Mamdani, Mahmood :

Mahmood Mamdani received his Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University and is the founding Director of the Centre for Basic Research in Kampala. A Fellow of the African Academy of Sciences, he is the author of The Myth of Population Control and Politics and Class Formation in Uganda.

"This theoretically adventurous work by a prominent Ugandan academic attempts to shift away from current paradigms constructed around themes of ethnic identity and the role of civil society. . . . This is an original book that offers a new angle of vision and is likely to stir up lively debate."

--Foreign Affairs

Submitted by the Publisher, April, 2002

In analyzing the obstacles to democratization in post- independence Africa, Mahmood Mamdani offers a bold, insightful account of colonialism's legacy--a bifurcated power that mediated racial domination through tribally organized local authorities, reproducing racial identity in citizens and ethnic identity in subjects. Many writers have understood colonial rule as either "direct" (French) or "indirect" (British), with a third variant--apartheid--as exceptional. This benign terminology, Mamdani shows, masks the fact that these were actually variants of a despotism. While direct rule denied rights to subjects on racial grounds, indirect rule incorporated them into a "customary" mode of rule, with state-appointed Native Authorities defining custom. By tapping authoritarian possibilities in culture, and by giving culture an authoritarian bent, indirect rule (decentralized despotism) set the pace for Africa; the French followed suit by changing from direct to indirect administration, while apartheid emerged relatively later. Apartheid, Mamdani shows, was actually the generic form of the colonial state in Africa.

Through case studies of rural (Uganda) and urban (South Africa) resistance movements, we learn how these institutional features fragment resistance and how states tend to play off reform in one sector against repression in the other. Reforming a power that institutionally enforces tension between town and country, and between ethnicities, is the key challenge for anyone interested in democratic reform in Africa.

Acknowledgments

I Introduction: Thinking through Africa's Impasse

Pt. I The Structure of Power

II Decentralized Despotism
III Indirect Rule: The Politics of Decentralized Despotism
IV Customary Law: The Theory of Decentralized Despotism
V The Native Authority and the Free Peasantry

Pt. II The Anatomy of Resistance

VI The Other Face of Tribalism: Peasant Movements in Equatorial Africa
VII The Rural in the Urban: Migrant Workers in South Africa
VIII Conclusion: Linking the Urban and the Rural

Notes
Index