In the summer of 1957, at the British Colonial Office's Conference on African Administration, a working group convened to discuss “the place of chiefs in African administration” reported their finding that “the brilliant classical period of indirect rule is over.” With independence movements now sweeping the continent and the decolonization of Africa in full swing, the Colonial Office put its best face forward, declaring (if already a bit nostalgically) the successful tenure of a form of governance that had become its hallmark.

The origins of indirect rule can be traced back at least as far as the 1850s in the thinking of colonial administrators in India and Natal, though its best-known application and elaboration was in the administration of Northern Nigeria under Frederick Lugard in the early 1900s. Its basic premise was simple: rather than building from the ground up wholly new forms of government in colonized territories, British sovereignty would be layered atop existing indigenous institutions. African elites would continue to rule over the day-to-day affairs of a subject population, though always under the final oversight of the colonial governor.

In his study of the system of indirect rule, Mahmood Mamdani argues that the analysis of this peculiar form of state permits the development of what might be called a unified theory of colonialism in sub-Saharan Africa. Where previous generations of scholarship had suggested a sharp differentiation in economic and political development separating South Africa from the rest of the continent, Mamdani's theory proposes a model capable of accounting for colonial rule and its aftermath on both sides of the Limpopo.