No European control could be exercised without the cooperation of large numbers of Africans. This was secured in two ways. First, just as the Europeans had relied on Africans for the rank and file of their armies and police, so their administrations and economic enterprises could not function without a host of Africans employed as clerks, messengers, craftsmen of all kinds, and labourers. All of this employment offered new opportunities to Africans, and to ensure an efficient labour force all European administrations began to supplement and develop the schools begun by the missionaries.

As well as recruiting and training large numbers of Africans as auxiliaries in all spheres of European activity, the colonial powers also came to rely on African chiefs as essential intermediaries in the chain of authority between the colonial governments and their subjects at large. Both the French and the British colonial regimes were essentially hierarchical. The administration of each colony was entrusted to a governor who was responsible to a colonial minister in the government in Europe (in the French case, via a governor-general at Dakar). These governors were assisted by senior officials and a secretariat in the colonial capital, and their decisions and orders were transmitted for implementation to provincial and district commissioners. A district officer, however, could not deal directly with each of the tens, or even hundreds, of thousands of Africans in his care. He therefore gave orders either to the traditional chiefs or to Africans who had been recognized as local rulers by his government, and these intermediaries passed them on to the people at large.

In this connection a difference of theory began to be discernible between French and British policy. The French regarded the local African chiefs as the lowest elements in a single administrative machine. This administration was to be conducted on entirely French lines. The British, on the other hand, came to believe more and more in “indirect rule.” British authority was not to reach directly down to each individual African subject. While the British retained overall control of a colony’s administration, it was to be made effective at the district level by cultivating and by molding the governments of the traditional African rulers.

Indirect rule was neither a new nor a specifically British expedient. Maclean had been an indirect ruler on the Gold Coast in the 1830s; Goldie had proposed indirect rule for the empire his Royal Niger Company had hoped to conquer; and, in the early days of their expansion, the French had often had no alternative but to seek to control their newly won territories through the agency of the African governments they had conquered. Once they were firmly established, however, the French almost invariably moved away from the practice. The British, on the other hand, evolved a theory of indirect rule that they tried to apply systematically to their colonies during the first half of the 20th century. This was largely due to the influence of Lugard. In 1900–06 he had seen no other way to control the vast population in northern Nigeria, whose rulers he had defeated, and he had subsequently been promoted governor-general (1912–19) of a united Nigeria, which was by far the most important British colony in Africa. After his retirement to Britain, he became a dominating influence on the formation of colonial administrative policy, so that indirect rule became accepted as the ideal philosophy of government for British tropical Africa.

Not all areas of western Africa were as suitable for Lugardian indirect rule as northern Nigeria. Lugard himself experienced considerable problems in trying to apply it to the largely chiefless societies of eastern Nigeria and to the Yoruba of the southwest, where authority and law were not as clear-cut. In the Gold Coast indirect rule proved more acceptable to the Asante than the direct rule imposed after the conquest of 1900–01. Farther south, however, the Western-style economy and modes of thought had made such inroads that there were endless problems in the implementation of indirect rule, and the full constitutional apparatus for it was hardly installed until the 1940s.

The development of indirect rule also implied a contradiction with an earlier tradition of British colonial government, that of the colonial legislative council. The governors of British colonies were allowed more initiative than French governors and were supposed to exercise this in the interests of their individual territories insofar as these did not contradict the overriding British interest. To help them in this, each colony was equipped with a legislative council that included representatives of local opinion, and this council’s consent was normally required before laws were enacted or the colonial government’s budget was approved.

The institution of the legislative council had evolved from experience with settler colonies outside Africa; when such councils were introduced into tropical Africa from the 1840s onward, most of their members were colonial officials. A minority of “unofficial” members represented trade and the professions rather than the traditional communities, and these were not elected but were nominated by the governor. However, 19th-century colonial officials, traders, and professionals were almost as likely to be Black as white, and the early legislative councils were by no means ineffective vehicles for the expression of African interests and of criticisms of British policy. It was thus possible both for the British and for the educated African elite in their colonies to view the legislative councils as embryo parliaments that would eventually become composed of elected African members who would control the executive governments, which would themselves, through the growth of education in the colonies, become more and more composed of African officials.

Although very little thought was given to the matter, because it was supposed that the development might take centuries, it was supposed that the British colonies in Africa would follow the example of Canada and Australia and ultimately emerge as self-governing members of the empire. The equally remote future for the French colonies, on the other hand, was thought to be the acculturation (assimilation) of their people, so that ultimately they would all become full French citizens, the colonies would be integrated with metropolitan France, and the African citizens would share equally with the French-born in its institutions.

Both of these ideals were more appropriate to the colonial situations in western Africa before the great scramble for territory that began in 1879, when the colonies were comparatively small territories in which European influence had been slowly but steadily gaining ground for a considerable period. They were effectively shelved when it came to grappling with the problem of governing the enormously greater numbers of Africans without any real previous contacts with European ways who were quickly brought under colonial rule in the years after 1879. Thus, on the French side, though those born in the four major communes (Saint-Louis, Gorée, Rufisque, and Dakar) of the old colony of Senegal continued to enjoy the French citizenship that they had been granted prior to 1879, other Africans became French subjects (possessing the obligations of citizens but not their rights), who could only qualify for citizenship after stringent tests. By 1937, out of an estimated 15 million people under French rule in western Africa, only some 80,500 were citizens, and only 2,500 of these had acquired their citizenship by means other than the accident of birth in one of the four communes.

In the British colonies, however, where the legislative councils were already a reality, there was a dichotomy between them and the institution of indirect rule. Initially, insofar as this was resolved at all, it was at the expense of the development of the legislative councils. Thus the competence of the council in the Gold Coast was not extended to Asante before 1946, while in Nigeria until 1922 the council’s competence was restricted to the small territory of Lagos. It was not until 1922 that any elected members appeared in the councils, and they remained for a generation a small proportion of the total unofficial membership, chosen only by tiny electorates in a few coastal towns. For the rest, the African population remained firmly under British control through the mechanism of indirect rule. The implication was not only that the norms of African society and political behaviour were far removed from those of western Europe but also that the British had by no means accepted that African society and politics would or should evolve in that direction. Those few Africans who had become educated and acculturated in Western ways were not thought to be representative of the mass. There was a move to exclude local Africans from the colonial administration, which became regarded as a professional service, liable to serve anywhere in Africa, with the role of holding the ring until, in some unexplained fashion, the native administrations under indirect rule had developed sufficiently to make British control superfluous.