While the study of the decolonising world has often focused on popular nationalist leaders like Mahatma Gandhi, Kwame Nkrumah and Julius Nyerere, On the Subject of Citizenship recentres the focus on the intellectual work of the scholar, Mahmood Mamdani. Edited by Suren Pillay, this book assembles 11 of the most influential voices in the scholarship of our time, including Talal Asad, Nivedita Menon, Siba N'Zatioula Grovogui, Kuan-Hsing Chen and Partha Chatterjee. The scholars focus on Mamdani's classic, Citizen and Subject in an attempt to derive a method of theorising the postcolonial situation. Mamdani's thoughts are imperative because his intellectual work, which has redefined the way we understand both the colonial and postcolonial situations, partly derives from his participation in the political projects that sought to reform the postcolonial state. Mamdani lived through not only the polarising reality of the colonial regime but also its chronic legacies.
Citizen and Subject emerged as a critique of modern conceptions of power and called for the understanding of the colonial dynamic. Mamdani observes that the modern state extended its rulership in the rural countryside where Foucauldian institutions of power had not yet been erected through what he conceptualises as decentralised despotism. Decentralised despotism allowed the imperial state to effect indirect rule colonialism, with which it manufactured a bifurcated state. In the bifurcated state, the urban was racialised as a space for settlers and ruled through civil law while the rural was tribalised as a space for native ethnicities and ruled through customary law. The post-independence state has inherited indirect rule governance, to the extent of naturalisation. The result is not only an influx of political minorities through claims to ethnic-based districts, kingdoms and federalisms but also the attendant extreme violence.
On the Subject of Citizenship reveals that Citizen and Subject is a mirror through which every African subject can locate self. If the Ethiopian exceptionalism has often argued that Ethiopia was not colonised and thus to explain the violence in the Horn of Africa is to search for an explanation beyond the colonial encounter, Namhla Thando Matshanda's enlightening discussion reveals that the Western powers played an important role in instituting and entrenching decentralised despotism, the governance code for which the colonial regime is most incarnated in the Postcolony. Matshanda observes how the Italian occupation, and especially the latter British Military Administration (BMA), was instrumental in concretising the Amhara national identity as the permanent majority in Ethiopia. She elaborately contends that with also the dynamic of the Cold War, the strife of ethnic federalism and the consequent violence in contemporary Ethiopia needs to be contextualised in the history of Western imperialism in the region.
Whereas a spectre of critique has hovered over Mamdani's scholarship from especially political economists, culturalists and gender theorists, accusing him of abandoning the analytical lenses of those disciplines, a critical reading of Citizen and Subject reveals rather that Mamdani added perspective to the disciplines through enhancing the political. Mamdani's scholarship defies rigid disciplinarity which has its history in modern colonial Europe. In fact, Mamdani's critics majorly fail to grasp the dynamic of interdisciplinarity in his thought. Like Grovogui also observes, the critiques of Citizen and Subject will always ‘point more to the deficiencies in African Studies than they do to Mamdani's work’ (see Chapter 2). The political nuance, for example, enabled Mamdani to illustrate for the political economists that you cannot understand the peasant without understanding peasant subjectivity. Critical contributors in On the Subject of Citizenship such as Steven Friedman, however, tend to de-emphasise the political – the power of the state – in the sustenance of permanent majorities and minorities. While agreeing with Mamdani's conception of the nature of contemporary society, Friedman rather emphasises a socio-economic lens in making sense of the fragmentation in the postcolonial state. His contention, which he presents as a South African exception, is that in the townships, ‘while the polity has been deracialised, poverty and inequality remain racialised’ (see Chapter 9). Whereas Mamdani would agree with Friedman that social justice was never achieved in a deracialising South, he would challenge the assumption that poverty and inequality do not constitute a question on the nature of the state.
Pillay who also delves into the question of justice in post-apartheid South Africa illustrates how rather than exceptional, the South African case fits in Mamdani's thesis. Focusing on ‘subject races’ as an entry into the tension between the Indian South African and the black Africans, Pillay echoes Mamdani, contending that it is the colonial state that fashioned the subject races and pitied them against the subject ethnicities. The postcolonial moment has continually thrust the citizenship of the subject races in a precarious situation – with subject ethnicities threatening violence against them. While taking Africa as a vantage point, Mamdani's thought travels across geographies. On the Subject of Citizenship mobilises perspectives over different geographies such as India, Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, South Africa, China, the Middle East and America. This book offers a timely postface for Mamdani's thought in grappling with the possibility of inventing new political futures.
Partha Chartejjee identifies how Citizen and Subject reinforces the critique of the ideals that the world now cherishes such as territorial sovereignty whose history implicates them in the naturalisation of the nation-state. Chartejjee also forewarns of government practices that may sustain the nation-state and the imperial hold. Within a similar spirit, Pillay calls for a new concept of justice ‘that is not simply about reversing the logic of colonialism but refusing the logic of colonialism’ and ‘a concept of difference that does not use one's past to decide if one belongs and has a political future’ (see Chapter 10). As Karuna Mantena abridges it, decolonisation can be understood as ‘a conjoined process of political imagination, inventive reform and hard negotiation, which together work to unsettle inherited identities – to convert perpetrators and victims into survivors, natives and settlers into citizens, nation-states into inclusive democracies’ (see Chapter 7). For even China and America which, in imagining self as superpowers, might conceive the decolonisation discourse as immaterial to them, Mamdani's thought is a prophecy on the unsustainability of political empires built on exclusion of the other.
Reading Citizen and Subject as method in postcolonial scholarship challenges the intellectual to invent a new language as a way out of the conscripts of colonial modernity. The search for a new language is the place at which Nivedita Menon arrives when she recognises that despite the critique of colonial customary land ownership, contemporary feminist activism for individual land rights and land titling for women is also entangled in a neoliberal capitalist abyss. Menon observes that rather than securing land for women, private individual landownership only eases the state's persistent attempt to dispossess people of the land. It would be interesting to place Nivedita Menon and Lyn Ossome in conversation because while both possess a critique for the liberal rights movement, and still while both find emancipatory resources from the reading of Mamdani, they arrive at diverging imaginations. In regard to the question of women's relationship to land, Menon's hope is that there can be a movement for ‘anti-ownership, collective, use rights in land’ (see Chapter 4), while Ossome is interested, first, in the question of: ‘how does the postcolonial state govern women?’ (see Chapter 8). Ossome's inquiry leads her to assert that the violence of the postcolonial moment through which the formerly colonised subject seeks freedom is gendered and targets women. Mamdani would be puzzled because as he testifies on the manifestation of extreme violence in the postcolonial world, he has never seen a genocide of women and he does not believe that either men or women can survive without the other.
Mamdani's thought is both an archive and a method for the decolonial thinker who has to contend with questions of identity, violence and the pistons of modernity. Mamdani's thought is a methodology for the Social Sciences. Mantena in fact illustrates that Mamdani's exploration of the African situation offers the possibility of deriving a political theory. What political theory is possible from a reading of Mamdani? Mantena contends that Mamdani offers us a ‘theory of postcolonial democracy’ through Citizen and Subject's assertion that whereas the postcolonial state was deracialised, it was not detribalised. The consequence, Mantena observes, was a paradox in which democracy is ‘centrally implicated in the politicisation of identity’ (see Chapter 7).
Mamdani imagines the political future as a horizon of possibilities. On the Subject of Citizenship, however, presents some of his readers as hesitant to imagine a post-liberal society. Asad, for example, insists that ‘transcending sectarian and ethnic groupings within the modern state in order to achieve equality and unity – while at the same time allowing space for organised citizen groups to protest against injustice – may not be possible’ (see Chapter 3). On the Subject of Citizenship is actually faced with a contradiction regarding Mamdani's thought because some of the articles, in their exposition of liberal democracy and imagination of radical democracy, still offer sanctuary to the ideas of separationism and liberal identitarianism which breathe new life into the nation-state. Some writers sustain politicised identity categories and stabilise others. Other authors straddle with the idea of the African intellectuals' agency in the divisive nationalism manifesting through racism and tribalism. Mamdani would, however, request us to see these crude nationalisms and sub-nationalisms as derivative of power. To him, protest mimics the language of power.
‘Looking Back, Looking Forward’, Mamdani's reflection at the end of this book is a worthwhile inclusion. One gets the sense that the disagreements that Mamdani's interlocutors have are rather on emplotment not the argument of Citizen and Subject. Even contributors like Abdelwahab El-Affendi who disagrees with Mamdani on the historico-theoretical philosophy of colonialism, also restate Citizen and Subject's thesis of decentralised despotism. Mamdani guides on how to read Citizen and Subject: ‘as an account of an unfolding dialectic between structure and agency, between colonial power and response to colonialism’ (see Chapter 12). Mamdani revisits the debates that Citizen and Subject has raised over the years, dispelling the South African and Ethiopian exceptionalism, economic determinism and re-echoing the clarion call for historicisation. He conceives the postcolonial being as a historical subject, crafted in the thick of colonial rule. Mamdani, however, believes that not all is lost in the imagination of non-colonially conscripting reforms of the postcolonial state. Mamdani's thought bridges the gap between the university intellectual and the nationalist. The bridge is built on the pursuit of both excellence and relevance. On the Subject of Citizenship's referents to Mamdani as a citizen-scholar and/or a public intellectual are all deserving recognitions. The inexhaustibility of Mamdani's thought remains a trope for decolonising political theory and producing decolonial reality.