states their presence in everyday life is rarely a problem, they are not only present in their institutions, but, as Foucault notes, in their subjects. The dispositions of the state are socialised into the habitus of its subjects. It is this