| Acknowledgments | |
| I | Introduction: Thinking through Africa's Impasse | 3 |
| Pt. I | The Structure of Power | 35 |
| II | Decentralized Despotism | 37 |
| III | Indirect Rule: The Politics of Decentralized Despotism | 62 |
| IV | Customary Law: The Theory of Decentralized Despotism | 109 |
| V | The Native Authority and the Free Peasantry | 138 |
| Pt. II | The Anatomy of Resistance | 181 |
| VI | The Other Face of Tribalism: Peasant Movements in Equatorial Africa | 183 |
| VII | The Rural in the Urban: Migrant Workers in South Africa | 218 |
| VIII | Conclusion: Linking the Urban and the Rural | 285 |
| Notes | 303 |
| Index | 339 |
