Date: Tue, 17 Jul 2001 07:55:21 -0500
Subject: Mamdani on colonial roots of citizenship


http://www.uct.ac.za/general/inaug/mamdani.htm

              U N I V E R S I T Y  O F   C A P E  T O W N

              Inaugural Lecture Series

      When does a Settler become a Native?

      Reflections of the Colonial Roots of Citizenship
      in Equatorial and South Africa

      Professor M Mamdani        13 May 1998

                                CONTENTS
        1. Introduction
        2. Post-Independent Reform
        3. The Settler and the Native
        4. When does a Settler become a Native
        5. Hutu and Tutsi
        6. Citizenship in Contemporary South Africa
        7. The Intellectual Challenge
        8. A Dedication

                              INTRODUCTION

Settlers are made by conquest, not just by immigration. Settlers are
kept settlers by a form of the state that makes a distinction -
particularly juridical - between conquerers and conquered, settlers and
natives, and makes it the basis of other distinctions that tend to
buttress the conquerers and isolate the conquered, politically. However
fictitious these distinctions may appear historically, they become real
political facts for they are embodied in real political institutions.

The settler-native question is a political question. It is also a historical
question. Settlers and natives belong together. You cannot have one
without the other, for it is the relationship between them that makes one
a settler and the other a native. To do away with one, you have to do
away with the other.

My talk is going to focus on notions of citizenship in equatorial Africa,
notions we have inherited from the colonial period and failed to redefine
and reform adequately. I will argue that the form of the state we inherited
from colonialism has written into it a distinction between ‘native’ and
‘settler,’ and that each political identity has become the basis of a
different type of citizenship in the period after independence.

My starting point will be an argument culled from my recent book,
Citizen and Subject. The colonial state in equatorial Africa recognized
two types of political identities: civic and ethnic. Civic Identity was the
identity of the citizen. It was racially defined. Citizen’s rights, civil and
sometimes political, were limited to those considered civilized. The
rights of the civilized were written into civil law and were enforced by the
central state. The language of the central state was the language of
rights. Racism was the original sin of civil society in colonial Africa; civic
rights were the rights of the settler.

The population of subjects was excluded from this regime of rights.
Natives were said to belong, not to any civic space, but to an ethnic
space. The native identity was not defined by where he or she was born
or lived, but by his or her ancestoral area. That area, in turn, was
defined ethnically: you belonged to your ethnic area. You were obliged
to follow the customs of your ethnic group. Your rights and obligations
were defined by your custom, and a Native Authority, whose seat was
the local state, enforced that custom as a ‘customary’ law. The local
state spoke the language of culture, not rights.

                POST-INDEPENDENCE REFORM

In the dominant varient of the post-colonial state, the distinction
between citizen and subject was turned into two types of citizenship,
civic and ethnic. Civic citizenship, hitherto the settler’s prerogative,
ceased to be exclusive. Both native and settler were now recognized as
citizens of the central state. The native’s identity, however, became the
basis of an exclusive right. Only the native was recognized as
possessing an ethnic citizenship. The settler had no ‘customary’ home,
no ‘customary’ authority, and no ‘customary’ rights. Most importantly,
there was no land to which the poor amongst the settlers could have a
‘customary’ right. The ‘customary’ right only belonged to the native, to
those defined as ‘indigenous’ citizens, not to settlers defined as ‘non-
indigenous.’

We need to recognize a class question here. For poor people, ethnic
citizenship was far more important than civic citizenship, for one reason:
it was the only way of getting access to land. The rich could buy land
anywhere. But if you were poor, one who could not afford to buy land in
the first place, you could still claim land ‘customarily’, in your ‘home’
area, from your ‘customary’ chief, as a ‘customary’ right, under
‘customary’ law. So the poor came to have a better sense of ethnic
belonging, of who belonged and who didn’t, than did the rich. Also, this
ethnic sense got sharper whenever livelihood - especially access to land
- got more difficult.

The world had turned upside down. But it had not changed, at least not
fundamentally. The big change was that civic space was de-racialized,
so that civic rights became universal. Everyone, whether native or
settler, was recognized as a civic citizen. But the distinction between
the civic and the ethnic remained, since only the native was
acknowledged as an ethnic citizen. There was also a corresponding
distinction between civic and ethnic rights. Civic rights continued to be
defined as individual rights in the civil and political sphere. In contrast,
customary rights were defined as a group right, one you accessed by
virtue of belonging to an ethnic group. The domain of customary rights
was not as much civil and political, as it was cultural and economic.
While individual rights were acknowledged as universal, only the native
was supposed to have group rights. The continuity lay in the fact that
the settler-native distinction continued to be written into the structure of
the post-colonial state and the definition of rights.

                  THE SETTLER AND THE NATIVE

Settlers were without ethnic homes. They were, by definition, rootless,
foot-loose, not tied to any specific territory, always trekking. They were
said to come from somewhere, but from nowhere in particular. Neither
did they seem destined for anywhere in particular.

The proto-type settlers were, of course, the whites. Of metropolitan
origin, they were the core citizens of the colonial state. But they were
not its only citizens. There were others, even if of second-class status,
one lacking in all the rights. There were the Asians, who came from
colonies outside Africa. Then there were the Arabs, who came from both
within and from outside Africa. And, finally, there were the Tutsi, who
came wholly from within Africa, whose migration had preceded the
colonial era by centuries, but who were nonetheless turned into settlers
by the colonial state, which claimed that they were a race apart, the
Hamitic race. This meant that no matter where they were, the Tutsi
were always said to come from elsewhere in Africa, and no-one quite
knew from where. The case of the Asian and the Arab, but particularly
that of the Tutsi, shows that you didn’t have to be white to be a settler.

The word for the white settler in Kiswahili is mzungu. Mzungu, however,
does not literally mean a white person. It simply means a restless
person, a person who will not stay in one place, a person full of
anxieties. It comes from the verb kuzunguka. Hawa wana zunguka kwa
nini? Why are these people always so restless? The Tutsi, the Arabs,
the Asians, the Whites, these then were different examples of what I will
call the Settler Proper.

In the Great Lakes region, the proto-type settler was the Tutsi, and the
proto-type native the Hutu. When colonialism put forward the Hamitic
hypothesis and defined the Tutsi as a race, and not an ethnic group -
like the Asian or the Arab - that definition was more political than
biological. It meant that the Tutsi never had a ‘customary’ home like real
ethnic groups were supposed to have, even if they constituted the
Authority of a Native Area.

But the homeless peoples were not the only settlers. There was also
another category of settlers, those away from home, Native Settlers,
even if this designation should sound contradictory. From the point-of-
view of this kind of state, every native outside of his or her own home
area was a settler of sorts, someone considered non-indigenous -
precisely because that person had an ethnic home elsewhere, even if
within the same country. The distinction between the indigenous and
the non-indigenous had ceased to be racialized; it was ethnicized.
Every ethnic area made the distinction between those who belonged
and those who didn’t, between ethnic citizens and ethnic strangers.

Take an example. In Congo, in 1992, 200 000 Baluba were expelled
from Shaba to Kasaii as ‘non-indigenous.’ Many died along the way.
The ethnic clashes in Nigeria around the civil war, in the Rift Valley in
Kenya and in Kivu Province in eastern Congo contemporarily, all turn
around claims to ethnic citizenship, and thereby to ‘customary’ land for
the ethnic group as its home area. This is the stuff of one type of ethnic
conflict throughout the region. The Mobutist state even had a name for
it: it was called geo-politics.

This kind of ethnic conflict is structurally embedded. It is embedded in
the institutional setup, and is generated as a contradiction between
economic development and the nature of citizenship. The more
commodity production expands, the more labour is set into motion, and
the more the proportion of the non-indigenous - of migrant labour and
migrant peasants who have the political and civil rights of a civic citizen
but not the social and cultural rights of an ethnic citizen - increases, the
more ethnic tension is generated.

Here, then, is the political dilemma: every time the economy sets
people into motion, a new group of native settlers comes into being.

               WHEN DOES A SETTLER BECOME A NATIVE?

So, when does a settler become a native? There is no single answer to
this question, for the answer depends on whether your vantage point is
the civic or the ethnic. From the point of view of civic citizenship, it is
merely a matter of time. That time period comes up for discussion every
time citizenship is debated. And that time period is specified in
citizenship clauses in most constitutions. The 1981 Citizenship Law in
former Zaire, for example, said that anyone who had an ancestor born
before 1885 in the territory that came to be demarcated as Congo with
colonial rule would be considered a citizen of the state. Mind you,
citizen here meant only civic citizen. This provision of the 1981 law was
confirmed by the 1991 National Conference.

>From the point of view of ethnic citizenship, however, the answer is:
NEVER. So long as the distinction between settler and native is written
into the structure of the state, the settler can become a citizen, but not
a native. To say that is to say that the settler can be a member of the
civic space, now de-racialized, but not the customary space, still
ethnicized. On this point, at least, there was agreement between power
and resistance in Mobutu’s Zaire. All agreed that settlers - the
Banyamulenge, the Banyamasisi - must be kept out of the ethnic
space. When a colleague and a friend, Jacques Depelchen and I visited
Kivu Province on behalf of CODESRIA last year, several organized
groups in civil society pointed out to us the ‘subversive’ tendency of
settlers to mask their ‘real’ identity by taking on territorial identities: so
that the Tutsi appear in one place as Banyamulenge (those of the
location called Mulenge), and in another as Banyamusisi (those of the
location called Musisi). This is how the settler appears from the point of
view of the native, always trekking.

The ‘indigenous’ demand for a differentiated citizenship, one that makes
a clear distinction between native and settler, the indigenous and the
non-indigenous, is usually constituted as a demand of the majority; in
other words, it is constituted as a democratic demand. It does not have
to be promulgated as the decree of an unrepresentative, undemocratic
government. When Habyarimana backed the creation of an organisation
called Maghrivi in Goma, Ruchuru and Musisi in Kivu Province in the
early 1980s, he made two demands in return for his material and
political support: one, that all Tutsi be defined as non-indigenous, no
matter where they lived; and two, that all questions of citizenship be
settled democratically, by majority vote.

So, what is the solution?

Is it to turn the world upside down again? As seemed to be the first
impulse of the post-Mobutu state in the new Democratic Congo, under
Rwandese pressure, an impulse to recognize all immigrants as
‘natives,’ thereby signalling that they too can have their own ‘Native
Authority,’ complete with its customary ethnic homeland, even if that be
at the expense of an existing Native Authority, which is bound to be
since the boundaries of Congo are not about to be expanded? If one
looks at developments in contemporary Kivu Province in eastern Congo,
is not the unintended consequence of such a solution to intensify the
conflict between Native and Settler, between two kinds of citizens, the
indigenous and the non-indigenous?

Or should we move to a liberal human rights solution, on the basis of a
partial reform, one which reinforces individual civic rights while eroding
group ethnic rights, but without totally undercutting these, and thus
without doing away with the distinction between the civil and the
customary, institutionally underpinned by two different types of
authorities, civic and ethnic? This has been the South African solution
to date. But what if this proclamation of inviolable rights of the individual
should come to be seen as a way of strengthening settlers’ rights,
thereby provoking opposition from the native majority? In that case,
ironically, will not the regime of individual rights - not only divorced from
majority rule but in the teeth of majority opposition - be realized only by
an enlightened dictatorship, whether the result of an internal dynamic, or
a foreign occupation, or some mix?

Or is there a third solution, a solution other than the first which hopes to
turn settlers into natives, and the second which hopes to strengthen the
regime of individual rights and thereby fortify settlers against
encroaching native demands? Why not explore a third solution which
would seek to reform the very structure of the state which has
institutionally underwritten the distinction between the indigenous and
the non-indigenous, the Settler and the Native, into the division between
the civic and the customary? To focus on this type of solution is to join
the question - which rights - to another: whose rights?

I will try and pursue this third type of option. I want to suggest that it is
misleading to think of history or culture as some sort of a closure by
itself. Historical and cultural constraints become real when written into
our institutions, which is why to free us of that constraint requires
institutional reform. I want to suggest that we explore the creative side
of politics. I will try and do this by making a distinction between two
types of identities, cultural and political, between those politically
enforced and those not, to make my point. I will illustrate the point with
the case of the Hutu and the Tutsi.

                       HUTU AND TUTSI

Anyone who wishes to understand contemporary Rwanda would do well
to shed the Hamitic hypothesis and the history built around it by making
at least two distinctions. The first is that between migration and
conquest. The migration of Tutsi into the Great Lakes region went on for
centuries before the establishment of the state of Rwanda after 1500.
The migration was peaceful, and its context was peaceful coexistence
between pastoralists and agriculturalists. In contrast, the state of
Rwanda fortified over nearly four centuries a system of vassalage
between pastoralists and agriculturalists, the Tutsi and the Hutu. The
second distinction is between two different periods of state formation,
first the four centuries preceding colonial rule and second the nearly half
century of Belgian colonialism, and the relation that each forged
between state and society on the one hand, and the Hutu and the Tutsi
on the other. Anyone who takes into account this second distinction
would also recognize that the Hamitic hypothesis did not stop at being
a racist construct, but actually became the ideological justification of
political institutions that distinguished between the Tutsi as a race and
the Hutu as an ethnic group. Let me elaborate.

No two conflicting groups in the Great Lakes region have a longer and
more comprehensive history of inter-marriage than do the Hutu and the
Tutsi. Inter-marriage between the Hutu and the Tutsi has been going on
for centuries, at least three. The extent of that inter-marriage has been
so large that it would not be an exaggeration to suppose that a half or
more of the population in Rwanda is a product of such inter-marriage.
And yet, everyone of these people is either a Hutu or a Tutsi. No-one
claims to be both; there are no Hutsis!

This uni-dimensional social identity could not be reproduced without
patriarchical institutions which passed social identity exclusively
through the line of the father. You inherit your father’s identity. Only
when the line of the father is highlighted and that of the mother obscured
can children be born as purely Hutu or Tutsi as were their fathers.

And yet, that you were born either Hutu or Tutsi did not mean that you
could not change from Hutu to Tutsi, or Tutsi to Hutu - under definitely
prescribed circumstances - during your lifetime. In pre-German and pre-
Belgian controlled Rwanda, Tutsi was an identity of wealth and of power.
Hutu signified a lack of both. A Hutu with means could go through a
social ritual called Kwihutura. It was a ritual by which a Hutu shed his
Hutuness. Your children could now marry Tutsi and their children would
be considered Tutsi. Likewise, a Tutsi family without means may find it
difficult to find a Tutsi spouse for their off-spring. These children would
then have no choice but to marry Hutu. While the social space between
Hutu and Tutsi was vast, with Tutsi as power and Hutu as subject, it
was a space that some could and did negotiate, either through
opportunity that came with enrichment or through compulsion that was
a consequence of impoverishment.

With the colonial reforms of the 1920s, these identities were written and
frozen into law. Every individual was issued an identity pass that
classified him or her as Hutu or Tutsi. These identities were no longer
just socially acknowledged, reproduced or negotiated, as the case may
be; they were politically enforced. Tutsi was no longer an identity that
signified access and proximity to power and wealth, and Hutu a lack of
it. Tutsi now became an identity linked much more with power than
wealth; in other words, to be a Tutsi was not always to be rich. At the
same time, Hutu came to be a subject identity: whether you were with
or without wealth, so long as you were Hutu, you were a subject. With
the end of Kwihutura, the ritual shedding of Hutu status by the few Hutu
who managed to acquire wealth, there could develop a Hutu counter-
elite for the first time since the creation of Rwanda kingdom. Not
surprisingly, this counter-elite became a vehicle for a radical Hutu
consciousness, turning Hutuness from a mark of servitude to a badge of
pride, demanding Hutu Power. It is that demand which fuelled the set of
events that have come to be known as the ‘social’ revolution of 1959.

Rwanda was like a half-way house between direct and indirect rule:
while its subject population was packaged into separate Native
Authorities, and these enforced a customary law, neither the Authority
nor the law they enforced could be seen as an instance of rule by one’s
own, a claim that was made as a matter of course by indirect rule
authorities elsewhere. The result was that while Native Authorities
everywhere else could be turned into so many separate ethnic
enclosures, this could not be in Rwanda where every Native Area
appeared as more or less equally Hutu and every Native Authority
equally Tutsi, like a creamy layer spread thin on the Hutu majority. The
relationship between the Tutsi chiefs in the Native Authority and the
predominantly Hutu peasantry was much more characteristic of direct
than indirect rule.

And yet, let us not forget that both Hutu and Tutsi were colonized
subjects. Both had a victim consciousness. The Tutsi were defined as a
race, but they were without civic rights. They were victims in the civic
sphere. The anti-colonial radical nationalists of Rwanda were invariably
Tutsi who had developed a radical insurgent race consciousness. The
Hutu, in contrast, were defined as an ethnic group under Tutsi chiefs in
Native Authorities. They were victims in the ethnic sphere. Their struggle
against Tutsi chiefs was branded tribalism, not nationalism. Both
struggles, the nationalist and the tribalist, had a democratic component.
And yet, neither could be embraced uncritically. Both needed to be
problematized.

The 1959 ‘social revolution’ was a peasant jacquerie that would have
remained a rebellion, unable to attain power, had it not been for the
Belgian power shifting allies on the eve of colonial rule. The revolution
was preoccupied with one question: Justice. It was determined that
every institution must reflect the identity of the Hutu majority in society.
The first demand of Hutu Power was that the occupants of educational
institutions and the holders of state employment must be predominantly
Hutu, as predominantly as was the population of Rwanda. They
demanded what is now called ‘affirmative action’ to stamp every
institution with a majority character. And they demanded eternal
vigilance to keep it so. Thus the 1972 coup d’etat by which the military
regime of Habyarimana replaced the civilian presidency of Kayibanda
was baptized a ‘cultural’ revolution, which was triggered by Hutu
vigilante mobs in the university and secondary schools, intent on
uncovering ‘cheaters’, i.e., Tutsi children of ‘mixed’ marriages who were
posing as Hutu.

The Tutsi who have come to power after the 1994 genocide share one
thing with the Hutu revolutionaries of 1959. Both see themselves as
revolutionaries. Both have vowed never to forget the past. And both are
determined that the struggle must never end: A Lutta Continua! The
irony is that, determined to make history, both have turned into
prisoners of that same history. For every turn in the ongoing cycle that
appears as sweet justice to one, appears to the other as the cruel face
of revenge. One is compelled to ask: Are not the worst perpetrators
often those with the mindset of a victim?

The Tutsi is a proto-type settler, and the Hutu a proto-type native. After
1994, the Tutsi wants justice above all else, and the Hutu democracy
above all else. The minority fears democracy. The majority fears justice.
The minority fears that democracy is a mask for finishing an unfinished
genocide. The majority fears the demand for justice is a minority ploy to
usurp power forever.

When does the pursuit of justice turn into revenge? I shall propose two
answers to this question. The simple answer will be: when justice is
denied. The more complex answer, the one that our journey through
Rwandese history suggests, is: when the quest for justice turns into a
permanent preoccupation, into a vendetta, into a self-righteous settling
of scores that knows no bounds.

What can be acceptable boundaries for the pursuit of justice? Life itself.
The agreement to live as part of a political community within the same
state, the community of those willing to live together under a single
political roof, and thereby to affirm that it is better to live with one’s
political enemies than to die with them. This is why, in my view, the
question of citizenship becomes so important.

I would like to take this discussion as a backdrop against which to
make observations about citizenship in contemporary South Africa.

             CITIZENSHIP IN CONTEMPORARY SOUTH AFRICA

The South African transition has a double significance from a
continental point of view. For the first time in the history of African
decolonization, a settler minority has relinquished exclusive political
power without an outright political defeat. I am not arguing that this
minority has given up its interests, only that it has consented to
exploring ways of defending these interests other than a monopoly over
political power and the rights of citizenship. In doing so, I believe it has
established - in native eyes - a political and moral claim to citizenship in
a post-apartheid order.

Secondly, in relinquishing the demand for power-sharing and accepting
a post-apartheid political order predicated on majority rule, the settler
minority has recognized that the majoritarian character of the native
population is a fact of political significance. I suggest to you that this
change is of epochal significance for it has set the political trajectory of
the African continent on a course radically different from that of the
Americas. The Americas is the continent of settler independence. The
South African transition means that nowhere on this continent has a
settler minority succeeded in declaring and sustaining the
independence of a settler colony.

The fact that both settler and native are citizens in a post-apartheid
order does not mean that this citizenship is common or equal. From
this point of view, the 1994 compromise has brought South Africa in line
with other equatorial African countries: while civic citizenship is
deracialized; ethnic citizenship remains unreformed. Faced with a
political order that recognizes majority rule but is not based on a single
and equal citizenship, the settler minority has responded with two
sharply different political initiatives, one identified with the mainly
English liberal mainstream, the other with the mainly Afrikaner right-
wing. Neither questions the divide between civic and ethnic citizenship.
Both position themselves assuming that this divide will continue. The
difference between them is telling: while the liberal initiative calls for a
strong defense of the property rights of civic citizens, the main body of
the right wing demands the Afrikaner volk no longer be considered
settlers, but be recognized as natives, complete with a native homeland
and presumably a Native Authority.

Both positions are problematic. The first position, the hopeful defense of
racialized privilege as the rights of a citizen in a post-colonial order, is
not new. It was attempted by the wealthy section of Asians in Uganda.
Asian immigrants came to Uganda in the colonial period, as both
indentured labour and free immigrants. Unlike those who came to South
Africa, most of those indentured died in the course of building the
railway or returned home after completing the railway. It was the
subsequent inflow of commercial workers and petty entrepreneurs who
formed the bulk of Ugandan Asians. Though denied a share of political
power, this immigrant minority had privileged access to the market
place in a growing import-export economy. Without having a privileged
access to power, the Asian minority became beneficiaries of
inequalities generated by the colonial order. Members of a highly
racialized civil society, they depended on the colonial state for a
defence of racialized privilege.

Faced with a deracialized state at independence, the wealthy stratum of
Asians hoped to defend their gains in the language of citizenship and
rights. There developed a clear breach between the language of rights
and that of justice. In native ears, rights-talks increasingly sounded like
a defense of settler privilege, and justice a language to articulate native
grievance. Part of the lesson of the Uganda Asian experience is that the
denial of justice bred a wave of popular discontent, a wave a demagogue
rode to power. The story of Idi Amin Dada has been racialized and told
over and again, as that of an anthropological oddity. To be meaningful, it
needs to be retold as the story of an unaddressed social grievance that
could be harvested by a demagogue. It needs to be understood as a
lesson in the limits to which the non-racial language of rights can be
effective in defending racialized privilege once it has become illegitimate
in the eyes of the native majority.

The second position is that put forth by the Afrikaner right, that erstwhile
settlers be recognized as natives. This too is not new, and this too is
problematic as illustrated by the continuing saga of Uganda Asians. In
the consultations which led to the promulgation of the new constitution
in Uganda in 1991, citizens of Asian descent applied to be considered
an ‘ethnic’ group, and to be listed as such in the appendix to the
Constitution. It was a petition that had little chance of succeeding, for
its consequence would have been to define an ‘ethnic homeland’ for
Uganda Asians. While the Uganda Asian petition was met with little
more than a raised eyebrow, a similar demand by South African whites
is likely to evoke a stronger response, mainly because of a different
historical backdrop. Is not the demand for a Boer homeland, with its
own Native Authority, likely to be seen and resisted as a continuation of
settler appropriation of native land?

I would like to suggest that we explore a third alternative, one that would
transcend the political divide between settlers and natives, between civic
and ethnic citizenship, and forge a single citizenship for all. But this
single citizenship cannot just be declared formally, or written into a
constitution. For it constitutes such a radical departure that, for it to be
reality, its very practical basis has to be created. In the context of a
former settler colony, a single citizenship for settlers and natives can
only be the result of an overall metamorphosis whereby erstwhile
colonizers and colonized are politically reborn as equal members of a
single political community. The word reconciliation cannot capture this
metamorphosis. For this is not some Latin American dictatorship that
can hope to return to some pre-existing political arrangement. This is
about establishing, for the first time, a political order based on consent
and not conquest. It is about establishing a political community of equal
and consenting citizens.

If the experience of Uganda is any guide, this cannot be without justice.
And if the experience of Rwanda is any guide, this justice will need to
be different from a victor’s justice. That different form of justice, one that
can establish the practical basis of a common political community
between yesterday’s colonizers and colonized, is what I call survivor’s
justice. Different from victor’s justice, it needs to be seen more as the
practical embodiment of empathy than as the setting of a historical
score. That, in my view, is the political challenge for contemporary
South Africa.

                  THE INTELLECTUAL CHALLENGE

There is also an intellectual challenge. For the world of the native and
the settler was not just a political and a social world. It was also an
intellectual world. What is called African Studies was in reality a study
of natives by settler intellectuals. These intellectuals were not simply
men, they were also women. And they were not simply rightists; they
also included many a leftist and liberal. They shared a common horizon.
Even when they empathized with the native, they believed the native to
be incapable of self-consciousness. For many in the first generation, the
native was the product of a disadvantaged biology; for the more
sophisticated latecomers, the native was the product of a disadvantaged
history. In their view, natives were like Peter Pan, perpetual children,
who needed to be patronized and matronized. It is this context that
makes sense of Jomo Kenyatta’s comment in the preface to Facing
Mount Kenya that, when he wrote the book, he felt like a rabbit turned
poacher.

There were, of course, exceptions. There always are, those who stand
on the shoulders of their contemporaries and manage to see beyond
one horizon to another. But I am talking of the rule. It is out of this
limited horizon that the notion of South African exceptionalism has been
born. At its core, South African exceptionalism is the contention that
the South African experience is so totally and irrevocably shaped by the
initiative of the settler, that South Africa is no longer, in any meaningful
sense, a part of Africa, native Africa. When I came to UCT nearly two
years ago, I was aware that the notion of South African exceptionalism
had stained the South African intelligentsia with a prejudice more than
just skin-deep. What I was not prepared for was the ferocity with which
it would be defended, not simply by its intellectual articulators who
seemed to lack conviction but more so by the managers of the
academy whose self-righteous tendency seems to be to see any
external critique as taking the initiative out of their bureaucratic hands.

Without an intellectual return to Africa, you cannot shed the notion of
South African exceptionalism. And without a serious endeavour to shed
that notion, you cannot have an intellectual renaissance. Many may try
to avoid it. Some may even seek to defend the oasis of South African
exceptionalism in the language of political correctness, as some sort of
a homage to intellectual pluralism, painting winds of change from the
north as alien and hegemonic, in words as fresh as a few weeks ago, as
"hierarchical" and "patriarchical" notions brought from elsewhere - as if
hierarchy and patriarchy is so alien to the settler experience that it
needs to be brought in as some kind of a native virus from the equator.

I doubt any single institution has the power to stop the debate around
South African exceptionalism, for it is a debate whose time, I suspect,
has come. The choice you have is slightly different: either you continue
to act as a well-endowed home of intellectual orthodoxy, or you open
your doors to a great debate which will go beyond transforming the
complexion of your student body to transforming what you actually
teach these students.

                              A DEDICATION

I would like to dedicate this inaugural lecture to two individuals, who
have been so close to me that I have seldom dared to admit their
influence. The first is my mother: a lady of such great religious
conviction that as a kid she went to a Catholic convent school in the
mornings and an Islamic madressa in the afternoons; a lady who
remains incessantly curious about the world inspite of - may be,
because of - the fact that she has had no more than four years of formal
schooling; a lady who combines two great virtues, one to struggle for
justice no matter what the odds, and two, to remain fair-minded and full
of empathy while doing so. This lady is not here, she is at home, in
Kampala. But she was in Cape Town on April 22nd, that day of the
great curriculum debate on African Studies. After the debate, she told
me that she had only heard half my talk. Why? I asked. Because I was
praying during the other half. For what? I asked. ‘Taake sachki jeet ho’,
meaning, so that the truth may prevail.

The second person to whom I wish to dedicate this lecture is my wife
and companion, who is here in the audience. Mira is the member of the
family who sets its standards. Her tenacity of purpose makes me think
sometimes that she must have learnt the art of swimming against the
tide in her mother’s womb. What makes Mira a rare person is that she
combines this incredible resilience with an equally amazing humility as
a seeker of knowledge. For this is a person who never stops learning,
so much so that sometimes you run out of breath and wish she would
learn to stop - but, you realize you have once again missed the point -
and the point is that for this is a person for whom no experience is so
routine as to lack nuance. Nothing, and no-one, passes her by. To live
with her is to learn to live life as a great learning experience.

So, you see, life has been kind to me. I do not come from a
disadvantaged background. When I asked myself while writing this as to
what these continuing influences have nurtured in this common ground, I
could come up with only one answer: what it means to hold convictions
with doggedness but without dogma.

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**********************************************
Satish Kolluri,
Department of Communication Arts and Sciences,
103E Performing Arts Center,
DePauw University, Greencastle, IN 46135

Ph: 765 658 6559 (O)
    765 655 1802 (H)

skolluri-AT-depauw.edu



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