Page 2 of 2 BOOK REVIEW How colonial Britain divided to rule Define and Rule: Native as Political Identity by Mahmood Mamdani
Reviewed by Piyush Mathur
While framing the ulama as the enemy of the Dutch, Snouck Hurgronje also distinguished "between Islam as a religion and Islam as a political ideology", advocating tolerance toward the former and "ruthless suppression" of the latter (p38, p39). In effect, "religious tolerance" became the policy "toward those who acquiesced in Dutch rule" whilst "a brutal counterinsurgency" ensued against those "who did not" (p39).
Snouck Hurgronje's recommendations culminated, via the efforts
of Cornelius Van Vollenhoven (1874-1933), in "separate legal codes for Europeans, foreign Orientals, and natives" that remained in place until the inception of the Republic of Indonesia in 1945 (p42).
Africa: races versus tribes; Darfur
With "civil law" being viewed as "the marker of" civilization, "different systems of customary law" were said to exist among the colonized - and their imperial articulation divided "the colonized majority into ... administratively driven political minorities" that were called tribes in Africa (p45). In practical terms,
When a census-taker entered your name, it was either as member of a race or as member of a tribe. ... Races were said to comprise all those officially categorized as not indigenous to Africa... Tribes ... were all those defined as indigenous in origin. (p46-47)
Then, while "races were governed under a single law: civil law", each tribe, by definition, was viewed to have been governed by its own customary law, which turned out to be a caricatured cultural selection made under colonial supervision. Apportionment and content of rights were made to hinge on the perceived civilizational state and stage of the peoples: "the colonizing master race (Europeans)" had civil privileges over "colonized subject races (Asians, Arabs, Colored, and so on)," who had civil privileges over "native tribes" (p50-51).
Within customary law, "tribes" were divided into "native and non-native" - with the former favored and identified only in terms of "origin" (an ultimately unascertainable criterion). The presumed uniqueness of each tribe ensured the state's intervention to certify its traditionalism and authenticity - equally the parameter for the tribe's value as a native ally - and to singularize its governing authority in the "chief", inevitably an older male (p49). This contradicted Africa's "political history" of pluralism, in which "the definers of tradition could come from women's groups, age groups, clans, religious groups, and so on" depending on the "domain" (p49).
To illustrate the above generality of African colonization, Mamdani focuses on Darfur, where, after defeating "the Mahdiyya in the Battle of Omdurman", the British resorted to "tribalization" to counteract the Mahdiyya's Sufi-inspired ideology, Mahdism (p69, p71).
While being "anti-imperialist", mass-supported, and violently "repressive", the Mahdiyya themselves used to have an all-round cosmopolitan make-up (p71). The tribalization began to unfold as the British, making it "the centerpiece of their strategy in Sudan," sliced up "Darfur, the province into a series of homelands, dars" - which they had "identified with a tribe administratively tagged as native", attaching significant advantages to one's official nativity by origin (p71).
In this, the British "subverted" the customary meaning of dar, which used to signify "one of several locations, starting with one's immediate dwelling and extending to several localities in a series of concentric circles" (p71, p72). However, the new colonial definition of home as "tribal homeland ... became the basis of voluntary organization over time" (p72).
Uniquely for Africa, Darfur's tribalization systematized discrimination against "pastoralist tribes" in favor of "peasant" tribes (p73). That feature aside, the rest "is obtained in all African contexts ... from Eastern Africa to Nigeria, from Sudan to South Africa" excepting Rwanda, where "the historiography and the land tenure system, local administration and dispute resolution - were racialized" (rather than being "joined ... to a tribalized administration") in that "[e]very institution privileged Tutsi over Hutu" (p72).
The Hamitic Hypothesis, 'Arabization'
As for the intellectual component behind the construction of native versus settler dichotomy - and Africa's racialist tribalization - Mamdani blames the historiography that has rested on the so called "'Hamitic Hypothesis'," according to which "Africa was civilized from the outside, with light-skinned or fine-featured migrants from the north civilizing natives to the south" (p55).
He mentions the key historians - both colonial and anti-colonial nationalistic ones - who believed in that hypothesis, discussing some of them; he also outlines the key "forms" of this hypothesis.
In the 19th and early 20th centuries' colonial writings regarding central Africa, the Tutsi are "cast ... as the Hamites and the Hutu as the native"; in colonial accounts of West Africa, "the Berbers were cast" as "Hamites and ... presented as the founders of Hausa states and thus civilizers of the Hausa".
In writings regarding the Sudan, this hypothesis, which dubiously "knit together disparate histories of the Sudan" comes up as "Arabization" of native Negroes; and then there is the "Pan-Africanist version" - such as that authored by "Cheikh Anta Diop, who cast Egypt as the great civilizer of the rest of Africa".
Mamdani points out that while Diop "darkened the complexion of Hamites" by rendering "Egyptians of the Pharaonic period as a black people", he "left the logic of colonial historiography intact" (p54).
Focusing on its Arabization version, Mamdani debunks the belief that there was "an ongoing confrontation" between Arab invaders and native Negroes - averring that Arabs never invaded Sudan (p57). His account clarifies that Africa's Arabization had little to do with the Arabs, per se - and that the meaning of "Arab" in the historical context of Africa has been far from uniform.
Instead, an "Arab" identity was embraced in three major distinctive phases - between the early-16th century founding of the Sultanate of Funj and the 19th-century European colonization - by local royals, merchants, and masses respectively for spiritual, commercial, and political reasons (which he carefully outlines). In the last phase, for instance, "Arab" attracted many common Africans owing to "the anti-colonial pan-Arab movements, particularly Nasserism" (p59).
These temporal variations in the manifestation of Africa's Arabization aside, there were regional variations: While "settled" and powerful people got to be called Arab in "historical Funj, the heartland of northern Sudan", it was "nomads marginal to power" that were called Arab "in Darfur" (p59, p60).
In the book's last section, Mamdani provides a brief qualitative sketch of Africa's decolonization as a nationalistic "preoccupation of ... the intelligentsia and the political class" and as an attempt at going beyond the colonial dichotomy of settlers versus natives (p85). Through "the thick of civil war", the intellectuals attempted "to give the independent state a history", just as the politicians attempted "to create a common citizenship as the basis of national sovereignty" (p85).
As "mainly a post-colonial development", the African university has generally lacked distance from politics; hence, Mamdani credits here Nigeria and South Africa for "creating a significant density of institutional life" as a precondition for intellectual autonomy (p88). Given its benefit of autonomy, Nigeria happened to develop "an alternative historiography to colonial conventions on race and tribe" (p87, p88).
Conclusion
The lively, aphoristic writing of this short book improves upon Mamdani's previous books, which, though unfailingly thorough and groundbreaking, are typically ponderous. The book contains a number of interesting factual details and enlightening explanations that this review's reader must access on his or her own. This is not a comprehensive nor definitive book of history (but nor is Mamdani claiming that); it is better described as a historically informed theoretical explanation of the modern preoccupation with defining and managing difference.
A weakness of the work is that Mamdani does not question the conceptual status of "tribe" at all - let's say in the anthropological tradition. Hence, he is driven to showing that those that had been deemed "tribal" by the imperialists were not in fact tribal - by stressing such peoples' pre-colonial cosmopolitanism, demographic fluidity, or political organizing, etcetera. If, however, he had investigated further into the anthropological literature, then he would have come to know that the term "tribe" never actually came around meaningfully and has been deemed inherently flawed since Morton Fried (1975).
Another intriguing, worrisome problem with the book is that it shows no awareness of, and does not engage with the fact that the British efforts to develop pure, native law for India had dated as far back as Warren Hastings, the first governor-general of Bengal through 1772-1785, at whose initiative N B Halhed compiled A Code of Gentoo Laws; or, Ordinations of the Pandits in 1776. Further, compiling an "Ur-text that would simultaneously establish the Hindu and Muslim law" had preoccupied the British since Sir William Jones (1746-1794), well before the Great Revolt of 1857 or imposition of the indirect rule (Bernard Cohn, 1996, p69).
Mamdani likely has an explanation for his jump to Maine; however, he has not shared it with us. In any case, the book's early, pivotal dependence on this singular historical character - out of the crowded past - has about as many strategic disadvantages as benefits.
Define and Rule: Native as Political Identity by Mahmood Mamdani. Harvard University Press (September 17, 2012). ISBN-10: 0674050525. Price: US$25.62; 168 pages.
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