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

by Mahmood Mamdani

Mbeki’s answer was unequivocal: I am formed of the migrants who left Europe to find a new home on our native land. Whatever their own actions, they remain still part of me.… I am the grandchild who lays fresh flowers on the Boer graves at St. Helena and the Bahamas, who sees in the mind’s eye and suffers the suffering of a simple peasant folk: death, concentration camps, destroyed homesteads, a dream in ruins … I am an African.43 The concentration camps Mbeki referred to were built by the British to house Boer prisoners during the Second Boer War, when the British conquered their fellow whites and took their colonies. Mbeki was announcing a transformative revision of history, in which it was not only Africans who were colonized—by the British and the Boers—but also the Boers. He was challenging South Africans to reimagine political identity, to see that political identity could be reimagined because it is a product of histories, not nature. If whites, too, could be colonized Africans, then they could be citizens of the postcolonial state.