Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities

by Mahmood Mamdani

Modern colonialism and the modern state were born together with the creation of the nation-state. Nationalism did not precede colonialism. Nor was colonialism the highest or the final stage in the making of a nation. The two were co-constituted.

Paperclip director Bosquet Wev was unapologetic: “Nazism should no longer be a serious consideration from the point of view of national security when the far greater threat of communism is now jeopardizing the entire world,” he explained. Only in 1947 was the impasse overcome, after General George Marshall, the newly appointed secretary of state, ordered that national security would take priority over denazification.

South Africans have thus felled one pillar of the settler-versus-native distinction in their country: race as political identity.