Mahmood Mamdani

Works

• 1996Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism

  Comparative study centred on South Africa and Uganda: indirect rule created a “decentralised despotism” of chiefs who ruled rural subjects by a customary law shaped by the colonial state, while an urban minority held civil rights; independence deracialised the state but did not detribalise it.

• 2001When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda

  Study of the genocide of 1994: colonial rule turned Hutu and Tutsi into a “native” and a “settler” race, and the genocide was the violence of former victims who claimed the country as natives; Mamdani reads it with Arendt on the colonial history of genocide and with Fanon on the violence of the colonised.

Position

Mamdani is on the map as a theorist of the colonial state in Africa and of the political identities it produced. In Citizen and Subject (1996) he argued that late colonial rule in Africa created a “bifurcated state”: in the towns a racially exclusive civil power governed citizens through civil law, while in the countryside native authorities – chiefs empowered by the colonial state – governed subjects through a “customary” law that the colonial state had itself defined, a form of rule he called decentralised despotism. Apartheid, in this view, was not an exception but the most developed form of indirect rule. Independence deracialised the state but did not detribalise it, and democratisation requires dismantling the legal division between citizen and subject. In When Victims Become Killers (2001) he applied this to Rwanda: colonial rule had turned the difference between Hutu and Tutsi into a racial one between “native” and “alien settler”, and the genocide of 1994 was the violence of former victims who claimed the country as natives; he read it with Hannah Arendt’s account of the colonial history of genocide and with Fanon’s understanding of the violence of the colonised. Define and Rule (2012) traced the colonial theory of the native back to Henry Maine, and Neither Settler nor Native (2020) extended the analysis to the making of modern nation-states. Citizen and Subject was debated in the CODESRIA Bulletin, among others by Archie Mafeje; his books on the “war on terror”, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim (2004), and on the campaign over Darfur, Saviors and Survivors (2009), made him a public intellectual.

Life & context

Mahmood Mamdani was born on 23 April 1946 in Bombay and grew up in Kampala in a Gujarati Muslim family. He studied political science at the University of Pittsburgh, where he took part in the civil rights movement, and at Harvard, where he took his doctorate in 1974. When Idi Amin expelled the Asians from Uganda in 1972 he was forced to leave and spent months in a refugee camp in Britain; he then taught at the University of Dar es Salaam, returned to Makerere University after Amin’s fall and founded the Centre for Basic Research in Kampala. He held the A. C. Jordan chair of African Studies at the University of Cape Town (1996–99), where a dispute over the teaching of African history became public, and from 1999 taught at Columbia University in New York; from 2010 he also directed the Makerere Institute of Social Research. From 1998 to 2002 he was president of the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA).

Further main works

• The Myth of Population Control: Family, Caste and Class in an Indian Village (1972)
• Politics and Class Formation in Uganda (1976)
• Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (2004)
• Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror (2009)
• Define and Rule: Native as Political Identity (2012)
• Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities (2020)