In a 1998 lecture in South Africa, I asked the following question: When does a settler become a native? The answer, I believed then and believe now, is never. The native, I argued, is a creation of the settler state. The native is the settler’s invented other: the settler claimed not only to be defined by history but to be its maker, at the same time stigmatizing the native as an unthinking captive of unchanging custom and a product of geography. My conclusion was that settler and native are joined; neither can exist in isolation. Should you destroy one, the other would cease to exist. In the
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