Surveillance, for Keith Breckenridge, is not a matter of an all-pervasive state peering intensely into the lives of its subjects. Rather, the use of biometrics reflects the inability or disinterest of states in Africa to know very much about their populations. With a fingerprint, the South African government could know that a black person was indeed the one who had a job or the residence permit that allowed him to be where he was. In a twist of minimalist logic, fingerprint identification now allows Africans to receive certain social benefits without an elaborate apparatus of registration or a banking system available to most citizens. The documentary state, Breckenridge argues, seeks a fuller portrait of the individual subject and opens itself up to a broader discourse about what membership in a state entails; the biometric state focuses its gaze and narrows the discursive possibilities.

As Breckenridge shows in this illuminating and far-ranging book, biometric identification was not a European technology brought belatedly to Africa, but a mode of governance pioneered in South Africa itself, only later making its way “home” to Great Britain. Francis Galton, well known for his roles in developing statistics, articulating a “scientific” vision of racial distinction, and promoting the technology of fingerprinting, spent formative years (around 1850) in South Africa. His interests came together in marking Africans as an inferior population whose inability to participate in the literate logic of advanced societies implied that biometric means were the only ones able to track individuals, and that there was no need for more robust forms of information about them. Fingerprinting had not only its advocates, but also its foes, among them Mohandas Gandhi, for whom the South African attempt to subject Indians to this mode of identification was an unacceptable intrusion into the family. Rather than becoming a state technology of universal import, fingerprinting was associated with criminals and foreigners—and racially marked populations. Applying such methods to respectable peoples was fiercely resisted.

In South Africa, as in parts of Europe and North America, the classification of populations and interest in “isolating and sanitising” (208–9) a portion of the population were part of the agenda of elites who considered themselves progressive. They wanted to build a healthy population and had confidence that science would enable them to do so. In South Africa, which was “unconstrained by a democratic order” (214), the process went particularly far. It went further after 1948, when fingerprinting was linked, after false starts, to registration schemes, most notoriously in the passbook that male (and later female) Africans had to carry. Biometric technology was seen as a means of avoiding counterfeiting and impersonation. But, Breckenridge makes clear, the reality of the system was less far-reaching than the fantasy, for storing and sorting fingerprints and using them to trace individuals were more arduous tasks than their proponents acknowledged. Despite computer technology, the “dystopian” (201) side of biometrics strains the capacities of information-hungry governments even in the age of the “war on terror.”

Fingerprinting in South Africa was for most of the twentieth century focused on a racially defined category that was to be denied the rights of the citizen. In 1981 the government extended fingerprint authentication to all racial categories, creating for the first time a single, centralized registration system. The move led to controversy, especially from whites who thought it only fit for blacks, and administrative chaos. But as the apartheid system collapsed, biometric registration took on new meaning. From the 1990s, different constituencies in South Africa were pushing for biometric registration as the basis for accurately allocating pensions and welfare grants to people who were otherwise unidentifiable to the government.

For Breckenridge, biometric methods have both their uses and their dangers, but they also have their limitations. Most important, they represent a narrow conception of the relationship of individual to the state. Handing out welfare grants to people who place their fingers on a reader does not substitute for debate over the provision of water, sanitary facilities, and education to people in poverty, nor does it take away the possibility that people will mobilize against exclusion and impoverishment.

The biometric state, of course, was never just a biometric state. Indeed, no adjective placed in front of this noun (as the author of this review has also done; see Africa in the World: Capitalism, Empire, Nation-State [Harvard, 2014]) can fully describe what states do, how their elites conceive of themselves, and how their power is constrained and challenged. Breckenridge has told a story of considerable complexity in an engaging and persuasive manner, and in so doing he has opened up questions that are as much a matter for the future as of the past.