DEFINE AND RULE, native as political identity, W.E.B. du Bois Lectures

154pp., paperback, Wits University Press, Johannesburg, 2013

ISBN: 9781868147427

In this series of lectures Mahmood Mamdani focuses on the turn in late nineteenth-century colonial statecraft when Britain introduced a new idea of governance, as the definition and management of difference, how lines were drawn between settler and native as distinct political identities, and between natives according to tribe.

Includes three lectures:

"Nativism: The theory, Sir Henry Maine and the post-1857 crisis of empire"

"Nativism: The practice"

"Beyond Settlers nd Natives: The theory and practice of decolonisation".

"Eminent Ugandan scholar and African intellectual, Mahmood Mamdani argues that Mwalimu Julius Nyerere taught us both to respect and manage our national and regional divides, but at the same time, to promote the Pan-African objective of the unity of all Africans, at all times avoiding the deadly and false trap, cultivated during the colonial years, that as Africans we are different tribes and races with mutually exclusive interests." Thabo Mbeki, former president of the Republic of South Africa

"During the nearly two decades since his pathbreaking Citizen and Subject, Mahmood Mamdani has continued to expand our understanding of the relationship between contemporary politics and our colonial pasts. Now, in Define and Rule, he distils with magisterial clarity his reflections on how political thought and law converged in the colonial imaginary to create a technology of rule that spanned South East Asia, India and most of Africa. He shows how the colonial past is alive in the present, as popular politics remains fractured by the question of who is a citizen, of who can rightfully belong. With an astute eye cast to the horizon, he demonstrates that the colonial past need not be the straitjacket of our future. In his inimitable way, Mamdani makes our postcolonial predicaments thinkable – and therefore changeable. Original and always provocative, in this book, Mamdani gives us the intellectual co-ordinates with which to chart a way toward a truly decolonized political future." Suren Pillay, Center for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape

Mahmood Mamdani is Herbert Lehman Professor of Government and Professor of Anthropology and Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University. He was Director of the Makerere Institute of Social Research in Uganda from 2010 to 2022. His books include Neither Settler nor Native, Citizen and Subject, When Victims Become Killers, and Good Muslim, Bad Muslim.