Work · African & Africana Philosophy
Citizen 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.
Introduction
Mahmood Mamdani’s “Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism” was published by Princeton University Press in 1996 and received the Herskovits Award of the African Studies Association. Comparing South Africa with Uganda and drawing on material from across the continent, it argues that colonial rule after the late nineteenth century governed Africans through indirect rule: chiefs appointed or recognised by the colonial state exercised fused executive, legislative and judicial powers under a “customary” law the state had codified, while civil law and rights were reserved for the colonisers and an urban minority. Mamdani calls this arrangement a bifurcated state and a decentralised despotism, and reads apartheid as its most developed form rather than as an exception. He then examines how rural revolts and urban movements tried to overcome the division, and why independence left it largely in place. The book became a standard work on the African state.
More works by Mahmood Mamdani
As of November 2026 · Improve this page · How Agora is made