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

by Mahmood Mamdani

Tolerance therefore became a key structure of the nation-state, for it legitimated the permanent separation of the majority and the minority, a distinction without which the nation-state collapses.

This distinction is a product of the essential incoherence of the nation-state, which joins the nation, a political community whose boundaries are determined by its members, to the state, a legal form in which membership (citizenship) is determined by law. These two objects, state and nation, are necessarily incompatible, for the purpose of the state is to apply law equally to all members, while the purpose of the nation is to protect and valorize only members of the nation.

Locke’s compromise was toleration, whereby the state agrees not to enact the national prejudice against the inhabitants of the state who are not also of the nation, as long as these minorities accept their minority status. Minority status boils down to the forgoing of sovereignty. The state will never exist in the image of the minority, which renounces any political project that would change the character of the state.

status. Minority status boils down to the forgoing of sovereignty. The state will never exist in the image of the minority, which renounces any political project that would change the character of the state.

Europeans generally agreed that they had to find ways other than violence to resolve differences among themselves, but they also agreed that they had a right to colonize the uncivilized because the uncivilized, like the permanent minority in the nation-state, lacked sovereignty.

Abstract notions of autonomy, sovereignty, and self-preservation—so central to liberalism—developed in tandem with international practices of conquest and served to rationalize them.6 It is in this sense that we may understand humanist thought as the founding moment of a colonizing tradition.

Humanism, in the emerging mold of human rights, only became an apparent foil for the pursuit of big-power interests toward the end of nineteenth century, when humanists argued that Europe’s new nation states should be required to preserve minority rights. All major Western European powers agreed, and in the 1878 Berlin Treaty minority-protection requirements were imposed on the Balkan states emerging from the Russo-Turkish War in the East. But, demonstrating again that humanism is a fig leaf for the powerful, the same strictures were not applied to Europe’s old states, which would not be enjoined by treaty to protect minorities.

In Senegal and Morocco, the French followed the British by building a durable alliance with local elites whose moral and ideological standing was intact, even if their political power was on the wane.

These divisions were drawn along lines of cultural and ethnic distinction, thereby transforming ethnic groups into administrative-political units known as tribes. Each territorial division was said to be the homeland of its tribe, administered by local authorities who combined the sanction of custom with the backing of colonial power.

The territorial and legal boundaries created by indirect rule thereby became the basis for postcolonial conflicts over political belonging.

They did not merely resurrect Roman divide-and-rule practices but rather pioneered an altogether different form of statecraft based on the recasting of identities. Whereas Romans took the self-consciousness of their subjects as a given, British colonial governance sought to reshape the self-consciousness of the colonized.

Historical writing, census-taking, and lawmaking fostered new subjectivities by creating for the colonized a new past, altering their status in the present, and anticipating for them futures that otherwise would never have come to pass. Colonizers wrote European race theories and perverted variations on local history into the histories of colonized peoples, making European categories of race and tribe appear local and natural. Thus did colonized peoples learn that they had always been rivals.

Territorial indirect rule embraces the customary authority and law of institutional indirect rule but binds these to tribal homelands. The innovation that brought about territorial indirect rule was the American Indian reservation. First tested in the mid-nineteenth century in California, then put into practice more formally and completely by presidents Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant, the reservation segregated Indians from whites, stripped Indians of land, and minimized the political threat they posed by subjecting them to domination under colonially supervised customary law.

Their bloody confrontation notwithstanding, colonialism and anticolonialism share a common premise: that society must be homogenized in order to build a nation.

I recall taking a bus in the mid-1970s from Dar-es-Salaam to Maputo, the capital of the newly liberated Mozambique. As the bus entered the square in the middle of the city, I could see a huge banner inscribed with a quote from the Mozambican revolutionary Samora Machel: “For the Nation to Live, the Tribe Must Die.” The tribe here referred not to the ethnic group—as in a cluster of culturally unique people—but to political identification with the ethnic group. The message was that every potential source of competing identity had to be cleansed in order to homogenize the nation.

Like other nationalist projects, postcolonial nationalism has been deeply violent. Indeed, the violence of the militant nationalist project often...

In kick-starting the nation-building project after independence, postcolonial elites turned their backs on the history of colonialism and thus on their own history. Instead they modeled their political imagination on the modern European state, the result being that the nationalist dream was imposed on the reality of colonially imposed fragmentation, leading to new rounds of nation-building by ethnic cleansing.

Is nation-building violence a criminal act, calling for prosecution and punishment? Or is it a political act, the answer to which must be a new, nonnationalist politics? Where societies choose the first option, criminalizing nation-building violence, progress toward eradicating the political sources of that violence will not come easily, if at all. This is because nation-building violence tends to be cyclical. Those excluded by new boundaries of nationhood turn to a new round of violence in order to establish a national political community in which they are included, necessarily excluding others. And then the cycle restarts.

The postcolonial crisis is first and foremost a political crisis, not a criminal one.

Law-making violence is, as Jacques Derrida points out in his comment on Benjamin, an originary violence that establishes a new authority and cannot itself have been authorized by an anterior legitimacy. The state fears this founding violence more than it does crime, for founding violence is able to justify, legitimate, and transform political and legal relations, and so present itself as having a right to right and a right to law.

The tendency to think of all violence as criminal and thus the response to all violence as law-preserving can be traced to the euphoria surrounding the alleged triumph of the liberal democratic model at the end of the Cold War.

The claim was that the era of law-making (political) violence had come to a close; all responses to violence therefore must be law-preserving, aiming to suppress crime and thereby maintain the existing and final order. Where the political approach is open to reconsidering and changing the rules, the criminal approach reasserts and reaffirms existing rules.

Instead, by taking a political approach, South Africans reconfigured perpetrators and victims—alongside beneficiaries and bystanders—as something altogether new: survivors. All groups were survivors of apartheid, with a place at the table after its violence.

A single-minded focus on identifying perpetrators leaves undisturbed the logic of institutions that make nation-building violence thinkable and possible.

The indigenous homeland is a technology of rule, extended across nation-states seeking to homogenize.

Israel’s European elite, Ashkenazi Jews, have sought to civilize “oriental” Jews—in particular, Mizrahim, or Arab Jews. They have been de-Arabized, stripped of the culture they shared with other Arabs, and now represent some of Israel’s most ardent Zionists.

Understood as historical objects, political identities are revealed to be products of power, not nature. South Sudanese have learned to see themselves as tribal because tribes have been invested with political power. Zionist Jews have learned to see themselves as natives of Palestine because their conception of nativity involves exclusive rights to the land. Americans have learned to see themselves as immigrants rather than settlers, which suits their sense of the American nation as a historic rupture from Europe rather than a European colonial outpost.

would have to see their history differently, as a continuation of European settlement, in order to begin the decolonization of the political.

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.

One such idea, emerging from anticolonial discourse, is that independence from foreign control is sufficient to ensure the political end of colonization. Another is the conflation of immigration and settlement: immigrants join existing polities, whereas settlers create new ones.

Powerful epistemic forces in the world today seek to make history go away and to replace it with a universal impulse called human rights. Human rights denies the existence of history, instead looking only to the here and now and asking who did what to whom, so that perpetrators may be punished and victims vindicated. The arena of human rights is that of the courtroom, specifically the post-atrocity tribunal. When atrocities are committed, human rights activists find the perpetrators, name them and shame them, maybe even put them in jail. What these activists rarely seek to do is understand why the atrocities happened or what they tell us about the political community.

Where violence is merely criminal, we can only see it as a function of individual pathology. We cannot see it as a political outcome calling for a political solution.

Nuremberg effectively depoliticized Nazism, saddling responsibility for Nazi violence with particular men (mostly men) and ignoring the fact that these men were engaged in the project of political modernity on behalf of a constituency: the nation, the volk. The Allies who prosecuted individual Nazis at Nuremberg were invested in ignoring Nazism’s political roots, for these roots are also America’s.

The Allies also sought to protect themselves from censure for their contemporary actions. After the war the Allies engaged in many atrocities similar to those the Germans had, including the ethnic cleansing of millions of Germans across Central and Eastern Europe. These Germans were loaded onto the same cattle cars the Nazis used to transport Jews to concentration, labor, and death camps; large numbers of Germans found themselves the new occupants of those camps. Some half a million Germans died amid the ethnic cleansing. But because the Nuremberg process was constrained to providing justice for victims of individual German perpetrators, the political context, contemporary and historical, was not subject to scrutiny.

If Nazism had been understood not as a crime but as a political project of the nation-state, there may yet have been a place for Jews in Europe, in denationalized states committed to the equal protection of every citizen. However, because the response to Nazism took the nation-state for granted, the solution for the Jews turned out to be the nation-state, again. Israel gave the Nazis what they had wanted all along: national homogeneity, by means of the ejection of Jews from Europe.

Through political mobilization, Afrikaners, the descendants of Dutch colonists, came to realize that they did not have to be members of a racist white national majority—that this was not their natural political identity, but rather an identity they had adopted for historical reasons that need not prevail for all time. Similarly, the various nonwhite groups defined as separate by apartheid’s racial categories came to understand themselves as black, a cohesive identity whose solidarity defied the will of the state. Newly conscious of their blackness, they redefined their foe as white power rather than white people, another shift of political identity.

Decolonizing the political through the recognition of a shared survivor identity does not require that we all pretend we are the same; far from it. It requires that we stop accepting that our differences should define who benefits from the state and who is marginalized by it.

But the fate of Indians in South America differed from the fate of Indians in the North: “a larger native population has survived in South America,” Hegel wrote, “despite the fact that the natives there have been subjected to far greater violence, and employed in grueling labors to which their strength was scarcely equal.” He thought the difference stemmed from a single fact: “South America was conquered, while North America was colonized.” Whereas “the Spanish took possession of South America in order to dominate it and to enrich themselves both through political office and by extracting tributes from the natives,” the British settlers looked to populate North America. One looked for riches, the other for land.

Therein lies a key difference between premodern and modern practices. For millennia, conquerors have bled resources from far-off places and sent the bounty home. Europeans in South America followed this playbook, taking what they could—including the labor of the locals—but steering no new course in world history. It is the land-devouring settlers in North America who had transformative impact on both sides of the colonial divide, in Europe as well as its colonies.

Indians were eventually granted US citizenship after the First World War, but they were treated as naturalized immigrants. The rationale was both simple and profound: Indians belonged to a different political community, variously called a tribe or nation. To become a citizen by virtue of native birth, as guaranteed by the Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment, one must already have been accepted in the political community. Thus one could reside within the borders of the nation-state while being excluded from it politically, rendered a permanent minority without rights.

The goal of US-led denazification was to establish the collective guilt of the German people. This was a mistake, for two reasons. First, the notion of guilt rendered the violence of the war and the Holocaust a matter of crime and therefore an offense against the state. This foreclosed a reckoning with Nazism’s political roots and undercut the possibility of reform, for offenses against the state necessitate no reform of the state, only the restoration of its authority through corrective action against offenders. Second, while many Germans were in fact Nazis, and while many more benefited from Nazi policies, Germans were not in fact collectively to blame. Germany was also home to an antifascist opposition, which paid dearly for its position. The Americans, however, refused to work with antifascists after the war. Doing so would have undermined the collective-guilt thesis and put the United States in league with the left in the middle of the postwar red scare.

As a result, denazification alienated all parties in Germany—ex-Nazis, many of whom were nominal party members, who had joined not out of conviction but because their employers required them to; bystanders, who, like most people, are disengaged from politics and could feel some justification for rejecting the idea of collective guilt; and homegrown idealists, who could have been the vanguard of a new politics. It is no wonder that, during the years of occupation, most Germans felt little remorse about what had happened to the Jews of Europe. Ordinary Germans—already defeated, already crippled by economic crisis and aerial bombing during the war—were battered and bullied by the occupiers, leaving them to wonder at their own victimization.

Indeed, after the war, the Allies joined their former enemies in promoting a new homogenizing, nation-building effort that proceeded from the very presumption underlying Nazi ideology. The basis of Nazi thought, unrepudiated at Nuremberg, was that Jews constituted a nation foreign in Europe. The same presumption is foundational to Zionism. Postwar Germans, no less than Americans and Britons, could readily embrace the idea that Israel was the home of the Jews, separate from Germany and Europe at large. The establishment of the state of Israel was the solution to the Jewish question in Europe.

A basic law declaring “Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People,” enacted in 2018, formally and finally marks the Palestinians as beyond the bounds of the nation-state and therefore an internally colonized population. Notably, this declaration replaced the earlier notion that Israel is a Jewish and democratic state. This was always false; Israel has never been a democracy, for the majority there is defined prepolitically. Now we know that the balance of the Knesset agrees. In a democracy, majorities are formed through the political process. In a nation-state, democracy can be real only for the national majority. The permanent minority may have voting rights, but it is ever unable to exercise sovereignty. Nation-state democracy only ratifies the permanent majority, which prevents the political process from addressing the sources of its privilege.

Sudan, discussed in chapter 4, was not a settler-colonial state, yet, rather remarkably, British officials deployed the settler-native distinction in the absence of settlers. The British demarcated two races, Arabs said to be Northern and Africans said to be Southern, and described the Arabs as settlers and the Africans as natives. The distinction was based on the concocted history and ethnography implicit in colonial modernity, which presumed that Arabs were civilized, Africans were uncivilized, and that any civilization in Africa came from abroad. Certainly the peoples deemed Arab and African had their own wide-ranging concocted histories, too, but again the British innovation lay not in inventing histories but rather in politicizing them.

South. Like nationalists everywhere, Arab nationalists, good pupils who had come to believe themselves inherently superior, attempted to maintain their place in the sun of colonial modernity long after the colonizer departed.

This method of governance did not end with Sudanese independence in the 1950s. It did not end with South Sudan’s secession from Sudan in 2011. Rather, tribalism as an administrative practice and as the currency of political competition has endured and today been taken to its absurd extreme. Each of the major tribes in South Sudan has its own separate ministries in the government. Each has its separate militias. The army of the state is itself fragmented by tribal rivalries; various wings of the armed forces fought each other in the South Sudanese civil war that began in 2013, a conflict costing hundreds of thousands of civilian lives. As of this writing, a peace is in place, but tenuously. Wealth and power in South Sudan come to whomever can mobilize enough troops to terrorize a population. A new militia could arise and, if it intimidates enough people, earn its own slice of tribal homeland and its own perch in the government. If the United States, with hardly any surviving natives, can continue to be organized as a settler state, South Sudan can continue to be organized as a collection of native tribes, even with no settler presence.

The African National Congress, the South African Indian Congress, the Coloured People’s Congress, and the Congress of Democrats (for whites) all opposed apartheid. But they reproduced the apartheid imagination in their internal architecture.

The state was not defeated militarily or by virtue of intense social disorder. What changed was the political landscape. White South Africans were learning to adopt a new kind of political subjectivity that defied that of the nation. The change was especially pronounced among student youth. Soon they were joined by leading academics at Stellenbosch University, the prestigious home of the Afrikaner intelligentsia. These alliances made clear that the nation could no longer be defined by whiteness, compelling the NP to change its tune and take part in the transition. The state might have used its power to violently break the stalemate with anti-apartheid forces, but the nation had changed underneath it, rendering apartheid no longer a viable nation-state project.

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.