The wages of postcolonial modernity
Mahmood Mamdani believes political modernity is more about conquest than tolerance
The age of classical colonialism is over but colonisation hasn’t disappeared. It will remain as long as the nation-state dominates in not only the developing and undeveloped economies (an overwhelming majority of these having been ex-colonies) but in the United States as well. Ethnic cleansing, which went hand-inhand with colonisation, continues in postcolonial colonisation. “The birth of the modern state amid ethnic cleansing and overseas domination teaches us a different lesson about what political modernity is: less an engine of tolerance than of conquest,” states Mahmood Mamdani in his 416-page Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities.
In the book’s introduction, the Ugandaborn author and professor at Columbia University writes that the foundation of the modern state was laid in 1492 when “the Castilian monarchy sought to create a homogeneous national homeland for Christian Spaniards by ejecting and converting those among them who were strangers to the nation — Moors and Jews.” He adds that the other development was “the taking of overseas colonies in the Americas by the same Castilian monarchy that spearheaded ethnic cleansing”. The Castilian monarchy was synonymous with Reconquista while taking over regions of Iberia that were for centuries under ruthless
Moorish rule. The aim was nation-building rather than state building. Castilians sought to change the people within the territory and to force them into a cultural homogeneity under the banner of “one country, one religion, one empire”.
Historians have ignored the continuity of colonialism sans the colonies and have overstressed the so-called “civilizing mission as direct rule and the methods that succeeded it as indirect rule”. Alongside the emergence of a violent nationalism following from the creation of minorities under indirect rule, post-colonial nationalists “struggled to consolidate power by transforming society into the home of the nation as they imagined it”. Mamdani puts it poignantly when he says that the resulting era of blood and terror, ethnic cleansing, civil wars, and sometimes genocide are “the wages of postcolonial modernity”.
The Castilian system might have spread in Europe but for the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648 and its “nation-state model, ushering in a regime of tolerance”. In stark contrast to the Castilians, the European nationstate agreed to protect internal minorities rather than oppress and expel them, and the persecution of internal minorities ended. “As long as minorities did not revolt, sovereigns would not persecute them; and as long as sovereigns did not persecute minorities, other sovereigns had to respect their right to rule unmolested,” Mamdani notes.
Neither Settler nor Native is divided into six chapters — The Indian Question in the United States, Nuremberg: The Failure of Denazification, Settlers and Natives in Apartheid South Africa, Sudan: Colonialism, Independence, and Secession, The Israel/palestine Question, and Decolonizing the Political Community — each of which deserves to be treated as a precious monograph and as a vision to arrest this historical process.
A sub-chapter The US Colonial Mode exposes the emptiness of American pride in democracy. The real face of the settlers is their cruelty towards Native Americans. In this, they bluntly copied the Castilians. “To call the colonised peoples of the United States “Native Americans” is to configure them as original inhabitants of the polity… They were original inhabitants of the land, not the polity. The Constitution’s use of the term ‘Indian’ reflects the fact that the peoples deemed native in US territory were never Americans… The country sees itself as a rupture in history, some
Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities Mahmood Mamdani
417pp, ~799
Harvard University Press thing entirely new — not a conqueror, but the successor to a conqueror, which was the Crown,” Mamdani writes. At a webinar on the book, the author pointed out that Native Americans are like undocumented people in a land that is theirs and that they are worse off than the African-american descendents of slaves.
Indeed, Hitler’s Nazi model of Aryan supremacy was inspired by America. Mamdani reminds us of James Q Whitman’s Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law, which touches on how American race law provided a blueprint for Nazi Germany. Nazism triumphed in Germany during the high era of Jim Crow laws. The Nuremberg Laws were crafted in an atmosphere of considerable attention to the precedents — the American race laws. Hitler praised the American model in Mein Kampf.
Ethnic cleansing in the US went alongside genocide and population transfers of American Indians. This is similar to what Germany did to the Jews who were in turn victimised by Allied population transfers following World War 2. In South Africa, White settlers forced Blacks into tribal homelands known as Bantustans. The British also segregated Arabs and Africans into separate homelands. In Palestine, Zionist settlers forcibly exiled non-jews.
A gutsy humanitarian, Mamdani has called out the International Military Tribunal’s Nuremberg trials for prescribing a “criminal” solution that held individual perpetrators responsible without questioning Nazism as a political project, and thus the violence of the nation-state itself. Political violence needs political solutions; not criminal justice, barring permanent political identities of settler and native.
Mamdani’s scholarship takes in a range of work from John Locke to Radhabinode Pal’s Dissenting Opinion of the Member for India in the Tokyo War Crimes Trial. However, it is difficult to agree with his view that Marx was “silent about the political community and assumed that political and social equality will be realized within the bounds of a pre-existing political community”. It would seem that he has ignored the evolution of Marx’s texts and of anthropological investigations into the castes and tribes of the world. frankness about sexual relationships and tales of struggle and success in Hollywood and Europe, but it is the section on the suicide of Bedi’s brilliant schizophrenic son Siddharth that reveals the man’s vulnerable saddened core. It is difficult to read and must have taken vast reserves of emotional strength to write.
The memoir is a tricky form and film stars who attempt it risk coming across as selfobsessed liars intent on whitewashing their pasts. That is not the case with this book, which is sometimes painfully honest. In a conversation with this reviewer on the Books & Authors podcast (on www.htsmartcast.com) Kabir Bedi said one of the reasons he wrote it was so young people could learn from his experiences, and avoid making similar mistakes. Given that every person traverses an individual path and has to learn his own lessons on love and life, this seems unlikely. Still, the reader might never succeed in dodging the slings and arrows of outrageous romantic fortune but he will definitely understand that it takes a brave man to be this forthright. An immensely readable account of a life touched by fame, adventure, much love and deep sorrow too, Stories I Must Tell marks Kabir Bedi out as a true original.