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

by Mahmood Mamdani

Yet this discourse has been unable to make sense of extreme postcolonial violence. Anticolonial intellectuals have taken their lead from Marx’s reflections on the 1848 revolutions in Europe. The political revolution must clear the way for the social revolution, Marx argued in his seminal On the Jewish Question. Political revolution (or political independence) confers formal political equality and citizenship but at the same time sharpens the experience and thus the consciousness of social inequality, broadening the horizons of struggle from the political to the social. The final stage in this process, according to the teleology of anticolonial theory, is epistemological revolution, whereby the very consciousness of being, the vocabulary in which we understand the world around us, is transformed. And yet, in a growing number of cases, the attainment of political independence and formal citizenship has not led to mobilizations for social equality. Rather, recurring civil wars have followed in the course of nation-building.