White control bubbling under

MAHMOOD Mamdani’s style of writing is defined by preoccupation with issues of bifurcation, a term that he uses in one of his books. For him, the separation of phenomena into two different parts often fails to recognise the existence of complexities that may assist us to better understand how things function.

In this latest offering, Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities, Mamdani advances the central thesis that the emergence of political modernity in Europe, which included the notion of toleration for minorities, gave rise to the nation-state as we know it.

This involved the use of race to establish a political formation called the nation, which is based on exclusion of others who may be “different”. This in turn got mixed with geography, thus the creation of states in their varied manifestations.

The challenge that Europe faced during its Middle Ages was the emergence of humanism as a school of thought, with its emphasis on the need to treat humans as equal. The result was the notion of toleration for those considered “outsiders” in relation to the nation, based on their “race”, religion, and “ethnicity”.

Europe, however, failed to uphold that which it tried to resolve for itself when, through colonial conquest over other continents, it embarked on a systematic programme of the mistreatment of other human beings as “minorities”; the “uncivilised other” which Europe arrogated to itself the right to dispossess of the land, oppress, exploit, and dehumanise.

For Mamdani, the model of creating “minorities” which could be mistreated based on their “backwardness” emerged in North America, where the indigenous peoples of the land were brutalised, rendered almost extinct through violence, and eventually reduced to an underclass.

Nazi Germany escalated this model to murderous levels with the mistreatment of the “minority” Jews.

Following the colonial conquest by both the Dutch and the British, and establishment of segregation laws by the latter, the apartheid regime adopted the practices of racist North

America and Nazi Germany to create, maintain and enforce a system of racial classification, oppression, and exploitation.

The Bantustan system was used to create an artificial “minority” of black people in relation to a “majority white South Africa”.

At the same time as apartheid was formalised in 1948, the State of Israel was founded following the conquest over Palestine by the Zionist movement, creating an artificial “minority Arab” population.

The last example examined by Mamdani is the case of Sudan and its eventual split into two countries in 2011 – Republic of Sudan and the Republic of South Sudan.

The split was presented to the world to be a result of an endless civil war caused by ethnic strife. What this view conveniently leaves out is that it was the British who politicised ethnicities that had existed for many centuries without there being wars. Instead, “tribal” differences were created.

Through this book, Mamdani has masterfully shown the link between European modernity, manifesting through the emergence of the nationstate, humanism’s insistence on toleration of the minorities within Europe, and the paradoxical inversion of that practice during colonial conquest, by turning the indigenous peoples of various lands into the oppressed and exploited, and rendering them as “minorities”.

There are however major weaknesses in Mamdani’s arguments.

Critics have pointed out that the book ignores the question of gender in its attempt to explain how minorities are formed. Mamdani has argued, in turn, that he does address issues of gender in his other writings. He also argues that, like any writing project that would have limitations, the book was not intended to address the issue of gender.

The second weakness is silence on the political economy of the emergence of the nation-state, colonial conquest, and even nationalism.

Again, Mamdani tries to explain this away in the June 2021 Bulletin of the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (Codesria) that: “Even if someone wrote a love poem, he or she was likely to be asked: what about class?” Yes, what about class, Prof?

It is difficult to avoid raising the argument that colonial conquest was never about some innate hatred that Europeans had for peoples of other continents, and therefore set out to conquer them.

People across the world had been engaged in mutual trade for millennia. What changed during the 15th century was the internal crisis within Europe with the shortage of resources to maintain itself.

Second, tensions between the monarchies on the one hand and the merchants who were growing richer by the day on the other, led to the formalisation of the resolve to conquer other lands on behalf of the monarchy.

The merchants were therefore stripped of their monopoly on trade and resulting self-enrichment. The Papal authority to conquer other people because they were “uncivilised” was simply a cover for economic conquest. Race and religion were conveniently used as justification to achieve these means.

Lastly, Mamdani fails to develop a critical appreciation of what he terms the “South African Moment”. While offering some critique of the compromises of 1994 he argues that the settlement averted the emergence of the phenomenon of a “majority” over a “minority”.

What he fails to appreciate is that the 1994 settlement left white privilege intact. The result over the years has been the re-emergence of white supremacist practices that are subtle and not as pronounced as they were under apartheid.

And, as Aubrey Matshiqi often argues, we now have a situation of a “numerical minority that is now a cultural majority”, meaning that we increasingly observe the dominance of white voices in public debates that shape the political, economic, social, legal, and cultural tapestry of the country.

While offering vintage Mamdani analysis, the book has these major weaknesses that other scholars should seek to correct for us to have a broader and deeper understanding of European modernity and its enduring effect on the lives of peoples all over the world.

♦ Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities is published by Wits University Press and is available from bookstores and online outlets. Prices average around R360.