Anger over Rhodes vindicates Mamdani

Nomalanga Mkhize, Business Day

IN 1998 eminent Ugandan scholar Mahmood Mamdani put forward the following challenge to his colleagues at the University of Cape Town (UCT): "The key question before us is: how to teach Africa in a postapartheid academy?" This was in response to the hostile resistance he received when, as professor of the Centre for African Studies, he devised a curriculum that put at its centre African scholarship that many UCT academics had either never heard of, or whose significance they did not understand, largely due to the isolation of South African universities under apartheid.

Professor Mahmood Mamdani debates children and conflict

An Extract from Mahmood Mamdani’s Seminal Book on Rwanda from Africa is a Country

Mahmood Mamdani, Africa is a Country

I visited Rwanda roughly a year after the genocide. On July 22, 1995, I went to Ntarama, about an hour and a half by car from Kigali, on a dirt road going south toward the Burundi border. We arrived at a village church, made of brick and covered with iron sheets. Outside there was a wood and bamboo rack, bearing skulls. On the ground were assorted bones, collected and pressed together inside sacks, but sticking out of their torn cloth. The guard explained that the bones had been gathered from the neighborhood. A veteran of similar sites in the Luwero Triangle in Uganda roughly a decade ago, I felt a sense of déjá vu. Even if the numbers of skulls and sacks were greater in quantity than I had ever seen at any one site, I was not new to witnessing the artifacts of political violence.

The Marikana Massacre: South Africa’s Post-Apartheid Dissensus

The Marikana Massacre: South Africa’s Post-Apartheid Dissensus by TigersEye99

The Future of Human Rights-Beyond Nuremberg with Mahmood Mamdani

Mahmood Mamdani - Define & Rule: Native as Political Identity

Mahmood Mamdani - DEFINE AND RULE: Native as Political Identity from CenterforPlaceCulturePolitics on Vimeo.

The Logic of Nuremberg

Mahmood Mamdani, London Review of Books

In March, General Bosco Ntaganda, the ‘Terminator’, former chief of military operations for the Union of Congolese Patriots (UPC), wanted for war crimes and crimes against humanity, voluntarily surrendered himself at the US embassy in Kigali and was flown to the headquarters of the International Criminal Court at The Hague. The chargesheet included accusations of murder, rape, sexual slavery, persecution and pillage, offences documented in detail by Human Rights Watch over the last ten years. Ntaganda’s trial, scheduled for next year, will follow that of Thomas Lubanga, the UPC’s president, who was convicted in 2012. There seems to be no question about the justice of the proceedings. At the same time, however, the UN Security Council has been pursuing a strategy of armed intervention in eastern Congo, using troops from South Africa and Tanzania, against the rebel groups Ntaganda and others commanded. Both initiatives – the prosecution of rebel leaders for war crimes and military operations against their personnel – are taking place when peace talks between government and rebels are well underway. This, then, is a co-ordinated military and judicial solution for what is also, and fundamentally, a political problem. Inevitably with such solutions, the winners take all.

In Conversation with Mahmood Mamdani

by Bhakti Shringarpure, Warscapes

It is in his bittersweet and touching book on the Asian expulsion from Uganda that one can trace the beginnings of author and intellectual Mahmood Mamdani’s world-view. He captures the terrifying experience of families being uprooted from ancestral homes and businesses, their scramble to leave amidst looting and violence and, most poignantly, the racism and hostility experienced during their resettlement period in Britain. As his flight takes off for London, he remembers seeing the places of childhood fade from view, and confesses that the tragedy taught him a simple, political lesson: “Unless you belong to the class that rules, a good argument will never be enough to safeguard your interests.”

Making Sense of Political Violence in Postcolonial Africa

Making Sense of Political Violence in Postcolonial Africa by TigersEye99

Legal Band-Aid not for deep wounds

Mahmood Mamdani interviewed by Shaun de Waal, Mail & Guardian

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.

Nation state: Nyerere's legacy

Mahmood Mamdani

by Mahmood Mamdani, Mail & Gaurdian

Assessments of Julius Nyerere, Tanzania’s first president, are conventionally focused on his quest for ujamaa, a just social order based on community solidarity. Whereas supporters hailed ujamaa as a creative adjustment of socialist thought to local realities, critics contemptuously dismissed it as a romantic and unscientific endeavour.

Nyerere’s concern with social justice needs to be understood in the context of his overriding commitment to building a nation state. In his farewell address to the Tanzanian Parliament on July 29 1985, Nyerere recalled: “The single most important task, which I set out in my inaugural address in December 1962, was that of building a united nation on the basis of human equality and dignity.”

Public Lecture: Mahmood Mamdani on the Arab Spring

Settler Colonialism: Then and Now, A lecture by Mahmood Mamdani

What is a tribe?

by Mahmood Mamdani, London Review of Books

A new form of colonialism was born in the second half of the 19th century, largely in response to the Indian Mutiny of 1857. Of its many theorists by far the most influential was Henry Maine, a brilliant historian of jurisprudence, barrister, journalist, colonial civil servant and eventually master of Trinity Hall, Cambridge. Maine made an eloquent case for the historicity and agency of the colonised, as part of an attempt to reconstitute the colonial project on a more durable basis. In doing so, he distinguished the West from the non-West, universal civilisation from local custom and, crucially, the settler from the native, thereby laying the groundwork for a theory of nativism. If the settler was modern, the native was not; if the settler was defined by history, the native was defined by geography; if modern polities were defined by legislation and sanction, those of the native were defined by habitual observance.

The state, private sector and market failures: A response to Prof Joseph Stiglitz

by Mahmood Mamdani, Pambazuka

Your Excellency, Mr. President; the Chair, the Honorable Minister of Finance; the Honorable Governor of the Bank of Uganda and the Honorable Deputy Governor, Bank of Uganda,

I assume that the Bank of Uganda has asked me to be a discussant hoping I would raise questions they do not feel comfortable raising. I will take a cue from them and ask Professor Stiglitz questions hoping he will give responses that I do not quite feel comfortable giving.

Armed struggle: Mamdani tells politicians to learn from Luwero

By Andrew Mwenda and Mubatsi A. Habati, The Independent

Mahmood Mamdani

Leading political philosopher Mahmood Mamdani says the government’s ban on the political pressure group Activists for Change (A4C) is naïve and likely to drive opposition underground. He spoke to The Independent’s Andrew Mwenda and Mubatsi A. Habati.

Mahmood Mamdani, "State Formation and Conflict" (2007)

The Darfur diversion: “Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics and the War on Terror”

Muhammad Idrees Ahmad The Electronic Intifada 8 June 2009

In Errol Morris’s 2004 film The Fog of War, former US Defense Secretary Robert McNamara recalls General Curtis LeMay, the architect of the fire-bombings of Japan during World War II, saying that “if we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.” LeMay was merely articulating an unacknowledged truism of international relations: power bestows, among other things, the right to label. So it is that mass slaughter perpetrated by the big powers, from Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan, is normalized through labels such as “counterinsurgency,” “pacification” and “war on terror,” while similar acts carried out by states out of favor result in the severest of charges. It is this politics of naming that is the subject of Mahmood Mamdani’s explosive new book, Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics and the War on Terror.

African Studies in Social Movements and Democracy

Edited by Mahmood Mamdani, Ernest Wamba-dia-Wamba

Trade unions, burial societies, students, religious and gender movements, riots and mafias. Not to mention class. The kaleidoscope of African social movements is complex and broad. But their histories have strong common threads - the experience of past oppression and the constant struggle for an identity that will encompass survival. How have they contributed to the nature of African civil society and the formation of democracy? The chapters are a living dialogue on the interpretation of these movements, and a critical and analytical appraisal of the African intellectual heritage itself. The book brings together a vast array of writers and topics from all over Africa - from bread riots in Tunisia, Communist Parties in Sudan, the "Kaduna Mafia" in Nigeria, burial societies in Zimbabwe, and the working class in Algeria.

Academic Freedom in Africa

Edited by Mahmood Mamdani

Eighteen of Africa's most distinguished scholars have contributed to this major and timely work, including Claude Ake, Archie Mafeje, Ali Mazrui, Issa Shivji and Joseph Ki-Zerbo. As a first step towards greater consideration of the nature of the research environment in Africa and to reflect on the social and material context of research as an intellectual activity, CODESRIA co-organised a major conference on academic freedom and research in Africa in Kampala in 1990. A selection of the conference papers are contained in this volume. The papers cover the relationship of capital and the state to academic freedom, the historical processes which have shaped intellectuals in Africa, issue of autonomy and democracy and the question of funding relationships, and the difficulty of alliances that question the right to independence.