Abstract
In Biometric State, Keith Breckenridge provides an intellectual history of biometrics in South Africa since 1850, simultaneously delivering a novel theorization of the postcolonial state. In other words, his empirical object of analysis and major theoretical contribution are one and the same. Biometrics, which he defines as the “identification of people by machines” (12), takes the place of the previously dominant documentary state. This move necessitates a fundamental rethinking of bureaucratic power, moving us beyond the early twentieth century Weberian ideal type, which Breckenridge argues became unreliable due to both capacity issues, and problems posed by forgery and deception.
The greatest strength of the book is its engagement with multiple existing literatures, rendering it appealing to political theorists, anthropologists of the state, Africanists, science and technology studies scholars, historians of science, intellectual historians, and political sociologists alike. Breckenridge masterfully dispenses with existing explanations, demonstrating that biometrics was not merely a technological innovation, but the technological innovation of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, transforming the existing model of the state itself. Writing against general explanations ranging from Weber on rationalization to Foucault on governmentality, and from Scott on high modernism to Cooper on the gatekeeper state, he insists that we take “the very specific history of progressivism, and…its distinctively unconstrained role in the making of the South African state after 1900” (26) seriously. He argues that the technologies of government produced under this ascendant progressivism unwittingly generated “the twentieth century enthusiasm for segregation” (208), the dark side of moralizing reforms.
Although Africa typically plays the role of “a territory outside of science” in this mode of history writing (27), Breckenridge successfully demonstrates that biometric government was forged in South Africa before being exported to the rest of the postcolonial world. Universal biometrics is a distinctly postcolonial phenomenon, with its Euro-American iteration “designed to target individuals and populations that have been significantly stripped of the rights and statuses of citizens” (203), viz. immigrants and criminals. The key figure in this project was Francis Galton, the British progressive—inventor of the statistical tools of inference, correlation and regression; developer of fingerprinting and the subject of the book’s first empirical chapter. In most existing accounts, Galton’s role in bringing eugenics to Africa is overlooked. Breckenridge remedies this by convincingly “show[ing] that Galton’s two biometrics—eugenically motivated statistics of human biology and the technologies of fingerprint identification—have common roots in the project of Empire” (37).
Drawing on Galton’s invention, a second pioneer in the development of South Africa’s biometric state was Edward Henry, a British police commissioner, proponent of fingerprinting, and protagonist of the second chapter. Breckenridge argues that his key innovation was “an obsessive preoccupation with fingerprinting as the only reliable means of identification” (74). The development of a simplified version of Galton’s classification system—the Henry System, as it came to be called, made its way to Johannesburg in 1900 when Joseph Chamberlain sent Henry to the Witwatersrand to satisfy the demands of mining companies in search of a more efficient means for migrant labour identification. Henry established Johannesburg’s first unified police department, which was, however, one “bereft of investigative capacity” (72). Instead, its efforts were limited to identifying migrant workers through fingerprinting in accordance with the Pass Law system. Compulsory detention became a major means of enabling the state to identify potential violators of the Pass Law, which often took upward of a week. The result was a shift from a philosophy of police restraint to one of routine detention, “set[ting] in place the engine of incarceration in South Africa” (72).
Fingerprinting was a way for colonial states with limited capacities to track populations in which they had only a marginal interest. The first major struggle over this colonial identification system is the subject of Chapter 3—where Gandhi’s initial enthusiasm for biometric registration of all South African Indians was followed by an abrupt reversal in 1908, after which he decried fingerprinting as an assault on the dignity of men and the respectability of women and children. Breckenridge makes two fascinating points regarding Gandhi’s shift. First, “his movement from managerialism to anti-modernism” (93) reversed the typical trajectory of progressive critics of industrialism, embodied in figures such as Beatrice Webb and Jane Addams. Second and more significantly, Gandhi’s “militant rejection of Western modernism” which subsequently formed the core of Hind Swaraj, “lay in his bitter experience of the compromises over fingerprint registration” (109).
The next two chapters give an account of the incorporation of biometrics into the segregationist and apartheid states respectively. In Chapter 4, Breckenridge argues that formulations such as Cooper’s “gatekeeper state” (2002), and Berry’s “hegemony on a shoestring” (1992) are inadequate; describing African state-forms rather than explaining their formation. Instead, he argues, the conflict between the policing and public health branches of progressive government yielded an administrative inertia. The gatekeeper state then “was a result, and not the cause of the failure of universal registration” (135). In Chapter 5, he tells the story of Verwoerd’s Bewysburo (“Bureau of Proof”), explaining its role in the transformation from a documentary bureaucracy to biometric system of identification by way of the requirement that all Africans are to carry a passbook.
Chapter 6 turns towards the global history that we are promised in the introduction—“Very recently Galton’s blueprint has escaped from the special conditions in South Africa, finding its way in to almost every one of the former colonies of the European empires, with centralized ten-print biometric identity registration filling the administrative void left by the weak states and limited ambitions of colonial governments” (164). Breckenridge describes this as a “Galtonian reversal” wherein contra Galton’s eugenicism, these emergent biometric systems direct resources at marginalized populations, and they function by individualizing subjects rather than deploying collective categories such as race or caste.
In South Africa, once biometrics were successfully divorced from their association with passbooks (and he explains the process of this dissociation in marvelous detail), they were marshaled as the chief means for distributing direct cash payments to the poor. He argues that in most postcolonial states, this biometric system of distribution characterizes a novel form of the welfare state. We can no longer conceive of welfare states—especially those in the postcolonial world, using the obsolete Weberian framework of the documentary state. Far from some disembodied notion of the postcolony, Breckenridge concludes by demonstrating that while biometrics in Europe and the United States is reserved for “individuals and populations that have been significantly stripped of the rights and statuses of citizens” (203), biometric systems tend to be universal in the postcolonial world.
Yet there remains a certain ambivalence in Breckenridge’s judgment of biometric government. On the one hand, he begins the book’s preface by arguing that “authoritarian political results” and universal fingerprinting go hand in hand, and not simply by happenstance (ix). He convincingly demonstrates the imperial and racist legacy of biometrics throughout this book, from his revisionist chapter on Galton to his take on Verwoerd’s controls on population mobility. It is not by chance that he calls this “the dark side” of the modern welfare state (208). He insists it is not “incidental that a very large proportion of those targeted are black” (202) in the US context. But Breckenridge concludes Biometric State with a final empirical chapter on the Galtonian reversal, the use of universal biometrics to deliver cash grants and services in the bulk of the postcolonial world. How are we to think about biometrics then: as a Marcusean technology inseparable from the results it yields; or conversely, as a Weberian means articulable to any end whatsoever?
This minor qualm aside, Breckenridge’s book is an exemplary work of scholarship, deploying rigorous intellectual history in the service of rethinking existing political theories of bureaucracy in the postcolonial world. For readers wondering why “bureaucracy” and “documentary state” are no longer conceptually identical, this is the place to start.