Mahmood Mamdani’s book Citizen and Subject: Contemporary
Africa and the Legacy of Colonialism (1995) is now viewed as one of the key
texts on citizenship, modernity and post-colonialism in Africa. Last month he
delivered the second annual Mistra lecture at the Mapungubwe Institute for
Strategic Reflection, as well as launching his new book, Define and Rule:
Native as Political Identity (Wits University Press), which was based on his
WEB du Bois lectures at Harvard.
It is a study of colonial “indirect rule” and how that
affected social identities (“native” versus “settler”) and conceptions of
“Africanisation” after independence, inflecting arguments about social
inclusion or exclusion (“Who belongs?”, as Mamdani puts it in this interview).
Born in Uganda, Mamdani is the director of the Makerere
Institute of Social Research, the Herbert Lehman professor of government at the
School of International and Public Affairs, and the professor of anthropology,
political science and African studies at Columbia University. He also taught at
the University of Cape Town for a time. We spoke about the lecture in more
detail:
Your Mistra lecture (Beyond Nuremberg: Breaking the Cycle of
Violence) talks about how processes such as the Truth and Reconciliation
Commission (TRC) and the International Criminal Court (ICC) are modelled on the
Nuremberg trials of prominent Nazis after World War II. You ask whether such
processes can help to build unified political communities in Africa.
The TRC saw itself as a surrogate for a Nuremberg-style
process, with the difference being that the TRC would give amnesty in exchange
for the truth. But the TRC saw itself as a quasi-criminal proceeding, a
quasi-judicial proceeding. And, I think, like Nuremberg, it was a performance.
The real exchange took place at Codesa, and that was not an
exchange of amnesty for truth but amnesty in exchange for the dismantling of
political and juridical apartheid. That was the real exchange. In some ways,
the exchange was spelled out in the sunset clauses: broadly, the structure of
governance would be retained — courts, police, and so on — and including some
participation in governance itself, in return for reforms that would lead to
equality before the law.
So I’m interested in extracting Codesa, that process, from
the language of compromise and pragmatism. What is more durable there? What can
be translated into other situations of intractable political conflict,
situations that have led to mass violence? I’m interested in the alternatives
to the judicial process.
So the TRC used the Nuremberg model and substituted for real
trials in real courts, but also offered amnesty, a sort of salvation in
exchange for confession. In that respect it was more like a church than a
court. You say the ICC is also modelled on Nuremberg, but even more closely
because it can impose penalties on people convicted of crimes against humanity.
Nuremberg has been turned into a template for how to deal
with mass violence. But Nuremberg took place at the end of a war between
states; it was the product of victory on one side and defeat on the other. The
essence of South Africa’s situation was that it was a stalemate. Both sides
acknowledged that.
At Nuremberg, the logic of the victorious powers was that
victims and perpetrators must not share a common future. The endpoint of such
thinking, after Nuremberg, was of course the state of Israel — the victims must
have their own state.
For any settlement on the African continent, this logic
cannot work. Whites and blacks have to live in the same country in South
Africa. Hutu and Tutsi have to live in the same country in Rwanda. Of course
there are exceptions — Ethiopia and Eritrea, like Sudan and South Sudan,
separated. But these are exceptions. We are looking for a process that will
help to construct inclusive communities rather than separation. Wherever we
have tried the judicial model on this continent, a solution has evaded us.
Wherever we have had a modicum of a solution in Africa, the heart of it was a
political and not a judicial process.
Look at Mozambique: Renamo now sits in government. Compare
this to Uganda, where the LRA [Lord’s Resistance Army] is still viewed as
having committed acts of terror and so on, and the LRA leadership is hunted.
The Ugandan Parliament passed an amnesty Bill for the LRA, but the presidency,
in cahoots with the ICC, ignored that and now the LRA leadership is on the ICC “wanted”
list. This precludes a political solution.
You can’t have a winner-takes-all process in a divided
society.
So you’re saying the TRC was the performative extension of
the settlement reached at Codesa and, for all that, it did help to produce a political
solution in these conflicts, but the ICC is not doing that.
Codesa had a downside: concessions in terms of local
government, particularly, wouldn’t allow for redistribution without the consent
of a wealthy minority. That is a problem for the durability of an inclusive
political community. I agree with the view that perhaps Codesa could not have
dealt with those issues then but the TRC could have begun a conversation on it.
Yet the TRC defined victims as though no apartheid had ever
existed — simply as individuals whose bodily integrity had been violated. That
is to put apartheid on the same plane as any dictatorship anywhere in the
world. But apartheid affected the entire society, not just isolated
individuals. Its cutting edge was legislation that defined the whole population
into groups it called races, then it passed laws that enabled a minority and
disabled a majority.
What is common to the TRC and the ICC is that both ignore
the issues that led to the violence. But there’s no real way forward unless we
take on the issues. I believe we are dealing with cycles of violence and, when
it comes to cycles of violence such as go into the making of a civil war, each
side has a narrative of victimhood.
And the sides can change places. When I studied Rwanda, the
more I looked at the historical dimension the more I realised that the two
sides tended to change places. A perpetrator was a victim one day, became a
perpetrator the next day. This was not a stand-alone act of violence.
There is a difference between political violence and
criminal violence. Political violence has a constituency — it’s not just about
individual perpetrators. Political justice affects entire groups of people. The
TRC was only dealing with individual violators of human rights, understood in a
narrow way: his right over your person. It focused on those who broke the law
in this respect.
If it wanted to make itself more relevant to the future, the
TRC could have educated the white population, in particular, that although most
of them were not perpetrators they were beneficiaries. But then it would have
had to take the limelight away from torture and so on and refocus it on who
benefited — where you lived, which schools you went to, what jobs you could
compete for.
I attended the hearings in Cape Town where FW de Klerk
spoke. It was extraordinary because he apologised for apartheid and he spoke
about apartheid in the terms I’m describing it. But the TRC was only interested
in, “Did you give orders in this case, that case?” Likewise, the ICC has
reduced mass violence to this simplicity, where there are these few
perpetrators and more than 20 000 victims.
What about the situation in Kenya now, where the
president-elect is facing charges of inciting mass violence?
Kenya has prioritised the judicial process. Debate in Kenya
was whether perpetrators should go to court in Kenya or at the ICC. There was
unanimity that they should go to court.
Violence in Kenya is similar to that in Darfur because, on
the ground, you have the land question. On the one hand, there is a colonial
definition of tribal ownership, with an origin in colonial law — it belongs to
me “as a native”. The other is a market-based claim: that land belongs to
whoever holds the title to it.
This is a huge issue that confronts Kenyan society. Instead
of prioritising the issues that made the violence more than criminal, that
allowed people to set in motion violence in which thousands would die, they
have focused on a Band-Aid solution. But you could put all the perpetrators in
jail and that violence would restart.
Every society that has gone through colonisation has had to
ask these questions: Who belongs? Who doesn’t belong? At the root of political
violence is exclusion.
