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

by Mahmood Mamdani

Nor do I believe that national majorities and minorities should, by dint of history, be enjoined to switch places. The transformation of native into settler, victim into perpetrator, is nothing to celebrate, as the story of Israel attests. Rather, the point is that history provides resources for seeing past identities of majority and minority, settler and native, perpetrator and victim. The people of today can, through concerted engagement with the facts of political modernity, be convinced of the necessity of discarding its divisive identities. We can all learn to see ourselves as survivors of political modernity—created by it, but not doomed to repeat it. Survivors do not necessarily agree on what the shape of society and the affordances of the state should be, but survivors at least are not configured from the start as enemies in a zero-sum contest for power.