Abstract
The latest work by Mahmood Mamdani focuses on the colonial production of native and settler identities and how, based on the discourse of legal pluralism and cultural difference, this distinction gave justification to the imperialist project that had begun in Africa in the late nineteenth century.
The starting point of Mamdani’s argument is that the political identities that are now the basis of African political life do not simply stem from territorial occupation alone, but are also the heritage of nineteenth-century European intellectual tradition. Such an argument is not, in itself, original, given that at least since the 1960s a number of African intellectuals have already argued the same, in critical dialogues with European historiography and ethnography. What is innovative is the interpretation of this process by means of the concept of ‘indirect rule’, elaborated previously by the author in his Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), to understand the effects of colonialism in Africa’s contemporary configuration.
Throughout the book, a historical approach is employed to locate the origin of this new technology of governance in the mid-nineteenth century. The argument connects the analysis of historical events of great impact on the development of colonial policy to two antagonistic pairs of characters, involving intellectuals and public figures at different points in time, a distinction that is reflected in the arrangement of the book’s different sections. The first two chapters show how metropolitan intellectuals and colonial administrators were engaged directly in the architecture of indirect rule, while the third and final chapter is devoted to African scholars and politicians who sought to overcome its legacy in the construction of post-colonial Africa.
Sometimes the roles of the intellectual and the public figure overlapped. This is the case of Sir Henry Maine, a prominent member of the British Colonial Service, presented by Mamdani as the intellectual demiurge of indirect rule. His mid-nineteenth century writings, motivated by the perception of an administrative crisis in the Empire, argued that the then prevailing assimilationist conception ignored the radical difference between European (Western) and Indian (Eastern) legal cultures. The imposition of a modern form of social organization guided by abstract and universal principles would be inevitably frustrated by the customary nature of the Indian legal system, temporally static and highly circumstantial. Impervious to change, colonized societies would have to be governed in their own terms.
But according to Mamdani, the novelty of this scheme was its classificatory power. The author develops the central thesis of the book on the basis of this characteristic. Maine’s intellectual work gave rise to a new mode of governance whose main component was the management of difference, something guaranteed by the continuous remodelling of the boundaries, authorities and subjectivities of colonized societies (p. 42). This classificatory policy then justifies the title of the book, since in order to rule the radically dissimilar it was necessary minimally to define them (p. 44).
The African continent becomes the main unit of analysis from Chapter 2 onwards. The argument is that, by means of a hybrid legal apparatus, the colonial power in Africa generated two major categories of social control: on the one hand, race was used to classify all foreign individuals in a certain location (European and Asian), which enabled their regulation by civil law (notwithstanding the uneven conditions); on the other, tribe defined the indigenous population in a circumscribed region, under the aegis of customary law. Each tribe would be constituted as a separate political unit based primarily on geographic origin, rendering irrelevant the possible ethnic or linguistic affinities with other groups. The mediation between these units and the colonial administration would be undertaken by traditional chiefs, whose role had also undergone a deliberate redefinition, assuming an absolutist character, hitherto nonexistent.
In the beginning of Chapter 3, Mamdani highlights the contribution of intellectuals from the Nigerian historiography school to the decolonization of African categories of social organization. The discussion revolves around the work of authors such as Yusuf Bala Usman, who claim the diversity and fluidity of identities in pre-colonial Africa, against the rigidity of the categories imposed by indirect rule. Given the limited knowledge of these historians’ production outside the continent, and even in Nigeria, Mamdani’s effort to promote them adds great value to the book. However, this could have been accompanied by a discussion, albeit brief, of other authors with similar projects, such as, Bernard Magubane and Archie Mafeje. In this way, a systematization of an African tradition of thought aimed at the epistemological reversal of colonial legacy, something to which the book explicitly seeks affiliation, would at least have been better introduced, even if not in an extensive manner, given the limits of space. Finally, Mamdani examines how the same critical movement was manifested in the challenge posed by post-colonial statecraft. The political project of Julius Nyerere in Tanzania is presented as the most successful experience in dismantling the classificatory structures erected by colonialism. The criterion for his assessment is the fact that Nyerere privileged legal and administrative over military channels in order to deinstitutionalize the categories of race and tribe in Tanzania’s political life, resulting in a relatively peaceful process of national unification.
Define and Rule makes a relevant contribution to the study of African societies by continuing the discussion that had begun in the classic work, Citizen and Subject. It can be seen as an extension of the argument, combining the political analysis presented there with an epistemological concern in this new book. In this way, Mamdandi adds further complexity to the concept of indirect rule.