Book Review

Although it is still relatively new, Mahmood Mamdani's Citizen and Subject has already been the subject of considerable attention and controversy among Africanist scholars. The African Studies Association has selected it as a co-recipient of the 1997 Herskovitz prize as one of the outstanding works on Africa published during the previous year. At the same time many historians of Africa (including the present reviewer) find both Mamdani's narrative and his analysis to be deeply flawed. The appeal and the problem of this work both center around the same issue: the attempt by Mamdani to construct a model of colonialism and its consequences that embraces both tropical Africa and South Africa. In the immediate aftermath of South Africa's dramatic shift from Apartheid to majority rule, such a comparison would seem to infuse the discouraging picture of recent tropical African development with new energy while also providing Southern African scholars with a basis for overcoming their previous intellectual isolation from the rest of the continent.	1
The central point of Mamdani's argument is implied in his title: throughout colonial Africa majority rural populations were governed through indigenous chiefs and "customary law" under a regime of "decentralized despotism." As a result they were ill prepared to participate as citizens in the modern states that have succeeded colonialism. The canonical version of such colonialism is the British system of indirect rule, formally employed only in tropical Africa but echoed both in the segregationist policies of rural South Africa and in the less explicit practices of other European powers in tropical Africa. Because such colonialism was both despotic and decentralized, Mamdani argues that it created only two possibilities for postcolonial African governments: a conservative maintenance of decentralization through either the same hierarchy of chiefs or a "noncoercive clientalism;" or, alternatively, a radical effort at development through "centralized despotism."	2
Mamdani's model derives mainly from tropical Africa, where indirect rule was the central theme of political discourse in the colonial era and where it is also possible to pass judgment upon postcolonial regimes. However, an equal portion of his book is devoted to South Africa (and sometimes to its satellite states such as Swaziland, whose status in the argument is ambiguous). Much of the discussion here, such as the analysis of labor union politics, has limited parallels in tropical Africa (and even these are not explored). Elsewhere, Mamdani draws the obvious analogies between the "Bantustan" policies of South Africa and indirect rule (labeled "non-racial apartheid"). The most ambitious comparative effort relates to the black-on-black political violence that characterized the decade or so preceding South Africa's democratic elections of 1994 and is usually blamed on a combination of white government manipulation and the political ambitions of the Zulu Inkatha movement. Mamdani sees these events more as a result of migrant labor communities ("The Rural in the Urban") being excluded from the urban politics of the ANC and its allied labor unions and civic associations. The positive model advocated here for all African politics is some amalgam of the energies displayed in rural movements of protest against local oppression and the urban vision of a fully integrated national society.	3
While it is difficult to quarrel with Mamdani's goals and he even provides occasional insights of some value, the book as a whole seems unconvincing when it is most coherent and incoherent when it is convincing. Mamdani's account of South Africa is sometimes based on faulty evidence and (as in the urban violence argument cited above) occasionally comes to controversial conclusions, but on the whole it follows the standard historiography. On tropical Africa, however (and ironically, since Mamdani has just moved from his native Uganda to the University of Cape Town), he is sometimes wildly out of line.	4
Mamdani pays little systematic attention to economic issues and insists that his "locus of analysis has been less the mode of accumulation than the mode of domination" (294). But underlying his entire comparison and particularly his treatment of tropical Africa is an assumption of comparable motives for domination. In South Africa these motives derive from a very large and permanent white population seeking control over a globally powerful set of mining enterprises that, by the 1940s, had engendered an advanced local industrial economy. In tropical Africa there were few (usually no) white settlers and economies were mainly restricted to agricultural exports of little significance to the outside world. Mamdani overcomes this gap by modeling all these tropical economies on the production of cotton and insisting several times that African cotton was critical to the industrial world because of shortages caused by the American Civil War, which ended twenty years before the colonial "Scramble for Africa." (Mamdani may be confusing the Civil War with the boll weevil infestations in the southern U.S., which occurred shortly after the Scramble and inspired various European efforts to develop African cotton production but produced little lasting demand for the resulting crops.)	5
Given the marginal economic situation of tropical African colonies (and their successor states) the motives for managing them were highly conservative: maintaining control (as a matter of national prestige and potential future value) while minimizing both financial and political costs (including an emphasis on export of crops such as cocoa, coffee, and palm oil, all more profitable and less onerous than cotton). While there were certainly many instances of abusive coercion, such as those cited by Mamdani, the aim (and usual result) of both indirect rule and the peasant agriculture that accompanied it was one of assuring enough revenue to cover the costs of running the colonial system itself while creating as little disturbance as possible within local society. Such regimes produced neither the suffering nor the wealth of South Africa. Morever, despite Mamdani's denunciation of the "civil society" arguments currently fashionable in tropical African political studies, his own rural-urban dichotomy turns out to be little more than a variant of the same paradigm, and one far more applicable to South than to tropical Africa, where urban communities have always maintained a predominantly migrant character.	6
Of greatest interest to readers of Law and History Review is Mamdani's discussion of codified "customary law" as an instrument of colonial rule. This was a practice shared in the rural areas of both South and tropical Africa and Mamdani follows standard scholarship in stressing the colonial nature of such an "invention of tradition." He also reproduces for us the colonial-era debates about the acceptability of removing rural African "subjects" from the jurisdiction of metropolitan law and entrusting the administration of its alternative to appointed chiefs and their bureaucratic European supervisors. But Mamdani overestimates the rigidity of neo-customary legal regimes (ignoring several recent studies of their operation) and also exaggerates (for tropical Africa) their role in inhibiting access to land by either local or immigrant African cultivators.	7
If this book stimulates further comparisons of either colonial or postcolonial development in tropical and South Africa, it will have served a useful purpose. However, the successful execution of such projects will require more careful historical research and more rigorous analysis than is evident here.	8
Ralph A. Austen University of Chicago

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