Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton Series in Culture/Power/History)

Mahmood Mamdani, professor at Princeton University, specialist of African issues, considered by 'Foreign Policy' and 'Prospect' as being one the 100 most important contemporary intellectuals, attempts here to explain why the process of democratisation failed in most African countries, following their independence.

His thesis? Colonialism wasn't only a racial system whereas Blacks were oppressed by Whites. It was, also, and above all, made possible by very peculiar politics, that led both to ethnic divisions (with tragical consequences at times) and strong a divide between the rural world and the urban one. This last division, to him, is in fact the main cause of the failures. How so?

The African scramble had made necessary the show more implementation of new colonial rules. If the abolition of slavery had transformed the colonies, the limited ruling personnel, compounded by how problematic were communication networks across such vast territories, had made it impossible to rely solely on a White cast to control it all. Decentralisation, then, came as a solution.

Indeed, in those parts where White people had no access or weren't present, they would rely on tribal and local chiefs, created by their own hands (who had nothing traditional about them, then) and who were given considerable powers in order to apply their colonial directives. It was a practical yet deeply cynical approach: corrupting to better conciliate; a dichotomy whereas the State, a mad Janus, took two faces, each defined by the racial identity of who composed it. On the one hand, new customs, completely fabricated by the new chiefs and their White puppeteers, controlling 'subjects' living in rural environments; on the other, in urban areas, the laws of the colonial States being applied only to those who were 'citizens'. And, it's in this institutional evolution that Mahmood Mamdani sees the causes of post-colonial failures when it came to become democratic.

Showing that these divisions (citizens/ subjects, rural world/ urban world) will echo themselves even within nationalist and independentist movements (he delves especially upon the cases of Uganda and South Africa; the first because such movements originated in rural areas, the other because they originated in urban ones) he demonstrates how such movements could only fail managing the disastrous institutional legacy left by colonialism.

The thing was, going from one extreme to the other, democratisation could only be possible through, either a 'detribalisation', involving the replacing of local chiefs (tribal authority) by bureaucrats working solely for the Sate (central authority) and not for their tribes or clans ( something that many refused to do as it would have threaten their own privileges); or, by carrying on with decentralisation as left by previous rulers that is, a maintaining of tribalism and clientelism (and we now know where such tribalism and clientelism have led!).

It's a challenging read, yet that leaves with a new perspective, seductive, that will strike anyone baffled by how deeply the legacy of colonialism had affected Africa, decades after colonialism itself had collapsed. A must-read for anyone interested in African issues. show less