The Sunday News
I have just finished reading Mahmood Mamdani’s latest book of 2021; Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities.
It is not only a pulsating read but is also a troubling account that compels readers to rethink many assumptions about countries, nations and states of the Global South. Mamdani’s latest book is an offering that takes away one’s political innocence and wakes one up from some philosophical slumbers. As it is in his other works, Mamdani’s baptismal philosophy of liberation is that both settlers and natives should die so that citizens can be born, in any country.
In short, Mamdani’s philosophy of nation-building and liberation is based on the death of colonial political identities and on the birth of decolonised political identities that make everyone in the nation a full citizen of the state with complete rights and responsibilities.
Meanings of the nation-state
To understand Mamdani and his gesture for the decolonisation and liberation of the nation-state in the Global South we must address some definitions and understandings, however, simplistic. What is generically called a nation is a population of peoples of different identities and historical origins that intend to forge a common future.
That is why nation-building is a work of political genius and art that involves bringing people of different identities, aspirations and fears under one flag. Benedict Anderson called nations “imagined communities” for the reason that nationals really have to have a reason to imagine and also believe that they belong to the nation, and the state has to make them see and feel that they belong.
What is called a state is a collective of governing institutions that are brought to life in the judiciary, the legislature and the executive in the shape of the government and its leader that becomes the head of state. What is called a country is landed territory, geographic space that is mapped and has borders and is the location where the nation and the state are positioned.
Countries are named and nations tend to call themselves after their countries. Much like the way Zambians call themselves after the land of Zambia. Nation-states are therefore, entities that bring together some states and some nations in places called countries.
The tragic birth of the nation-state in Europe
What came to be imposed on the Global South as the nation-state was a monstrous system and structure of power that was born under very unhappy and unfortunate historical circumstances. Before the nation-states there were just city-states in Europe.
Mamdani notes how in 1492 for the state to have a nation people that were not Christian that is the Jews, Muslims and others of Granada in Southern Spain had to be killed or forced to convert to the religion of the state, Christianity. The conquest of Granada and the ethnic cleansing that became part of building a nation for the state became a true template of conquest that was used in the colonisation of the Americas, Asia and Africa.
All settler colonisers brought the idea of a nation-state as a method and system of government and the natives had to be forced to convert to the religion, culture and political system of the settlers. Natives had to kill their previous religious and political identities in order to belong to the colonial nation-state. Mamdani emphasises the point that nation-states had a colonial and very violent birth in Europe. Coming to Africa and Asia as colonial impositions they carried the birthmark and DNA of their birth.
In the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, after a bloody 30 years war, European countries agreed to respect each other’s sovereignty and tolerate each other’s religious, ethnic and national differences. The Peace of Westphalia was the democratisation of the nation-state in Europe.
That democracy, tolerance and respect of sovereignty that European countries gave to each other was not extended to Asians, Latin Americans and Africans. So, the nation-states that were decided for Africa in Berlin 1884/5 were not the democratic nation-states that Europe had developed for herself and within herself. The idea and system of the nation-state that arrived with colonisers in Africa was a barbaric and evil idea that was forced down the throat and the life of the continent.
People did not have to willingly come under states and become parts of nations but they were forced. People were beaten and killed into becoming nationals of certain nations and citizens of certain states. In building nation-states in Africa, colonisers followed the Berlin maps and went on to divide some people that were previously united and united some communities that were previously separate, that was on its own violent disorder from which Africa still has not recovered.
What Mamdani emphasises is the colonial, racist and ethnic violent origins and systemic life of the nation-states that were born in Europe and came to be imposed on Africa, Asia and the Americas.
Nation-states: pre-coloniality and post-coloniality
Colonialism destroyed systems and structures of government that it found in Africa. It however, did not destroy the nation-state system that it left when it retreated during the independence of African countries, one after another.
Nation-states that are a colonial and imperial artefact remain intact in Africa. For that reason, Mahmood Mamdani argues, there are still permanent minorities and permanent majorities in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Mamdani suggests that the Global South needs to decolonise the nation-states and liberate them from the vestiges of colonialism and imperialism that they still carry.
Mamdani remembers travelling by bus from Tanzania to Mozambique in the 1970s. Arriving in Maputo he saw a huge banner with the words: For the Nation to Live the Tribe must Die! That was Samora Machel’s famous nation-building slogan. Decolonial nation building.
As a good Marxist, Machel might have meant that tribal consciousness was supposed to die so that national consciousness must live. If one goes to Kenya one might think that the Kikuyu are the nation when they are just part of it. The same in South Africa, one might be tempted to think that to be South African is to be Zulu. The Kikuyu and the Zulu are just majorities within their nations but they are not the nations, they are part of them.
Mamdani argues, nation building involves getting people of different tribes, ethnicities and races coming together to be a nation without being forced to become what they are not, and without killing parts of their culture or language.
This is nation-building as it happened in Europe after Westphalia, Europeans freely became citizens and nationals and their sovereignty was respected and honoured, minorities were protected.
What Mamdani drops as decolonisation of the nation-state is the “unmaking of permanent minorities” where no people should always be made few or small in terms of their political worth and weight in any country, including the former colonisers, that must now get born again as not oppressors.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from the University of the Witwatersrand, in Johannesburg, South Africa. Contacts: [email protected].
