Paddy O'Halloran
Conclusions to even the most
thorough intellectual efforts often leave readers with more unresolved
questions than answered ones. Perhaps
the writer shares in this dilemma, as well, arriving at ‘the end’ only to find
themselves unsatisfied. Maybe, too, it
is fortunate for the long process of intellectual work that no question is ever
fully answered, but it can be frustrating and difficult to accept in the short
term. However illuminating a line of
thought might be, it seems that the only end it can achieve is an artificial
one. Mahmood Mamdani’s Citizen and Subject (1996) concludes in
this way: with much more to say; with questions. My point here is not to reiterate Mamdani’s
thesis in that book, but to explore some questions that seem to arise from his
argument in the hopeful interest of providing some basis for expanding on his
project.
In the last pages of Citizen and Subject, Mamdani offers this
enjoinder: ‘The point is neither to set aside dualisms that mark social theory
nor to exchange one set for another more adequate to describing the
contemporary situation. Rather it is to
problematize both sides of every dualism by historicizing it, thereby
underlining the institutional and political condition for its reproduction and
for its transformation’ (1996, 299). This
is a view which has guided my own intellectual endeavors, currently with
serious reflection on Mamdani’s work: How can we question the logic of
divisions? Likewise, how can we challenge divisions, both actual and perceived?
Most importantly, what is the shape of a politics that questions—and perhaps
challenges—divisions?
Extremely briefly, Mamdani’s
argument is that formerly colonized African societies, including South Africa,
were deracialized with independence but not democratized inasmuch as a
colonially engineered bifurcation has persisted in which the urban was the site
of civil society and citizenship and the rural the site of customary authority
and subjecthood. Following this
dichotomy, and with the idea of problematizing dualisms and questioning
divisions in mind, Mamdani ends Citizen
and Subject by saying that it is in linking the urban and the rural that
formerly colonized African societies will advance the processes of
democratization which has largely eluded them (1996, 297).
More recent literature on South
Africa has repeated the necessity of providing this link in that country, both
in intellectual work and through politics.
Hart and Sitas (2004) call for a more integrated approach to questions
of the urban and rural in South Africa.
Research, they argue, has itself been largely bifurcated (2004,
32). Similarly, Kepe and Ntsebeza write
that there is a ‘marginalization of the rural’ in scholarship on South Africa
(2012, 4-5). It is important also that
political movements that are able to connect the rural and the urban—positively—should
be the subject of critical thought, study, and action. ‘Although theory cannot by itself transform
reality’, writes Mamdani, ‘without a theoretical illumination reality must
appear a closed riddle’ (1996, 299).
After Mamdani, we are tasked with combining sophisticated theoretical
work on the urban and rural with a transformational political project.
Now I will suggest some questions
that might be valuable to such work. The
first is drawn from the work of Partha Chatterjee in The Politics of the Governed (2004). Writing about India, but with theoretical
importance for South Africa and other countries, Chatterjee proposes a
distinction between ‘real’ and ‘formal’ citizenship (2004, 4), in which only
those with access to the former are fully rights-bearing citizens. The latter group, often considered ‘encroachers’
and ‘polluters’ in the urban sphere are not a part of civil society, but of
political society (2004, 140; 40). Political
society is the space of the ‘governed’ (of Chatterjee’s title), and its people
make up ‘populations’. ‘Unlike citizenship’, Chatterjee writes, ‘which carries
the moral connotation of sharing in the sovereignty of the state and hence of
claiming rights in relation to the state, populations do not bear any inherent
moral claim’ (2004, 136). It is an
easily observable fact in any city in the world that some urban people are not
afforded the same, or any, access as ‘full’ citizens to the civil society
institutions that are ostensibly urban.
As populations, lacking a moral obligation from the state, they are the
recipients of services rather than rights, a reality seen in many South African
cities (Chatterjee 2004, 136; Gibson 2011).
Likewise, we can say that not all rural areas, even in places where
customary rule was instituted and persists, are the site, exclusively, of
‘subjects’. What are we to make of this
fact in light of Mamdani’s work? The line of bifurcation, certainly, is not
neatly drawn. Therefore, we could ask
the questions: How do we account for those segments of society whose access to
citizenship is not conterminous with their location in either the urban or the
rural? Is there a ‘space’—not physical, but political, and in that way,
transcending the spatial bifurcation—between civil society and customary
authority, between the urban and the rural, that has characteristics of each
and potential for linking the two?
The fact of ambiguity leads to other
questions. The penultimate chapter of Citizen and Subject deals with the
concept of ‘The Rural in the Urban’.
What new angles on the issue, if any, are available if we propose the
reverse situation: the ‘Urban in the Rural’?
This is seemingly paradoxical, but the point is not a subversion or
conversion of the urban or rural spaces into their opposites, so obviously we
are not talking about the presence of large buildings in the midst of farmland,
but rather about a conceptual and political re-perception of what those
spheres mean and how they interact. For
inspiration we can look to the work of Norman Etherington, whose misleadingly
titled history of South Africa in the first half of the nineteenth century, The Great Treks (2001), takes a unique
approach. Rather than writing another
history from the point of view of the colonial archive, Etherington attempts a
history that has as its vantage point a central location in the High Veld, a
repositioning from which the colonial incursions of Europeans can be viewed
from without, rather than nearly exclusively from within themselves, and from
which ‘the agents of colonialism appear first as specks on a distant horizon’,
challenging the ‘pernicious tradition of viewing South African history through
the eyes of white colonists’ (2001, xiii).
He critiques, too, other methods (among them anthropological and linguistic)
that, in trying to shift the focus away from the colonial report, ‘reproduce by
other means the Us/Them binary opposition typical of colonial encounters….We
have events, They have ways of life. We have history, They have culture’ (2001,
xiii)—in the formulation of Mamdani’s study, ‘we are citizens; they are
subjects’. Does a method like
Etherington’s, very loosely captured in the inverted idea of the ‘urban in the
rural’, have value in the attempt to link these two spheres? Mamdani mentions
the connection between ‘urban activism’ and ‘rural discontent’ (1996,
220). Can we talk, after Chatterjee and
Etherington, about urban discontent manifested in rural activism? Taken further, might divisions through which
we understand politics and political action not be appropriate to the
circumstances that actually obtain and in which many, if not most, people make
their lives? The fact, detailed by
Mamdani that people have ties and residences in both the urban and rural spaces
makes this a compelling question.
Mainly, Mamdani’s argument about the
bifurcation of societies deals with institutions of power and the reproduction
of power: an ‘institutional segregation’ in the words of Jan Smuts, that
‘carries with it territorial segregation’ (Mamdani 1996, 6). Since civil society is itself a site of power
(especially if one considers the circumscribed nature of civil society
discussed earlier), Mamdani asserts that ‘no reform of contemporary civil society
institutions can by itself’ effect reform of the ‘decentralized despotism’ which
is central to his work and which he proposes exists in many African societies (1996,
15). Mamdani identifies two ways in
which the urban and rural have been
linked, what he calls ‘administrative’ and ‘political’ ways, but goes on to say
that the former ‘turned out to be coercive’ and the latter resorted to
clientelism (1996, 300). It is the final
point made in Citizen and Subject that
the route to transcending the urban-rural divide cannot be on the same avenues
built by power; ‘it is necessary to transcend the dualism of power around which
the bifurcated state is organized’, in Mamdani’s words (1996, 301). Considering again the ambiguity of the rural-urban
divide visible in Chatterjee’s ‘political society’, the reimagining of
historical narratives in the style of Etherington, we can ask some more
questions. One question that Mamdani
himself asks is this: ‘If power reproduced itself by exaggerating differences
and denying the existence of an oppressed majority, is not the burden of
protest to transcend these differences without denying them?’ (1996, 8). It is striking that the form of
transformation he envisions is found in the phrase ‘burden of protest’, which
would suggest, in the same vein as our discussion here, that it is outside of
institutions of power—in the ‘oppressed majority’—that the mode of
transformation must be sought.
Therefore, we can ask, what role do people not included or fully
included in civil society have in theorizing the urban-rural division and
initiating a transformation?—and it is my contention that they certainly have
one. In embarking on this reform, what
will ‘protest’ look like? It is probable that protest itself must be
reconsidered if a project of democratization that moves between spheres of
institutional division is to be successful.
Such protest itself will likely be difficult to categorize. Mamdani writes that ‘to create a democratic
majority is to transcend’ the divisions organized by power, including the
urban-rural divide (1996, 296), but this only leads to another question, and
one which I will not attempt to answer here, which is about how to ensure that
political action in this vein is actually democratizing. What is the potential for democratic movements
in the space between the urban and the rural?
What oppressive trends need to be identified and avoided?
As a final note, it seems that we
can turn towards certain elements of feminist thought, such as Ifi Amadiume’s
and Nomboniso Gasa’s (1987; 2007), for important insights into theorizing the
shifts that Mamdani presents as necessary and which are just hinted at in the
form of questions here. Nomboniso Gasa
seeks to avoid the ‘kinds of binaries that are completely unnecessary and do
not make sense of [in this case] black women’s experiences’ (2007, 214). That is what we need to do in all
politics. The contributions of thinkers
like Gasa are significant not only to an emancipatory project for women, but
for how politics are understood and carried out more generally. Both Amadiume and Gasa challenge discursive
binaries in a way that is crucial not only to feminism but to all politics that
aspire to be democratizing, as well as to re-envisioning and revising
discourses with liberation in mind. I
want to restate a question I posed above, as it seems to encapsulate the work
that needs to be done in expanding Mamdani’s thesis of twenty years ago and in thinking
about a future for politics in South Africa and many other parts of the world
that, through colonialism or other historical circumstances, face persistent
divisions in the present: What is the shape of a politics that questions—and
perhaps challenges—divisions? If we hope
to uncover aspects of the answer, we must keep ‘open’ the ‘riddle’, to use
Mamdani’s term, of reality.
References
Amadiume, Ifi. 1987. Male
Daughters, Female Husbands. London: Zed Books.
Chatterjee,
Partha. 2004. The Politics of the
Governed. New York: Columbia University Press.
Etherington,
Norman. 2001. The Great Treks. London:
Pearson Education Limited.
Gasa,
Nomboniso. 2007. Women in South African
History: They Remove Boulders and Cross Rivers - basus’iimbokodo, bawel’imil.
Cape Town: HSRC Press.
Gibson,
Nigel. 2011. Fanonian Practices in South
Africa. New York: Palgrave and Macmillan.
Hart,
Gillian, and Ari Sitas. 2004. ‘Beyond the Urban-Rural Divide: Linking Land,
Labour, and Livelihoods.’ Transformation 56: 31-38.
Kepe, Thembela,
and Lungisile Ntsebeza (eds.). 2012. Rural
Resistance in South Africa: The Mpondo Revolts after Fifty Years. Cape
Town: UCT Press.
Mamdani,
Mahmood. 1996. Citizen and Subject:
Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism. Princeton, New
Jersey: Princeton University Press.
