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

by Mahmood Mamdani

to believe that apartheid could simply give way to social equality was to ignore the critical tensions of the South African moment. The consolidation of the anti-apartheid movement had fostered a crisis, not a victory. The option in the early 1990s was to keep fighting, to keep breaking down the state and pitting enemies against each other, or else to reach out and achieve some compromise whereby enemies might live together as political adversaries. The success of the anti-apartheid movement had been based on such compromises, whereby whites accepted that they would not be in charge and blacks accepted that whites had something to offer—that their participation meant not capitulation to apartheid but rather resistance to it.