Citizen and subject

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. 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.

"Citizen and Subject is unparalleled in its ability to re-frame the polarized and reductive debates that are still the substance of Africanist political science, just as they were 20 years ago – debates over concepts like clientelism, corruption, democratization, ethnic violence, or civil society." — Adam Branch in Africa Is a Country. "Mahmood Mamdani’s book simultaneously aims to theorize a specifically African form of state, to account for its colonial origins and post-colonial trajectories (and their contributions to Africa’s crisis), and to derive from this analysis some key ideas about - and for - democratic politics in Africa today. His original argument is the most potent given the relative sterility of debate since the collapse of the post-independence project of national development" — Henry Bernstein in Development & Change., "Citizen and Subject is unparalleled in its ability to re-frame the polarized and reductive debates that are still the substance of Africanist political science, just as they were 20 years ago – debates over concepts like clientelism, corruption, democratization, ethnic violence, or civil society." — Adam Branch in Africa Is a Country. "Mahmood Mamdani’s book simultaneously aims to theorize a specifically African form of state, to account for its colonial origins and post-colonial trajectories (and their contributions to Africa’s crisis), and to derive from this analysis some key ideas about - and for - democratic politics in Africa today. His original argument is the most potent given the relative sterility of debate since the collapse of the post-independence project of national development" — Henry Bernstein in Development & Change.

Mahmood Mamdani is Director of Makerere Institute of Social Research at Makerere University and Herbert Lehman Professor of Government at Columbia University.

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