ABSTRACT
The role of the colonial state has always been problematic as a topic in anthropology. To anthropologists of the old school, who worked in Africa under colonial rule, the colonial state did not constitute a properly anthropological subject. In their opinion, the anthropologist's main task was to analyse the functioning of 'traditional' African societies before these were disrupted by western influences. After the spate of recent publications on 'Anthropology and Colonialism', there is hardly a need to go into the shortcomings of this perspective.2 To mention just one point: when decolonization became unavoidable in Africa, anthropologists had very little to say about the large-scale processes of change on the African continent, and were thus in danger of losing their leading position in the study of African societies to development economists, political scientists and sociologists.
