Small review of Mahmood Mamdani's Define and Rule: Native as Political Identity

I capped off 2024 by reading Mamdani's Neither Settler Nor Native, which was a fantastic romp, so I figured I'd get around to the little book that came before it, his 2012 Define and Rule. Here's what I thought of it.

Define and Rule is something like the skeleton key to Mahmood Mamdani's more recent and elaborate Neither Settler Nor Native. As the smaller, more focused work however, it packs an undeniably larger punch. Its objective is straightforward: to get at the specificity of how imperial 'indirect' rule worked (particularly under the British), as distinct from the earlier 'direct' rule of Roman empire. The answer too, is relatively straightforward. If the Romans ruled over subjects whose identities were already largely defined and given, the British (and Dutch) took this one step further and intervened in the very shaping of the identities of those they colonized. Such was the distinction between the Roman 'divide and rule', and the relatively more modern and ambitious 'define and rule'.

As for how such 'identity shaping' took place, we know the techniques by their names today everywhere found: by means of 'race' and 'tribe'. These twin technics of defining populations - as verbs, 'racialization' and 'tribalization' - were, according to Mamdani, not merely 'givens' taken up and redirected by colonial overseers, but rather wholesale inventions, imposed top-down on societies who never fit the respective bills in the first place. Tied in particular to geography, or rather, administrative entities, race enabled discrimination at the level of the territorial state, while tribe enabled discrimination within states. With these two scalpels of population control in hand did the British facilitate their imperial rule, innovations of violence whose legacies we live with and against today.

Although not exactly a full blown historical retelling (the book's a breezy 120 pages without notes), Mamdani does track the birth of 'define and rule' tactics by the British response to early failure in two instances: the Sepoy mutiny of 1847 (India), and the Morant Bay rebellion of 1865 (Jamaica). In the English post-mortems that were to follow, colonial policy shifted dramatically: from a concern with the eradication of difference in favour of assimilation, to a newfound interest in the fostering of difference and its management. In other words: why eliminate difference when you can institutionalize and exploit it? Dreamed up with particular intensity by the formidable intellect of Sir Henry Maine - whose writings ran the gamut from anthropology to law, history and politics, and whose books were compulsory reading in the Colonial Service - they were put into brutal and effective practice all across the empire whose sun never set.

As anything but instituting a new dawn of cultural pluralism and civilizational openness, what the British understood as 'difference' was not something mutable and living, but rather something fixed and enduring. Once 'entribalized' and 'enracialized', no escape was to be had: populations either fit the imposed criteria - usually caricatures drawn from the British colonial imagination - or else were given no standing whatsoever. From this 'fixing', pitting demographic against demographic, would follow some of the largest tragedies ever wrought on the planet as a consequence: genocide in Rawanda and Sudan, and apartheid in South Africa among others. It's not all dour though, and in the buoyant closing chapter does Mamdani offer models of decolonial theory and practice in the pole star shine of Nigerian historian Yusuf Bala Usman, and Tanzanian statesman Julius Kambarage Nyerere. A wide-ranging, important, and humane book.