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

by Mahmood Mamdani

Above all, South Africans came to recognize that political identities are not permanent or natural. Activists overcame differences of race imposed on them—differences marked as African, Coloured, Indian, and white—to join in a single cause of breaking down apartheid. Afrikaners, once champions of apartheid, became part of the movement against it. These groups had been formed under colonialism as distinct and often rivalrous, their interests said to be naturally divergent. Because of the racial difference imputed to them, they were subject to different laws and granted different opportunities to participate in the political community, or sometimes no opportunity at all. But in response to apartheid, these people learned to think anew their political relation to each other: not as others or rivals but as equals in law.