MAMDANI Thinking Through Africa's Impasse
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Introduction: thinking through Africa’s impasse (ch. 1) MANDANI, MAHMOOD (1996) Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 3-34 [email protected] @africanstates
Transcript of MAMDANI Thinking Through Africa's Impasse
Introduction: thinking through
Africa’s impasse (ch. 1)
MANDANI, MAHMOOD (1996) Citizen and Subject: Contemporary
Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism, Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, pp. 3-34
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Thinking through Africa’s impasse
AIMS
• Explain why and how ‘institutional segregation’ was developed as
part of the colonial project to stabilize racial domination.
• 4 objectives:
• Question the writing of history by analogy. Establish the historical
legitimacy of Africa as a unit of analysis
• Establish that apartheid is actually the generic form of the colonial state
in Africa. Colonial rule can be generically understood as ‘decentralized
despotism’
• Underline the contradictory character of ethnicity. Problematize the
way liberational movements dealt with ethnicity
• Show that although the ‘bifurcated state’ created with colonialism was
deracialized after independence, it was not democratized
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AIMS
•3 questions:
• To what extent was the (current) structure of power shaped in the
colonial period rather than in the anticolonial revolt?
• Rather than just uniting diverse ethnic groups in a common
predicament, was not racial domination actually mediated through a
variety of ethnically organized local powers?
• If power reproduced itself by exaggerating difference and denying the
existence of an oppressed majority, is not the burden of protest to
transcend these differences without denying them?
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Thinking through Africa’s impasse
Why is Africa poor?
DISCUSSION
• Discussion on Africa suffering from an impasse, by sticking to either
liberal (free civil society) or communitarian views (put communities at
the center)
• Solution to impasse lies in creative synthesis
• South Africa as an archetype of the colonial response to the ‘native
question’: territorial plus institutional segregation (specific native
institutions)
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DISCUSSION
• A balance to be struck between ahistorical structuralism and free
agency as posed by poststructuralism
• Binary oppositions of structuralism (modern/pre-modern,
developed/underdeveloped) superseded by poststructuralism
• Structural inequality does not negate by itself historicity (Bayart).
The latter still exists even if the former is present
• Between the exceptional (structuralism) and the routinary,
universalist (poststructuralism) there’s space to argue for the
specificity of the African experience while allowing for a comparative
perspective not building on analogy with the West
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Thinking through Africa’s impasse
DISCUSSION
• Beyond a history by analogy
• A state-centrist argument runs which regards the state as weak and
‘suspended above society’, embedded in patrimonial practices. Thus, the
main theoretical point to be established is in which stage of state
development the African state currently is, as compared to the European
experience
• Another stream focuses on exit and the uncaptured peasantry. A good
example is Hyden’s ‘economy of affection’ (African rural areas not
organizing around market relations). Hyden proceeds through analogies:
when he finds that African peasantry has not been captured in the ways
it historically was in Europe, Asia or Latin America, he concludes it is
non-captured at all, missing the relations that actually capture it.
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Thinking through Africa’s impasse
DISCUSSION
• Beyond a history by analogy
• Accounts centered on civil society sustain that democratization is the
contention between civil society and the state
• Under colonial rule, civil society was based on an exclusion by race.
Nonetheless, the subject population was not actually excluded but
‘incorporated’ through specific forms of power
• Its nature was not therefore exclusion, but rather another form of
power
• Hence, no reform of contemporary civil society institutions can by
itself unravel this ‘decentralized despotism’, since that requires
dismantling that form of power (p. 16)
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Thinking through Africa’s impasse
DISCUSSION
• The bifurcated state
• Indirect rule became the dominating strategy after the Scramble
• It was based on a distinction between urban society, under direct rule,
where only civilized people had civil rights and natives were excluded,
and rural areas, under indirect rule, where customary law would apply
along with the rule of tribal authorities
• Urban power spoke the language of civil society and civil rights, urban
power of community and culture (p. 18)
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Thinking through Africa’s impasse
DISCUSSION
• The bifurcated state
• 4 moments in the development of civil society:
• The colonial state as protector of the society of colons, thus
exclusion both of rural and urban populations
• Anticolonial struggle: embryonic (urban) middle and working
classes fighting for their entry into civil society
• Independence: Africanization brings 1) redress, and then 2)
redistribution, but under the same existing lines (regional,
ethnic, religious). Hence, patrimonialism
• Current stage: collapse of embryonic civil society, absorption
by the state
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Thinking through Africa’s impasse
DISCUSSION
• The bifurcated state
• Land was defined as a customary communal holding. But the African
was defined not as a native but as a tribesperson. British rule sought to
civilize Africans as communities, not as individuals
• Amongst all the traditions existing in the XIXth century, that of
contemporary conquest states was privileged and enforced as the basis
of customary authority
• Alongside with ‘enforced’ custom was force. Since tribes were left out
of market relations, and thus labor could not be mobilised by markets,
the only way to extract labor was through extra-economic coercion:
forced labor, forced contributions, etc.
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Thinking through Africa’s impasse
DISCUSSION
• Ethnicity and the anticolonial revolt
• Every rebellion movement was mirroring the ethnicity of the same state it was trying to overthrow
• Democratization in the continent would have entailed the deracialization of civil power and the detribalization of customary power (p. 25) in order to trascend the bifurcated state
• Despotism after independence
• 2 varieties: 1) conservative states, which removed racialism but kept in place the Native Authorities, thus strengthening division between ethnicities; 2) radical states, which deracialized and detribalized, but furthered control over local populations from the center in the name of development, thus widening the urban-rural divide
• Both then reproduced despotism as embedded in the bifurcated state
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Thinking through Africa’s impasse
DISCUSSION
• South African exceptionalism?
• SA institutionalised the divide between ethnic on the one hand, and
urban-rural on the other
• No matter the particularities (weight of black urban populations,
strength of civil society) apartheid in SA is de facto an application of
British indirect rule
• The objective was containing urban-based revolt, first by repackaging
the native population under a constellation of autonomous Native
Authorities so as to fragment it, and then by policing its movement
between country and town so as to freeze the division between the two
(p. 31)
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Thinking through Africa’s impasse
