Define and Rule: Native as Political Identity

The W. E. B. Du Bois Lectures

by Mahmood Mamdani

Define and Rule focuses on the turn in late nineteenth-century colonial statecraft when Britain abandoned the attempt to eradicate difference between conqueror and conquered and introduced a new idea of governance, as the definition and management of difference. Mahmood Mamdani explores how lines were drawn between settler and native as distinct political identities, and between natives according to tribe. Out of that colonial experience issued a modern language of pluralism and difference.

A mid-nineteenth-century crisis of empire attracted the attention of British intellectuals and led to a reconception of the colonial mission, and to reforms in India, British Malaya, and the Dutch East Indies. The new politics, inspired by Sir Henry Maine, established that natives were bound by geography and custom, rather than history and law, and made this the basis of administrative practice.

Maine’s theories were later translated into “native administration” in the African colonies. Mamdani takes the case of Sudan to demonstrate how colonial law established tribal identity as the basis for determining access to land and political power, and follows this law’s legacy to contemporary Darfur. He considers the intellectual and political dimensions of African movements toward decolonization by focusing on two key figures: the Nigerian historian Yusuf Bala Usman, who argued for an alternative to colonial historiography, and Tanzania’s first president, Mwalimu Julius Nyerere, who realized that colonialism’s political logic was legal and administrative, not military, and could be dismantled through nonviolent reforms.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Politics, Philosophy, Anthropology, Theory, Post Colonial

168 pages, Hardcover

First published October 30, 2012

About the author

Mahmood Mamdani is Herbert Lehman Professor of Government and Professor of Anthropology and of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS) at Columbia University and Director of the Makerere Institute of Social Research in Kampala. He is the author of Citizen and Subject, When Victims Become Killers, and Good Muslim, Bad Muslim.

Reviews

[Alexander · Rating 5 out of 5]

Define and Rule is something like the skeleton key to Mahmood Mamdani's more recent and elaborate Neither Settler Nor Native. As the smaller, more focused work however, it packs an undeniably larger punch. Its objective is straightforward: to get at the specificity of how imperial 'indirect' rule worked (particularly under the British), as distinct from the earlier 'direct' rule of Roman empire. The answer too, is relatively straightforward. If the Romans ruled over subjects whose identities were already largely defined and given, the British (and Dutch) took this one step further and intervened in the very shaping of the identities of those they colonized. Such was the distinction between the Roman 'divide and rule', and the relatively more modern and ambitious 'define and rule'.

As for how such 'identity shaping' took place, we know the techniques by their names today everywhere found: by means of 'race' and 'tribe'. These twin technics of defining populations - as verbs, 'racialization' and 'tribalization' - were, according to Mamdani, not merely 'givens' taken up and redirected by colonial overseers, but rather wholesale inventions, imposed top-down on societies who never fit the respective bills in the first place. Tied in particular to geography, or rather, administrative entities, race enabled discrimination at the level of the territorial state, while tribe enabled discrimination within states. With these two scalpels of population control in hand did the British facilitate their imperial rule, innovations of violence whose legacies we live with and against today.

Although not exactly a full blown historical retelling (the book's a breezy 120 pages without notes), Mamdani does track the birth of 'define and rule' tactics by the British response to early failure in two instances: the Sepoy mutiny of 1847 (India), and the Morant Bay rebellion of 1865 (Jamaica). In the English post-mortems that were to follow, colonial policy shifted dramatically: from a concern with the eradication of difference in favour of assimilation, to a newfound interest in the fostering of difference and its management. In other words: why eliminate difference when you can institutionalize and exploit it? Dreamed up with particular intensity by the formidable intellect of Sir Henry Maine - whose writings ran the gamut from anthropology to law, history and politics, and whose books were compulsory reading in the Colonial Service - they were put into brutal and effective practice all across the empire whose sun never set.

As anything but instituting a new dawn of cultural pluralism and civilizational openness, what the British understood as 'difference' was not something mutable and living, but rather something fixed and enduring. Once 'entribalized' and 'enracialized', no escape was to be had: populations either fit the imposed criteria - usually caricatures drawn from the British colonial imagination - or else were given no standing whatsoever. From this 'fixing', pitting demographic against demographic, would follow some of the largest tragedies ever wrought on the planet as a consequence: genocide in Rawanda and Sudan, and apartheid in South Africa among others. It's not all dour though, and in the buoyant closing chapter does Mamdani offer models of decolonial theory and practice in the pole star shine of Nigerian historian Yusuf Bala Usman, and Tanzanian statesman Julius Kambarage Nyerere. A wide-ranging, important, and humane book. 

[Sander Philipse · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mamdani presents a theory of late-stage colonialism (second half of 19th c. onward), and especially British and Dutch imperialism, as creating a tribally and racially segregated administration and societies throughout the colonized countries. He convincingly shows that the entire colonial apparatus, as a response to rebellions (especially in India) tried to pacify the population by locking them into rigid, static, European interpretations of what their supposed traditional rule was. In the process, the imperialists effectively segregated the population into unchanging categories, cementing formerly fluid and diverse identities and making vague understandings of ethnicity, tribe and race into administrative and thereby social reality.

A must-read for anyone who wants to understand the origins of modern-day ethnic conflict in many former colonies, and a must-read for anyone who wants to understand modern-day and historical European approaches toward race, tribe and administration.

[Muhammad Osama Yousaf · Rating 4 out of 5]

I would rank it among the best short works I have ever read because of how masterfully the author distinguishes between the imperialist state's military might and its philosophy about customs and laws. The legal system they embrace and the way they employ to divide people along legal lines are significantly more important military power they possess. Insofar as Pakistan is concerned, we are not fully free of the division or defining narrative that the British used; in order to be free of this, we must also rethink the entire process and eliminate the imperialist attitude of the ruling class.

[Rallie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book manages to accomplish something rather difficult - strong theoretical claims alongside good historical evidence to back them up. It's brevity makes for a good intervention into the space between postcolonial studies and decolonization.

[Mills College Library]

325.3 M263 2012