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

"Neither Settler nor Native emerges from many years of research and reflection about one of the outstanding questions of our time. Mamdani starts by asking, ‘Why is it that after the coming of post-colonial governments , there’s been so much terrible murder and bloodshed in these new independent nation states? Why is it that many new post-colonial nations have no sooner established themselves than they start seeking outsiders within their borders and excluding them from authentic membership of their communities? These are the opening questions, and Mamdani, who has watched them in the Middle East as well as diverse African countries, knows about the discrimination, ethnic cleansing and mass slaughter to which they keep leading. He goes back to 1492 because he sees these more recent horrors as the outcome of a much longer history. He writes very cogently about the early settlers in America, originally the British, French and other Europeans. He’s keen to establish the term ‘settler’ as distinct from migrant or an immigrant: a settler goes to conquer and build a nation on his own terms. Mamdani notes that writers interested in the black American experience sometimes tend to overlook what happened to the North American Indians. They have, he suggests, mistakenly “subsumed colonization under the umbrella of racism”. So he looks at the way the American Republic treated the Indians: a lot of killing, with the survivors turned into second class beings, and ‘Indian country’ further reduced to static reservations. He sees this as one of the most important early examples of the violent exclusion that is built into the formation of the nation-state in a colonial context. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Mamdani sees the consequences of that process worked out in Nazi Germany, whose genocidal policies were, in Hitler ’s mind at least, informed and sanctioned by the earlier American treatment of the Indians. He is highly critical of the Nuremberg trials, and the denazification of Germany, which he says completely failed to engage the issue properly, concentrating instead on convicting and punishing a few ‘bad apples’. He also shows how, immediately after the war and the Yalta and Potsdam conferences, the Allies themselves presided over another huge ethnic cleansing operation in Eastern Europe, moving millions of people in a crude and for many fatal attempt to align the population with revised state borders. There were many deaths once again. His other case studies are Israel where the Palestinians are the ‘permanent minority’ within the Zionist nation-state, and the recently divided Sudan, where the legacies of British imperialism are also being worked out in highly problematic ways. And the answer to this ongoing history? Mamdani really feels the weight of that question. He finds some reasons for optimism in post-apartheid South Africa, where a genuinely political solution and a fundamentally revised state have been struggling to come into existence. He writes of how the polarized peoples of the apartheid state found a way of talking about the past that isn’t just about accusation or individual guilt. He gives new meaning to the term ‘survivor’, suggesting that people on both sides of that suspended history are ‘survivors’, who are still working to find a new future and a new political order in shared recognition of that fact. He’s still very critical about some aspects of the situation: he doesn’t like the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, suggesting that they didn’t actually do a lot more than give money to the victims of warring anti-apartheid factions. He is, however, very respectful of the process overall and suggests, persuasively, that much can be learned from this attempt to achieve a new political settlement. A lot of the time, yes, and even when I wonder I remind myself that he knows a lot more about his subject than I do. I think a great deal of credit is due to a writer who has tried to think all this through. Mamdani knows the risk of being too ‘schematic’ and it’s great to read such a brilliantly informed researcher who has looked at these diverse situations so closely and then tried to produce a conceptual framework that will help us all think about it. He is careful with words as well as contexts; he’s trying to offer us a vocabulary that will enable us to think more accurately about these situations, and that could surely be extraordinarily useful. I think it’s safe to assume that some people will disagree with aspects of his interpretation but that is part of how understanding gets built: the book certainly isn’t written by a partisan who is trying to prove himself right all along. So, yes, I respect it a great deal, and I have learned a lot from it too. It is, I think, a truly important book."