The African colonial state was founded on militarism, a feature carried forward by the postcolonial state. The threat of coercion and use of overt violence mediated (and continues to mediate) relations between rulers and the ruled. Almost without exception, the implantation of the European colonial state in the African continent was underpinned by external interests rather than the aspirations and desires of the colonised peoples. Colonialism was a project disguised as civilisational but which in reality sought to meet the material and imperial interests of European colonial powers and their citizens. This meant that the threat and use of force was crucial, indeed necessary, in pursuing colonial interests in the continent. The forcible manner of foisting colonial authority on the colonised peoples necessitated the deployment of coercion, often blunt, brutal, and to chilling effect.

To exert control and achieve effective occupation of the colonised peoples necessitated the exercise of brute force because it was impossible to secure hegemony without coercion. While the ruling classes in the West established political control through ‘hegemony’, in the sense suggested by Antonio Gramsci – that is, dominance through consent; by contrast, colonial conquest and colonial rule in much of the Global South was non-hegemonic. It was fundamentally coercive and anchored on, and sustained largely through, the might of force. That is, the colonial state did not assimilate civil society in the manner that the European state did. This had grave implications for state-society relations.

The military machinery was the fulcrum of the African colonial state. This was because European colonial administrators had to deal with often inhospitable and relentlessly restive colonial subjects. Thus, the military was set up as a tool of internal coercion and control, not as a force against external aggression and provision of national security. This meant that the military, not so much the police, performed law and order tasks. Mahmood Mamdani summarised the crux of the problem as the ‘native question’ – the dilemma of successfully imposing alien rule by a tiny minority of foreigners on a majority of rebellious natives. In dealing with the native question, colonial authorities adopted two overlapping strategies.