Yunus Momoniat
CITIZEN AND SUBJECT: CONTEMPORARY AFRICA AND THE LEGACY OF LATE COLONIALISM by Mahmood Mamdani (James Currey/Fountain/David Philip, R79,95) –
UGANDAN academic Mahmood Mamdani, who worked in South Africa for a time, has written a wide-ranging and highly theoretical book which attempts to discern a pattern in the process of colonialism in Africa.
He begins by giving an outline of Africa’s impasse, the legacy of late colonialism: tribalism, the failure of democratisation, despotisms of various sorts, and policies which oscillate between modernism (civil society) and traditionalism (communitarianism). The central problems of the post-independence states are succinctly stated: “The failure to democratise explains why deracialisation was not sustainable and why development ultimately failed.”
Mamdani expounds a theory which lays bare the roots of this situation. Citizen and Subject is divided into two parts, the first analysing the structure of power in post-colonial Africa. He defines the central difficulty for colonisers as the “native question”.
Even before the problems of political economy and labour emerged, it was the need to control the native population which most exercised the colonialist policy-makers. This concern marked a shift in colonialism: from a “civilizing mission” to the more Machiavellian task of wielding power economically.
Jan Smuts formulated this problem in other terms. Either the African becomes a citizen of a state (direct rule), in which case he becomes a caricature of European man, or he must be ruled in a way which allows him to preserve his tradition and culture. The latter route, which Smuts prescribed, was the policy of institutional segregation – allowing tribal structures to flourish beneath the rule of the modern state (indirect rule). This virtually Africanist philosophy paradoxically became a central pillar of colonial rule.
Eventually colonial Africa was governed through both forms of rule, a complementary mode which emerged through trial and error: direct rule for citizens, indirect rule for subjects. Or civil society for the elites (citizens), and state controlled tribalism for the indigenous majority (subjects).
This arrangement Mamdani refers to as the bifurcated state, a modern state set over and above an absolutist, patriarchal state.
The policy of indirect rule served as a precondition for the development of what Mamdani calls decentralised despotism, the form of state which he argues emerged as the norm in colonial Africa, and indeed in independent Africa, either intact or as a variation.
Decentralised despotism is characterised by a central authority which rules the periphery through the virtual creation of tribes and tribal authorities. The imperial power mobilises tribal authority, makes members of the tribe subject to a customary law which is a caricature of the customary law of indigenous communities. Tradition becomes deformed into a form of tribalism that is functional for colonial rule.
In the modern period this arrangement leads to a reversal of one or other aspect of the form of state: either the despotism becomes overly centralised, as in radical one-party states and military rule, or the central authority ceases to have any relation to its periphery, to the rural countryside.
In every case, there is a failure of democratisation and in the development of an authentic civil society, a failure of the state to reach out into the rural areas to traditional communities.
The second part of the book analyses the structure of resistance. In Mamdani’s view, the form of resistance is always determined by the form of power, just as the state is always the outcome of the dialectic between power and resistance. He analyses the South African scenario as an example of successful resistance in the civil sphere – though he also sees a failure to mobilise (Zulu) rural resistance to apartheid.
At the other pole, Uganda is shown to have an effective rural resistance to colonialism. Mamdani stresses that tribalism is not inherently retrogressive, while anti-tribal movements are not necessarily progressive. Rather, in Africa power mobilises tribalism, but so too does resistance.
An interesting principle of Citizen and Subject is the contention that apartheid, rather than being an exceptional form of colonial state, is instead paradigmatic of colonialism in Africa.
South Africans will be impressed by Mamdani’s interpretation of apartheid and its prehistory, but also by his analysis of the dangers of our current situation. He warns of a preoccupation with civil society at the expense of rural society – a failure to extend democracy to the periphery and to incorporate the rural into the mainstream being the greatest danger of our transition.
Mamdani must be commended for attempting an analysis which does not shirk a realistic perception of the state of Africa. He manages not to be ideologically blinkered and yet does not slip into bland pragmatism. His analysis is rigorous, and breaks new ground. He challenges established positions, and in some cases resolves previously intractable debates. He passionately desires Africa to free itself from its impasse, and essential to this is the creation of a true state-form – a relation which works.