Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism

Mahmood Mamdani offers a bold, insightful account of colonialism’s legacy. Through case studies of rural and urban resistance movements, we learn how institutional features fragment resistance and how states play off reform in one sector against repression in the other. Reforming institutional power is the key to democratic reform in Africa.

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” or “indirect”, with a third variant–apartheid–as exceptional. This benign terminology, Mamdani shows, masks the fact that these were actually variants of a despotism. Direct rule denied rights to subjects on racial grounds. Indirect rule incorporated them into a “customary” mode of rule, with state-appointed Native Authorities. By tapping authoritarian possibilities in culture, indirect rule 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 and urban 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.