Review of Mahmood Mamdani's Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities

My last blog post for the year! A review of Mahmood Mamdani's Neither Settler Nor Native: the Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities. This is one of those books that I learnt so much from, but still found it wanting. Plan is to read alot more Mamdani after this!

This is a fantastic book. World-spanning, epoch-capturing, but let down, ever so slightly, by a certain political naïvety. But first, the good stuff. More than anything, what Mamdani has shown here is the specificity of our post-colonial present: that the colony and its afterlives are, in fact, a present, and not just a long forgotten past, swamped over by the march of a homogenising globalisation. Which is to say: even as we live in an age characterised by the “end of colonialism”, what has been reproduced everywhere are the dynamics of colonialism in conditions other than directly colonial ones. Despite having wrested self-determination for themselves, many ex-colonies have nonetheless been left with the poisoned inheritance of colonial governing structures, whose extraordinary capacities for violence remain continuous with their pasts.

Hence the pattern of distinctively post-colonial violence laid out here, violence not simply arbitrary or the mark of ‘backward’ peoples or ‘ancient’ hatreds, but instead modes of ruin shaped and given form by the contemporaneity of yet unreckoned-with colonialism. Central to the narrative here is the yoking of the post-colonial nation to the post-colonial state, with both sitting uneasily - and sometimes in murderous concatenation - in the form of the ‘nation-state’. For Mamdani, this fatal conjunction between the state-form - which offers indiscriminate legal equality to all within a territory - and the the nation-form - a political community defined instead by particularist membership - has never found adequate resolution except in ongoing legacies of apartheid, genocide and continual war.

Against the nation-state then, does Mamdani opt instead for a future of states without nations. It’s a bold, even utopian vision, but one throughly informed by the bloody histories of nation-formation. For at stake in the book is precisely an effort to ‘politicize’ nations, that is, to show their throughly constructed nature, not as ‘natural’ givens merely stumbled upon by colonial governments, but actively and even aggressively assembled by them, all the better to rule over. “Define and Rule”, so goes the title of Mamdani’s previous book, whose implications are carried over here into telling a global story of our post-colonial condition.

In saying all this Mamdani is not exactly out to make friends. By challenging the naturalness of the ‘nation’, so too is the designation of ‘native’ put under massive strain. Understood here not as aboriginal peoples with ‘original’ claims to land and rights, but as continually constructed communities with distinctive claims against others in the state, even ‘native’ marks a colonial holdover in need of undoing. While native claims have indeed been successfully used as bulwarks against settler expropriation, for Mamdani, the settler-native distinction is itself a double-edged sword whose benefits have come at costs now too high to continue bearing. On offer instead is the title of the book: neither settler nor native. The alternative being the political subjectivity of the survivor.

Mamdani’s model here is post-apartheid South Africa, which, on his telling, at least had some success in bringing the perpetrators of apartheid… not exactly to justice, so much as to the same table in order to work out a shared future, however unevenly. This at least politicised the country’s future, in contrast to the mostly prevailing ‘Nuremberg model’ of criminal justice, which, by individualising responsibility, closed off avenues of common reckoning, and enabled - in fact still enables, in the form of the UN's International Criminal Court, for example - colonial modes of government. To imagine a future of neither settlers nor natives is to imagine a future of survivors, in which who counts as a survivor is quite literally everyone: victims, perpetrators, bystanders, and beneficiaries. It is by hewing to this model of working through the past without distinction that alone holds the promise of bringing even the ‘post’ of the ‘post-colony’ to an end.

At least that’s the wager of this powerfully argued book. It’s not clear however, that’s it’s a wager than can be truly won, at least on the terms set out here. For underlying it all is a certain ‘voluntarism’ on the part of Mamdani, from whom one gets the sense that, if only everyone simply chose to do the right thing, things would turn out better. But what remains unengaged with - at least to my satisfaction - are the the global mechanisms that spur and motivate the reproduction of such post-colonial relations. I’m referring of course, to capitalism. Although occasionally gestured at, the role of capitalism in maintaining demographic hierarchies goes largely unremarked upon, which leaves Mamdani arguing for, of all things, an “epistemic revolution” in service of a “reform agenda”. What miserable rocks to have such great ambitions dashed upon.

Still, despite this gaping analytical lacuna, this is nonetheless a stunningly impressive text. To see Mamdani chart the prolongation of colonial categorising into postcolonial contexts is to watch a master at work. The detail marshalled here across the five case studies chosen to illustrate his point - the US, Germany, South Africa, Sudan, and Palestine - is a real feat of scholarship and worth reading for the synoptic power alone. As I write these words, the people of both Palestine and South Sudan are themselves being subject to horror upon horror in acts of genocidal violence in which it’s not clear that humanity itself can, or should, recover from. At the very least, this book offers some of the most powerful - albeit incomplete - tools to understand how and why we got to this irredeemable point.