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

by Mahmood Mamdani

Where they were cowed militarily, that solidarity might not take the form of rebellion, but it could take the form of demands for representation. So settlers learned how to foster division within tribes. To this end, they became militant advocates of civilization. Just as US settlers picked up cudgels on behalf of former slaves and full-blood Indians in Oklahoma, to wage a fight against the Indian elite in the name of civilization, so did South African settlers embrace a civilizing mission that would emancipate ordinary tribesmen from the tyranny of chiefs and tribeswomen from slavery. “The wives of a man are practically his slaves,” Natal Governor Benjamin Pine lamented, “and the more a man has the richer he is.” His moral outrage was tinged with realpolitik. “How can an Englishman with one pair of hands compete with a native man with five to twenty slave wives?” he asked.