Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism

By Mahmood Mamdani

In analyzing the obstacles to democratization in post- independence Africa, Mahmood Mamdani offers a bold, insightful account of colonialism's legacy--a bifurcated power that mediated racial domination through tribally organized local authorities, reproducing racial identity in citizens and ethnic identity in subjects. Many writers have understood colonial rule as either "direct" (French) or "indirect" (British), with a third variant--apartheid--as exceptional. This benign terminology, Mamdani shows, masks the fact that these were actually variants of a despotism. While direct rule denied rights to subjects on racial grounds, indirect rule incorporated them into a "customary" mode of rule, with state-appointed Native Authorities defining custom. By tapping authoritarian possibilities in culture, and by giving culture an authoritarian bent, indirect rule (decentralized despotism) set the pace for Africa; the French followed suit by changing from direct to indirect administration, while apartheid emerged relatively later. Apartheid, Mamdani shows, was actually the generic form of the colonial state in Africa.


Through case studies of rural (Uganda) and urban (South Africa) resistance movements, we learn how these institutional features fragment resistance and how states tend to play off reform in one sector against repression in the other. The result is a groundbreaking reassessment of colonial rule in Africa and its enduring aftereffects. Reforming a power that institutionally enforces tension between town and country, and between ethnicities, is the key challenge for anyone interested in democratic reform in Africa.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Release date: Apr 24, 2018
• ISBN: 9781400889716

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CITIZEN AND SUBJECT

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Sherry B. Ortner, Nicholas B. Dirks, Geoff Eley

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CITIZEN AND SUBJECT

CONTEMPORARY AFRICA AND THE LEGACY OF LATE COLONIALISM

Mahmood Mamdani

With a new preface by the author

Copyright © 1996 by Princeton University Press

Preface to the new paperback edition

copyright © 2018 by Princeton University Press

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First published by Princeton University Press in 1996

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 Contents 

 Preface 

CITIZEN AND SUBJECT (C&S) was the result of ten years of reflection, study, writing, and rewriting. Its prehistory began in 1974, when I completed my Ph.D. Published two years later as Politics and Class Formation in Uganda, this book understood the process of class formation as exclusively a consequence of the development of the market.¹ At the heart of the book was a lacuna in the understanding of the agrarian and peasant question. Except for an analysis of landlord-tenant relations in the Buganda countryside in the aftermath of the 1900 Agreement, the book showed little understanding of those parts of Uganda where access to land was a communal rights and colonial rule was experienced through the network of power relations known as customary. This had wider consequences. Without an understanding of the dynamics driving non-market relations in the countryside, it was not possible to provide a political explanation of practices described as tribalism in mainstream literature.

Armed with a Ph.D., I arrived at my first full-time academic job at the University of Dar-es-Salaam (1973–1979). There, I honed my skills in political economy through intense involvement in as many as six study groups a week. Much of the discussion on the Hill in those years focused on two issues: one, the nature of class formation after the Arusha Declaration, in particular the effect of nationalization on the development of a managerial alongside an administrative bureaucracy in the state; and two, the possibility of capitalist development in the era of imperialism. Issa Shivji wrote The Silent Class Struggle and The Class Struggle Continues calling attention to the specificity of class formation in the context of state-centered accumulation. His major critic was Ugandan lawyer, Dani Wadada Nabudere, whose several books include The Political Economy of Imperialism and Imperialism and Revolution in Uganda. Nabudere defended a classical understanding of class formation as exclusively an effect of market formation, alongside a claim that no independent (national) bourgeoisie could develop in the era of imperialism. In raising the question of the political (the state) with reference to class formation, Issa Shivji had moved away from the narrow understanding of political economy as focused on market formation.

I returned to Uganda in 1979 after Idi Amin had been ousted by Tanzanian troops, and began teaching at Makerere University the following year. For the next six years (1980–1986), I did research in the countryside:Buganda in Central Uganda, Lango in northern Uganda, Kisoro and the Ruwenzori mountains in Western Uganda, parts of Karamoja in northeastern Uganda, and Busia in eastern Uganda. The research familiarized me with the nature of social differentiation where land was not a scarce factor. My focus, however, was on objective constraints on choices faced by peasant households. I had yet to explore questions related to peasant subjectivity.

That changed in 1986, the year the National Resistance Army came to power and appointed the National Commission of Inquiry into Local Government and with myself as chair. The NRA coming to power was no simple change of government; and yet, it was not the revolution we had all hoped to make. It was clear that we would have to think in terms of reform, not revolution, and that reform would need a clear understanding of the relationship between the economic and the political, especially where land and social relations were shaped by the colonial framing of the customary. The difference between Buganda and most of the country loomed large: whereas land had become a commodity in Buganda with the 1900 Agreement, land in most of the country was held as customary. Customary right was a usufruct right; customary land could not be sold. The effect was to keep the peasant outside of the market but subject to dictates by customary chiefs. The countryside, I realized, was governed with an iron fist, and this hierarchy of chiefs had been crafted in the colonial period even if it was known as customary. This arrangement seemed hardly affected by periodic multi-party elections. As the Commission spent two years going around the countryside, I focused on the question of state reform and peasant subjectivity. I noticed that every time I raised the question of reforming the institution of chiefship, it inevitably generated an animated discussion among peasant audiences. I particularly remember an elder asking a question at the end of one such discussion: Can there be a world without chiefs? I came out of this process (1986–1988) with an understanding that where land was customary, agrarian reform would have to be thought of in political terms, that is, with reference to the coercive relationship between the chief and the peasant.

The stakes involved in a political economy became apparent to me when I visited South Africa in 1993—as a visiting professor at the University of Durban (Westville). Political economists had argued that the development of South Africa into a semi-industrialized and semi-urban economy had made it exceptional to the African story. The problem was that a political economy lens had made the nature and significance of customary power truly invisible. Later, I would realize that a modernist lens, such as that of Foucault, also led to a similar invisibility.

When C&S was published in 1996, my comrades in Dar-es-Salaam expressed a sense of betrayal: they saw it as an abandonment of the method of political economy. From my point of view, I had not abandoned the method as I had its language, and its categories, to the extent that both remained confined to the world of market-based relations. The importance of Shivji was that he had showed that the market was too restrictive to understand the nature of social change in a context where the state was acting as a structural force. To understand the peasant question, I thought it necessary to place the political (that is, the native question) center stage. This meant shifting attention from the dull compulsion of market forces (Marx) to the centrality of extra-economic coercion—forced crops, forced labor, forced sales, forced contributions and so on. Instead of considering this a further development of the Dar-es-Salaam debate on the relationship of the state to class formation, as an alternative to the theory of underdevelopment, the response of my Dar colleagues was reactive. I thought they failed to see what was new in my contribution: even if I was not quite with them, I had not parted company with them.

The realization that I had to look outside the market to understand the peasant question led to a new question: How was the subject disciplined in a colonized society like Uganda? How does the nature of custom change from the premodern to the colonial modern? Custom did not exist as a governmental power in the pre-modern, and it could not be so because the state was not modern. Discipline was not carried out in colonial society through forms Foucault has made us aware of in modernist society. I would later realize that custom becomes a form of governmentality under the modern colonial state. This would call for a deeper reflection on how custom, a social construct in the premodern period, was instrumentalized by the modern colonial state. Thus the contrast between how custom varied from one locality to another in premodern society and the production of uniformity as an authoritative customary law in the colonial modern. Custom and customary turned into a form of discipline in colonized society. Like modern governmentality, customary law has elements of self-regulation.

In discussing the structural legacy of colonialism, C&S proposed a broadening of the lens in two ways: from the labor question to the native question, and from the race question to the tribal question. At the same time, it called for a historical understanding of the customary. Scholarship on the labor question had been particularly well developed in the South African academy. When confronted by an anomaly—that the most highly developed economy on the African continent had introduced the most repressive political system—these same political economists responded with the claim that apartheid was functional to capitalism since it produced cheap labor. This obscured the fact that apartheid was in the main a political response to a political dilemma: the development of capitalism had moved labor from one region to another, and from the rural to the urban, making it possible for labor to organize to improve its lot. In response, the state looked for ways to tighten political control on these same laborers. Rather than free the movement of migrant labor as a key agent of market and capitalist development and thereby increase the supply of labor and reduce the price of labor-power, apartheid strengthened ethnic homeland authorities, tied access to land and recognition of land and other rights to membership of these homelands—thereby disenfranchizing those who moved out of the homeland while at the same time pitting them against those who remained in the homeland.

South Africa was not an anomaly. The same tendency could be observed in other parts of the continent. The new Nigerian constitution passed after the Civil War celebrated its federal character, in effect creating a confederation whose constituent units were ethnically-demarcated states. Every Nigerian was recognized first and foremost as a citizen of a state within the federation, and only then as a citizen of Nigeria. When he or she competed for a position in key federal institutions—the army, the civil service, federal universities—it was as an indigene of a subnational state. As with natives in apartheid South Africa, those who resided outside the boundaries of their ethnic homelands risked being disenfranchised. The political did not reflect and reinforce developments in the economy, even in the last instance; rather, the political tried to keep these developments in check, or even to reverse them, in the interest of maintaining law and order. As we shall see, the latest development along these lines has been the introduction of ethnic federalism in Ethiopia.

Ethnicity and tribe are animated by opposed logics. Ethnicity was an open and inclusive category in the premodern period: whether through conquest or contact, ethnic groups expanded over time. The Baganda were a handful of clans some centuries ago; as they conquered neighboring populations, they absorbed them—the conquered became Baganda over time. The logic was assimilationist, even if aggressively so. The same can be said of Nguni groups to the south, the Swahili to the east, the Amhara to the north-east, their Arab neighbors, the Hausa to the west, and so on. Amharization, Swahilization, Arabization, Hausization—these processes summed up the practices of aggressive assimilation.

Tribe, in contrast, was exclusive. It defined identity in one-dimensional terms and fixed it permanently: in relation to a homeland, to a community defined as indigenous to that homeland, to an authority that held sway over the homeland, and to a set of privileges and discriminations tied to homeland identity and identified as customary rights. This one-dimensional identification defined a person’s life chances: access to land, belonging in a community, and preferential treatment in community-based dispute-resolution processes. It had a modern ring about it.

Tribe was more a subset of race than a corollary of ethnic identity. Just as race distributed life chances in accordance with phenotypical identification and excluded racial others, so did tribe become the basis of privilege from which tribal others were excluded. Not only were these distinctions inscribed in law, it was in the nature of modern power that they were enforced through law. The law was constitutive of these distinctions. The administrative power of the chief was constituted by the political power of the colonial state. If the premodern was informed by an assimilationist logic, the modern colonial was informed by a segregationist logic.

Whereas direct rule was based on racial discrimination only, indirect rule turned on a double discrimination: race and tribe. This politicized both race and tribe. My argument was that tribalism needed to be understood as a necessary consequence of a mode of rule that instrumentalized Africa’s cultural history rather than being its organic development. Both ethnicity and tribe have meanings which are premodern and modern. In the United States, for example, the notion of ethnicity becomes salient as referring to different ethnic groups. Ethnicity does some work in the notion of an idealized liberal democracy. It both acknowledges cultural difference and is compatible with the notion of a political melting pot. Tribe in modern times is more a form of governmentality than ethnicity.

C&S called for a historicization of custom, distinguishing between two periods in particular: the premodern and the modern. In premodern society, custom was part of community, not of political power. In the colonial modern, custom became an instrument of the law; it became customary law. Colonialism defined a tribe as a group with its own distinctive law. Custom lost its autonomy, and customary law became subordinate to civil law. Civil authorities had the right to annul any custom deemed to be repugnant to morality—of which colonial (civil) power claimed to be the custodian. Several attributes distinguished customary from civil law. Excluded from civil rights, the colonized African became subjugated to customary law. The African had been containerized first as a racial being under direct rule and then also as a tribal being under indirect rule. Rather than set in motion by market-driven forces, the peasant was protected from market forces and pinned to the ground through the direct exercise of the administrative power of the chief. Both the position and the powers of the chief were framed as tribal and justified as customary. The transition from custom as socially observed to custom enforced as law—and thus a part of colonial power—became central to the stabilization of colonialism.

Whereas the first half of C&S discussed the structure of colonial power as its legacy, the second half focused on the response of the colonized. The standard argument in the literature had distinguished nationalism from tribalism, embracing the former and bemoaning the latter. In the rural areas, however, custom was both a language of local power and the language of local protest. The argument in C&S was that custom needed to be understood as contradictory: rather than embrace or distance oneself from the language of custom, one needed to acknowledge the dual use of custom: as a language of privilege by those exercising and benefitting from customary power and as a language calling for equal treatment, i.e., rights, when used by the victims of that power.

If every resistance is shaped by the nature of power it confronts, then the central challenge of a democratic politics in contemporary Africa, argued C&S, was how to connect the rural and the urban, two struggles against two very different modes of power in the indirect rule state. The African post-colonial experience had until now shown two ways of linking the rural and the urban in the postcolonial era: ethnic clientelism and centralized administrative force. Neither had been equal to the task of taking on the challenge posed by the colonial legacy.

Much ink has flowed since Citizen and Subject was published twenty years ago. The book has been widely reviewed since it came out; and much has happened on the ground over the past two decades. My own views have also evolved in response to developments, both in the academy and in society.

THE LEGACY—CRITIQUE FROM THE HISTORIANS

One group of scholars received C&S as a work of history. A few lamented that it was not comprehensive,² some others complained when they did not find their own cultivated garden in the patchwork they saw as C&S, and yet others complained that the book focused on colonial structures to the exclusion of historical processes.

One way of reading C&S is as an account of an unfolding dialectic between structure and agency, between colonial power and response of the colonized. A thread running through the book is that the response to power is in the first instance shaped by the very organization and language of power. I once gave the following illustration to make the point: say a man slaps a woman in Paris, another man does the same in Khartoum and a third man does it in Kwazulu Natal. All three women protest: the woman in Paris protests the violation of her rights, the one in Khartoum that of her dignity, and the one in Kwazulu Natal that of custom. How does one understand the difference in responses? I suggested that in the first instance, protest mimics the language of power, questioning its claims.

C&S is divided into two parts: Power and Resistance. The two chapters on Uganda (the Ruwenzururu, the NRA) and South Africa (the politics of migrant labor) give flesh to this claim and discuss in some detail a variety of attempts to reform the structure of power. Another chapter sets the argument in a broader comparative frame. The conclusion is summed up at the outset:

No nationalist government was content to reproduce the colonial legacy uncritically. Each sought to reform the bifurcated state that institutionally crystalized a state-enforced separation of the rural from the urban and of one ethnicity from another. But in doing so each reproduced a part of that legacy, thereby creating its own variant of despotism. (p. 8)

In both instances, C&S argued, the result was deracialization without democratization.

Some critics claimed the book had reified structures of power, presenting them as an iron-clad and inflexible legacy: after all, argued Frederick Cooper, the structures of indirect rule had solidified in the 1920s and 1930s but had loosened in the 1940s and 1950s as a consequence of citizenship struggles in those same decades. Another claimed that C&S had understood by legacy nothing but passive inheritance (Leander Schneider). Had these critics skipped over the entire second part of the book, or were they simply disappointed not to find in it a discussion of their particular nook of the African continent?

The kind of governmentality in the colonial context evolves alongside the state and modes of identification and self-identification change as the political system evolves. To understand this is to acknowledge the fact of differences between and within societies. It raises questions about how we would approach these categories in different contexts and locations. Not only do tribe and ethnicity have different logics, ethnicity in Nigeria is not the same as ethnicity in Tanzania, or indeed in the United States. There is a sameness—say, connection with the state—but the connection is also different, given that emergence of the state is different in each case. This is why second part of the book is concerned with historical reform—which suggests that people like Cooper either have not thought about it or have not read it.

The focus of the detailed case studies in Part 2 was precisely on the movements that sought to reform the indirect rule state, either by a democratization of the Native Authority in rural areas of Uganda and Tanzania or by a demand for a more inclusive citizenship in South Africa. If C&S did not seek to cover the continent comprehensively, it was not conceived as a work of history, or an area studies compendium. As some commentators acknowledged, it was a mistake to read the work as competing with the historians; rather, it needed to be read as using the work of historians to illuminate the present (Bill Freund).

How do we approach the present? I had critiqued reasoning by analogy: as a way of understanding Africa in the shadow of Europe, as if always trying to catch up, and always failing. Many agreed. Writing on Africa has been largely an exercise in explaining what has gone wrong. (Christopher Clapham). To talk of Africans as having failed only makes sense in analogy with European history; it makes better sense to look at the post-colonial experience not as an attempt to catch up with history but to come to terms with a colonial legacy (John Lonsdale).

THE POLITICAL CRITIQUE: IS ALL RULE INDIRECT RULE?

A second line of criticism came from political scientists who questioned whether indirect rule was specific to colonial power and thus deserving of theorization as such. Using local rulers to buttress colonial rule is not an African novelty; as early as the dawn of modernity, argued Michael Chege, Machiavelli had suggested three ways of running a colony: eliminate the population, send settlers to live amongst them, or set up an oligarchy which will keep the state friendly to you. Abdelwahib el-Affendi went a step further, evoking Michel Foucault: indirect rule, after all, is the very essence of modern power, whether at home or in the colonies. Could one borrow a leaf from Foucault, move away from a preoccupation with sovereignty and the law, and focus on the institutional matrix—the prison, the school, the hospital, the insane asylum, and so on—and the capillaries of power to understand how modern subjectivity is shaped and the modern subject produced?

In the colonies where the rural population lived beyond the reach of these modern institutions, how and where was the subjectivity of the colonized shaped? How was the colonial subject produced? There is no engagement with Foucault in C&S. Indeed, C&S was written at Makerere over the decade spanning 1987–96, when Foucault had not yet arrived in Kampala! But the real point is that even if he had arrived, the answer could not have been read in Foucault. The problem calls on us to think through the nature of power in the colonial modern. To use the language of Foucault, should we think of the customary as a form of discipline and indirect rule as a hybrid between discipline and governmentality?

Let me begin with at least one such attempt to think the colonial. For Partha Chatterjee³, the colonial modern revealed a split between the public and the private: if the colonial state occupied the modern sphere, nationalists established control over the private domain. C&S argues that the split between the public and the private was blurred under indirect rule. The distinctive feature of indirect rule colonialism was precisely that colonialism took command of the private domain, defining custom, thereby shaping the terms within which the subjectivity of the colonized would be produced. Herein lies the significance of the change from custom as social to custom as colonial law. In the premodern period, custom was a set of norms and conventions that regulated gender and generational relations. As such, it was a part of the community. Under colonialism, custom became customary law. More than just observed, it was enforced. The authorities in charge of enforcing custom, so-called customary authorities were sanctioned by the state and backed up by state violence. From a multiplicity of practices, state and customary authorities produced an authoritative version of custom as law. What the asylum, the school, the prison, the hospital, and such institutions were to the modern, the customary was to the colonial modern.

THE LAST TWO DECADES

The critical response to C&S largely focused on the indirect rule state and on efforts to reform it in the post-independence period. The critics have ignored the ways in which the experience of indirect rule has become part of historical memory in Africa. If the memory of modes of precolonial governance has been dimmed and distorted—in some cases even erased—by colonial knowledge systems, it may be said that the practice of indirect rule as a mode of statecraft has been naturalized through these very processes. The attraction of indirect rule to Africa’s post-independence leadership should be obvious: not only does it fragment the population into so many minorities, it also legitimates this political outcome by presenting it as a necessary consequence of cultural difference in African society and history. The politicization of cultural difference presents the ruling power with the possibility of endlessly producing new minorities, assigning each one a historic homeland under the leadership of an indigenous leader charged with safeguarding the rights of this indigenous population. Uganda’s attempt to reintroduce indirect rule post-1995 and Ethiopia’s endeavor to introduce it afresh post-1994 illustrate this tendency.

At the heart of the changes initiated by National Resistance Movement (NRM) when it assumed power in 1986 was the reform of local government. Central to these reforms was the dismantling of the office of the chief as an institution and the election of local committees and councils. At the same time, groups which had hitherto been politically marginalized—women and youth—were guaranteed the right to elect a representative on the nine-person Council. All local officials were made accountable to these committees and councils. The committee system stood as an antidote to the indirect rule state which had survived a quarter century into the post-independence era.

The reform of the local state stood uneasily alongside the failure to reform the central state where the NRM ruled as a single party with an election system that claimed to reward individual merit and rule out the participation of political parties. The turning point came with the constitutional reforms of the mid-1990s: these introduced multi-party elections at the center, but at the same time cordoned off urban from rural areas, bringing districts under presidentially-appointed administrators and closing them to competing parties. Over the next two decades, the center actively encouraged local groups to organize as separate ethnicities and looked favorably on their demand for separate districts as an expression of a right of (ethnic) self-determination. As the number of districts doubled and tripled from the original thirty-three, the cost of governance soared. With each district electing representatives to parliament, the number of representatives exploded, and the scarcity of sitting room turned parliament into a standing-room-only gala. And yet, there was no end in sight. There was no way the state could enfranchise each ethnic group with a district of its own; at the same time, given that every part of the country was multi-ethnic, new minorities emerged every time a new district was created.

A corollary to the formation of new districts (in the north and the east) was the creation of new kingdoms in the historical south. Where new kingdoms were carved out of existing ones—as in the historic Ruwenzururu region—the inevitable result was tension between the old and the new, turning violent where retired army officers had been appointed kings. The political consequence of this overall process—of district and kingdom creation on the basis of ethnic group identity, expressive of a decentralization based on group rather than territorial identity—was that ethnicities without a district or without a kingdom became defined as political minorities with a second class citizenship.

If Uganda returned to a version of the colonial indirect rule system, the new Ethiopian government introduced the system afresh in the mid-1990s with the adoption of a new constitution promising ‘ethnic federalism.’ A federal arrangement may have been an understandable antidote to the centralizing thrust of the monarchy and the Dergue that followed it. When it came to federalism, however, there were different types. Regional (territorial) federalism has been the characteristic form in the West: the United States, Canada and so on. Ethnic federalism, in contrast, has been an African development following the Nigerian post-civil war constitution of the mid-1970s. It followed the logic of colonial indirect rule.

As an expression of self-determination, ethnic federalism acknowledges the ethnic group—and not the population of a region—as the political self with the right to self-determination. The general principle is: for each ethnic group, a homeland. And inside each homeland, customary rights for members of the ethnic group indigenous to that homeland. In Ethiopia too, as had been in colonized Africa, those residing in the homeland but ancestrally not of it, were disenfranchised. This legal innovation turned ethnic difference into a source of advantage for those acknowledged in law as indigenous and discrimination against those who were not. The politicization of ethnicity created an enfranchised majority alongside disenfranchised minorities in each homeland. This is what C&S termed tribalism, the inevitable consequence of indirect rule.

As in the late colonial period, the post-nationalist state in Africa has come to prioritize law and order. The result is a necessary contradiction between the economic and the political. As the developmentalist state ushers in market-friendly reforms, it moves not only products of labor—but also labor itself, landless peasants, workers—beyond local boundaries. At the same time, the indirect rule state disenfranchises those who cross these boundaries as not being indigenous to other homelands. Viewed in light of these developments, the thesis that animated C&S remains as relevant now as it was when first published two decades ago.

We might think of the bifurcated state as a unique form of power introduced in Africa by colonial powers between 1880 and 1940. At the same time, we need to beware of its prehistory in India after the 1857 uprising and its overspill beyond Africa. Yet, this technology was not invented hothouse fashion; the bifurcated state in Africa extended to parts of the Middle East like Iraq and Lebanon. Not surprisingly, like many parts of of Africa, much of Middle East is also plagued by tribalization of politics, ethnic wars, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. All these outcomes can be seen as the debris of a modernist post-colonial project, an attempt to create a centralized modern state as the bearer of Westphalian sovereignty against the background of indirect rule. To think in these terms is to think in terms of a question C&S does not formulate: the relationship of group or territorial autonomy to the overall project to realize state sovereignty in the postcolonial period. This is the question raised by the current rebellion spreading through Ethiopia. What are the implications for individual citizenship of rethinking state sovereignty alongside group rather than territorial autonomy? The discussion in C&S suggests that where sovereignty rests on territorial federalism, the tendency will be to extend equal constitutional protection to all citizens, but where sovereignty rests on ethnic federalism, the tendency will be to render ethnic minorities as second-class citizens in ethnic homelands identified with other ethnic majorities. Whereas the discussion in C&S does reflect on different forms of federalism, it does not explore alternatives to the question of sovereignty as we have customarily thought about it. That is a project likely to take us beyond the parameters of indirect rule.

NOTES TO PREFACE

1. Mahmood Mamdani, Politics and Class Formation in Uganda (London: Heinemann, 1976).

2. F. Ansprenger, Book Reviews, The International Journal of African Historical Studies, vol. 30, no. 3 (1997): 719–720; Penelope Campbell, Book Reviews, The Historian, vol. 61, no. 1, (1998): 143; Anthony Costa, Revisiting Citizen and Subject. South African Historical Journal vol. 38, no.1 (1998): 222–231; Jeffrey Haynes, Reviews, History, vol. 83 (1998): 498–499; P.L.E. Idahosa, Reviews, The International History Review, vol. 20, no. 2 (1998): 493–496; A.W. Stadler, Book Reviews. South African Historical Journal, vol. 37, no. 1(1997): 220–245.

3. Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993).

 Acknowledgments 

THE PUBLICATION OF A BOOK is a convenient time to acknowledge publicly the debt incurred in the course of its writing. I welcome this opportunity, knowing fully well that such debts can never be repaid, only reciprocated.

It is difficult for me to retrace the history of this endeavor with precision, especially since its contours do not quite fit a formal program of research and writing. This is particularly true of the questions that came to guide the process of inquiry. More than any other, the contexts giving rise to these questions coincided with three turning points in my personal life. The first was the 1972 Asian expulsion from Uganda, which set me thinking about the relationship between deracialization and democratization. The second was a two-year term, from 1986 to 1988, as chair of the National Commission of Inquiry into the Local Government System, a commission that the National Resistance Movement (NRM) appointed upon coming to power in Uganda in 1986. This experience focused my mental energies on what democratization would mean in the context of rural Uganda. The third was a series of visits to South Africa, beginning with a two-week tour in 1991 as one of a team of African scholars and ending with a six-month family stay in 1993. This encounter with apartheid both made me rethink the claim of its being exceptional and raised the final question, to which this manuscript is a response: how to transcend the urban-rural divide that even this otherwise far-reaching democratic struggle shares with other movements on the continent.

In retrospect, I can trace the beginnings of the research process to a series of studies I carried out in the Ugandan countryside, from 1981 to 1985. During an earlier stay at the University of Dar-es-Salaam (1973–79), I had come to take it for granted that social research did not always require special funding: we used our modest salaries and informal networks to do field research. But all that changed as structural adjustment programs dramatically undercut our real incomes and forced us to become truly market responsive. I have to admit that only research grants—at first a small grant from IDRC on the commercialization of agriculture, later a more generous reflections on development grant from Rockefeller/CODESRIA—saved me from having to double as a Kampala taxi driver to ensure enough income for a decent living. Although I dutifully submitted research reports to both funders at the end of a duly specified period, I can remember only two individuals—David Court, in charge of Rockefeller’s Nairobi office, and Thandika Mkandawire, at CODESRIA’s Dakar office—cautioning more performance-minded colleagues that the process set in motion by a research grant may take longer to complete. In this case it took a decade. But then both David Court and Thandika Mkandawire—incorrigible social scientists that they are—always suspected that the more significant consequences of social action are often those unintended. For that bit of wisdom, and its unintended consequence, I thank them.

As I think of those who assisted me with the research process in various villages in the first half of the eighties, the feeling that overwhelms me is one of humility more than of gratitude. As many before them, these research assistants—Syahuka Muhindo in the Ruwenzoris, George Ocwa Okello in Lango, and James Serugo in Buganda—introduced me to their home villages and communities and waited patiently as I blundered time and again, good-naturedly acknowledging that this indeed is what a learning process must look like from the outside. Their guidance no doubt prepared me for the work I would have to do as chair of the 1986–88 Local Government Commission. The learning process continued through those years, formally as we held evidence-gathering sessions in village after village and district after district, and informally through discussions stretching over long country drives in the daytime and drinking sessions late at night. My most frequent and formidable companions in those years were Francis Lubanga, the Commission’s Secretary, and Margaret Odeke, fellow member. To them, too, many thanks.

The last phase of my formal field research was in 1993 in South Africa. My stay began in Durban and was made possible by a six-month visiting research professorship in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Durban-Westville. Conscious of the bureaucratic and discipline-focused anti-intellectual legacy of administrations in South Africa’s historically black universities, the rector of the university, Jairam Reddy, was generous and indulgent toward researchers. Mala Singh, the head of the Department of Philosophy, was helpful while remaining watchful, maintaining a judicious balance between generosity and judgment, lest meager performances be masked by professed commitments. In time, both Jairam and Mala became friends with whom I had regular discussions every time an issue intrigued or irked me.

I began my hostel research with a helping hand from Ari Sitas, a fellow academic from the University of Natal, who invited me to join the Culture and Working Life project of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) and introduced me to its union organizer, Alfred Qabula, also a famed worker-poet. As we persisted to organize, at first a workshop, then meetings with individual hostel dwellers—often with paltry results, I am sorry to say—Qabula taught me a lesson in perseverance and stamina that I hope never to forget. In contrast to the semiarid research environment in the Durban hostels of Dalton and Thokoza, I reaped an almost instant and substantial fortune in the larger Johannesburg area: in the hostels of Wolhuter (Johannesburg) and Mzimhlope (Soweto) and the Alexandra civic. That fortune would surely have bypassed me without the generosity of three key individuals: Cas Cavadia of the Civic Associations of Johannesburg, David Letsei of the Alexandra civic, and Sakkie Steyn of the Transvaal Hostel Dwellers’ Association.

Outside of the hostel context, I met and discussed—on a regular and informal basis—with several academics, many of whom doubled as militants: Ari Sitas, Blade Nzimande, Mike Morris, Adam Habib, Bill Freund, Ahmed Bawa, Nick Amin, Yvonne Muthein, Sandra Africa, Prem Singh, and Vishnu Padyachee in Durban; Niko Cloete, Rahmat Omar, Hassan Lorgat, Babylon Xeketwane, Eddie Webster, and Phil Bonner in Johannesburg; and Neville Alexander and Abdou Maliqalim Simone in Cape Town, all of whom helped me find my bearings in the rapidly changing South African situation.

I had gone to South Africa with one research objective in mind: to understand the methods of native control the South African state employed. It was a question with which I became preoccupied following my work in the Local Government Commission in Uganda. To explore its historical dimension, I researched collections at several libraries, both within and outside South Africa: at the Legal Resources Centre and the University of Natal in Durban, at the African Studies Centre and the Law Faculty of the University of Witwatersrand, at the Centre for Basic Research and Makerere University’s Law Development Centre in Kampala, and finally at Harlem’s Schoenberg Center, Columbia University, and the New York City Public Library. Often I stumbled through collections as would a pedestrian through urban concentrations, but at times I benefited from expert guidance: from Sue Clerk at Durban’s Legal Resources Centre, John Kateeba and Charles Ndyabawe at the Centre for Basic Research, and John Nsereko at the Law Development Centre.

Most of the writing of this manuscript was done in Kampala, mainly in the congenial atmosphere of our home and of the Centre for Basic Research. Some revision was done at Columbia University’s Center for African Studies, into the corridors of which I walked in one day—without warning. George Bond, the director, and Ron Kassimir, his deputy, generously extended to me the hospitality of the center for nearly three months in 1994. It was a collegial gesture that one does not quite expect in today’s network-infested world of academia.

As the manuscript took shape, I leaned on several colleagues and friends for critical feedback. Joe Oloka-Onyango and Expedit Ddungu at the Centre for Basic Research, Yash Ghai at the University of Hong Kong, and Niveditta Menon at Lady Shriram College in Delhi read and commented on selected parts. Ben Parker and Adam Habib at the University of Durban-Westville, Bill Freund and Ari Sitas at the University of Natal, Mike Neocosmos in Roma (Lesotho), Peter Gibbons at the African Studies Center in Uppsala (Sweden), and Norman O. Brown in Santa Cruz (California) read and commented on the entire first draft. Henry Bernstein at the University of Manchester and Zene Tadesse in Addis Ababa sent me pages of comments, often with a critique so convincing as to spur me on to yet another draft. Four friends and colleagues—Mamadou Diouf and Thandika Mkandawire at CODESRIA in Dakar, Talal Asad at the New School in New York, and Bob Meister at the University of California in Santa Cruz—combined written comments with discussions that were as drawn-out as I called for. Thandika was relentless with his criticism, I must admit, to some good effect. Both Bob Meister and Talal Asad read several drafts and bountifully gave of their time, energy, and intellect. Through these encounters, critical and understanding, I have come to appreciate that sympathy alone is indeed a poor substitute for friendship and solidarity.

Several persons helped me with the publication process. Ari Zolberg of the New School in New York listened to a breakfast sum-up of the main thesis and undertook to put me in touch with the most suitable publishers. Jane Gelfman intervened as a friend to ensure that I had a fair deal with the publishers. Two named readers, Abdellah Hammoudi at Princeton and Nicholas B. Dirks at Ann Arbor, Michigan, sent in detailed comments with a judicious mix of encouragement and revision suggestions. Mary Murrell, the editor at Princeton University Press, was a helpful guide as I prepared the final manuscript. Finally, I hope that the pen of Dalia Geffen, the copy editor, has eliminated any traces of my incorrigible partiality to exclamation marks!

I dedicate this book to my wife, Mira, and to our son, Zohran. Mira continues to inspire by example, living life to its brim, making light of the most strenuous moments, gently reminding me that I write for an audience, not just for myself. Zohran, in his own small but captivating ways, daily takes us along the trail that is his discovery of life, teaching us to see things through the eyes of a child, as if for the first time. To be sure, I cannot credit either with direct assistance in preparing this book. But I do know that without their companionship it would have been difficult to muster the tenacity and stamina to bring this work to conclusion—and enjoy doing it.

CITIZEN AND SUBJECT

 CHAPTER ONE 

Introduction: Thinking through Africa’s Impasse

DISCUSSIONS on Africa’s present predicament revolve around two clear tendencies: modernist and communitarian. Modernists take inspiration from the East European uprisings of the late eighties; communitarians decry liberal or left Eurocentrism and call for a return to the source. For modernists, the problem is that civil society is an embryonic and marginal construct in Africa; for communitarians, it is that real flesh-and-blood communitites that comprise Africa are marginalized from public life as so many tribes. The liberal solution is to locate politics in civil society, and the Africanist solution is to put Africa’s age-old communities at the center of African politics. One side calls for a regime that will champion rights, and the other stands in defense of culture. The impasse in Africa is not only at the level of practical politics. It is also a paralysis of perspective.

The solution to this theoretical impasse—between modernists and communitarians, Eurocentrists and Africanists—does not lie in choosing a side and defending an entrenched position. Because both sides to the debate highlight different aspects of the same African dilemma, I will suggest that the way forward lies in sublating both, through a double move that simultaneously critiques and affirms. To arrive at a creative synthesis transcending both positions, one needs to problematize each.

To do so, I will analyze in this book two related phenomena: how power is organized and how it tends to fragment resistance in contemporary Africa. By locating both the language of rights and that of culture in their historical and institutional context, I hope to underline that part of our institutional legacy that continues to be reproduced through the dialectic of state reform and popular resistance. The core legacy, I will suggest, was forged through the colonial experience.

In colonial discourse, the problem of stabilizing alien rule was politely referred to as the native question. It was a dilemma that confronted every colonial power and a riddle that preoccupied the best of its minds. Therefore it should not be surprising that when a person of the stature of General Jan Smuts, with an international renown rare for a South African prime minister, was invited to deliver the prestigious Rhodes Memorial Lectures at Oxford in 1929, the native question formed the core of his deliberation.

The African, Smuts reminded his British audience, is a special human type with some wonderful characteristics, which he went on to celebrate: It has largely remained a child type, with a child psychology and outlook. A child-like human can not be a bad human, for are we not in spiritual matters bidden to be like unto little children? Perhaps as a direct result of this temperament the African is the only happy human I have come across. Even if the racism in the language is blinding, we should be wary of dismissing Smuts as some South African oddity.

Smuts spoke from within an honorable Western tradition. Had not Hegel’s Philosophy of History mythologized Africa proper as the land of childhood? Did not settlers in British colonies call every African male, regardless of age, a boy—houseboy, shamba-boy, office-boy, ton-boy, mine-boy—no different from their counterparts in Francophone Africa, who used the child-familiar tu when addressing Africans of any age? The negro, opined the venerable Albert Schweitzer of Gabon fame, is a child, and with children nothing can be done without authority. In the colonial mind, however, Africans were no ordinary children. They were destined to be so perpetually—in the words of Christopher Fyfe, Peter Pan children who can never grow up, a child race.¹

Yet this book is not about the racial legacy of colonialism. If I tend to deemphasize the legacy of colonial racism, it is not only because it has been the subject of perceptive analyses by militant intellectuals like Frantz Fanon, but because I seek to highlight that part of the colonial legacy—the institutional—which remains more or less intact. Precisely because deracialization has marked the limits of postcolonial reform, the nonracial legacy of colonialism needs to be brought out into the open so that it may be the focus of a public discussion.

The point about General Smuts is not the racism that he shared with many of his class and race, for Smuts was not simply the unconscious bearer of a tradition. More than just a sentry standing guard at the cutting edge of that tradition, he was, if anything, its standard-bearer. A member of the British war cabinet, a confidant of Churchill and Roosevelt, a one-time chancellor of Cambridge University, Smuts rose to be one of the framers of the League of Nations Charter in the post-World War I era.² The very image of an enlightened leader, Smuts opposed slavery and celebrated the principles of the French Revolution which had emancipated Europe, but he opposed their application to Africa, for the African, he argued, was of a race so unique that nothing could be worse for Africa than the application of a policy that would