The Romans were content to rule peoples as they found them, but the British were not. In this sense nineteenth-century indirect rule turned out to be a far more ambitious project than direct rule had been: whereas direct rule aimed at civilising elites, indirect rule looked to impose a native subjectivity on the entire local population.
Mamdani explores this through a study of several different colonial experiences - the dispossesion and destruction of the Native Americans, the experience of Apartheid in South Africa and colonialism and independence in Sudan. Regarding the later he writes:
Colonial authorities did not have to tell Sudan's various peoples that they were different from each other - the people already knew that. They pracrtices different religions, spoke different languages, tended different crops and animls, and had different ideas about how to structure communities. They dressed, ate, amrried and died differently. Rather, what the British did was to invest these differences with political meaning. The British turned differences of culture into boundaries of authority and decided what power that authority would possess.
This classic form of divide and rule was enormously successful. The problem was that the divisions were cemented to such an extent that the post-colonial experience was shaped by them. In Sudan this was devastating. As Mamdani says, "colonialism made ethnic violence thinable because colonialism made ethnicity an important contour of public life". In Sudan, post-colonial violence, civil war and the eventual separation of South Sudan saw tens of thousands of lives lost, ruined or displaced.
In contrast, notes Mamdani, South Africa was able to transition away from Apartheid in a peaceful process. Why the difference? In Sudan, "everyone in control was committed to perpetating the colonial nightmare", but in South Africa "various groups learned to reject the political identities they had been given under colonialism." Through political mobilisation, "Afrikaners... came to relaise that they did not have to be members of a racist white national majority".
The problem is that this doesn't really hold. Apartheid was dismantled by the Black majority. The white minorty did not abandon racism. They just understood that they could not longer hold on to their systems of power and in this they were helped by concessions from the ANC to maintain the South African capitalist state. Civil war was a real possbility.
Mamdani continues:
In South Africa today there is little angst about the results of the Truth Reconcilation Commission. The focus is on the deficits... specifically [the] failure to achieve a more socially just country.... If the demand is that the end of apartheid should have delivered socila justice, then it ignores the political contxt of the transition. The political prerequisite for attaining social justice would have been a revolution, but this was not attainable given the balance of forces. There was instead a stalemate between forces supporting and opposing apartheid, which was broken through a compromise agreement.
But this outcome was not inevitable. What was underminded the possibility of revolution of the Black majorty working class was not the balance of forces, but political leadership. Revolution, like Civil War was a possibility. But by abandoning the struggle for the former, to avoid the latter, social inequality was baked in. There's a similar absence in Mamdani's treatment of Sudan. While its an exemplary discussion of the crises caused by colonial divisions, the story stops short of discussing the Sudanese Revolution. This is, in part, because of when the book was published. But that Revolution demonstrated a real possibility for uniting disparate groups. A different future was possible there too - as I wrote in my own book Socialism or Extinction.
These weaknesses undermine Mamdani's chapter on Israel/Palestine which ends up looking to a politically rejuvenated Israeli middle ground who can decolonise the Israeli state. Indeed Mamdani is critical of BDS as seeing this movement as undermining potential allies within the Israeli population. The problem is that these groups have demonstrated no desire to overthrow Israeli Apartheid. Indeed, mass protests and criticism of Netanyahu during the most recent genocide have failed to raise Palestinian solidarity in anyway. Israel, as Mamdani says, is a racist settler colonial power - liberation for the people of Palestine will come from the wider working class of region dismantling Israel and building a new state where Jews, Arabs and others can live together. This requires revolution. Mamdani says that "in place of the nation... we might imagine a new political community". But its not enough to imagine, one has to strategise how to get there. The process of "stripping away the nation" as Mamdani wants requires struggle and the way that the Israeli working class have become tied to the interests of the Israeli state (and by extenstion Western Imperialism) makes this process impossible. That state will need to be defeated, and wishing or imaging isn't enough.
These are harsh criticisms. Mamdani's book contains, however, much of interest to socialists. There's a lot of detail about the processes of colonialisation in the US, Sudan, Palestine and South Africa that shows how settler colonialism created and expanded differences to maintain colonial power. There's also some fascinating accounts of struggles against that. A chapter on the failure of de-Nazification in Germany post-WW2 is also particularly good at exposing the methods and hypocrisy of the United States. That said, I was left wanting, because Mamdani wasn't able to articulate a strategy for liberation or clearly identify the agency for that change.
Related Reviews
Englert - Settler Colonialism: An Introduction
Dunbar-Ortiz - Not A Nation of Immigrants: Settler colonialism, white supremacy & a history of erasure & exclusion
Dunbar-Ortiz - An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
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