One of the readings that I visited as part of the project I am currently busy with is Professor Mahmood Mamdani’s book ‘Neither Settler Nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities’ (2020). The book helps one navigate some of the complex questions that confront us today,
What the hack is customary law? What gave birth to a homeland system that was dominated by a single tribe whereas many of the places that became Bantustans had more than one group residing there? What exactly is this nonsense called ‘traditional authority’ that the likes of CONTRALESA today defend with their lives?
Understanding colonial/ apartheid using the single-state and two-state prisms: Why does it appear that some people in South Africa are destined to retain the peripheral status and others reap the benefits of full citizenship? In the book, Mamdani argues that the nation-state and the colonial state created each other. In case after case around the globe—from the New World to South Africa, Israel to Germany to Sudan—the colonial state and the nation-state have been mutually constructed through the politicisation of a religious or ethnic majority at the expense of an equally manufactured minority.
He asserts that the model emerged in North America, where genocide and internment on reservations created both a permanent native underclass and the physical and ideological spaces in which new immigrant identities crystallised as a settler nation. Settlers in America came up with two-state model and a segregationist single state model.
The segregationist model had whites and black Americans pitted against one another through racial domination and segregated spaces. Blacks in America were, and still are, considered as an inferior race that had no access to sovereignty. This means that although they were part of the American state they had different rights and statuses with the state.
According to the Americans, they had solved the problem of having blacks (slaves) as citizens with equal rights and opportunities. This policy reared its ugly head following the Great Depression in the 1930s, when President Roosevelt announced major labour market reforms and expanded public works programme (together referred to as the ‘New Deal’) which benefited only the white population and excluded blacks.
The American Dream has always been a fallacy: blacks continue to live in the shadows of the dominant white population (and recently other new races like Asians) and remain excluded in the creation of the land of the free and its claimed achievements.
The other feature of the America state is/ was the two-state model which has the American state as everyone knows it as well as the reserves for the Native Americans. Also called the ‘two-state’ solution, it allowed the fragmentation of a state for the purposes excluding others from sovereignty. In this case, although the reservations where the Natives reside are physically and geographically within the borders of the US but they constitute polities of a lower status.
1964 Civil Rights Act excluded the Natives in reservations, and the Natives only got their version four years later in 1968. The difference between the two laws is that the former was constitutionally-binding, and the other is not (advisory). In simple terms, the Natives are not and have never been rights bearing citizens in the US, in a constitutional sense at least.
What must be noted is that the reservations were created by the US state within its borders but they are artificially separated to advance the goals of political exclusion. The two-state model created a differentiated citizenship or sovereignty: White settlers belonged to the USA, and the Natives were ejected to quasi self-governing concentration camps without a full state status within the US.
America is dominated by European settlers, and not migrants. But what is the difference between the two terms? Migrants move to another country to become part of the existing political systems and remain subject of the laws they find. On the other hand, settlers have only one motive, that is, to takeover and subjugate the systems and people of the place they forcibly occupy. Settlers therefore seek to displace existing polities with their own and establish exclusive sovereignty. As such, the Natives reservations are “domestic dependant colonies”.
The crude American model of colonial subjugation (two-state) and racial oppression (single-state) was exported to other parts of the world. South Africa, Europe and Middle East.
In Europe, this template would be used by the Nazis to address the Jewish Question in Germany, and after the fall of the Third Reich, by the Allies to redraw the boundaries of Eastern Europe’s nation-states, cleansing them of their minorities. After Nuremberg, the template was used to preserve the idea of the Jews as a separate nation.
By establishing Israel through the minoritisation of Palestinian Arabs, Zionist settlers followed the North American example. The result has been another cycle of violence. The implication of this is that Nazism may have been defeated militarily but it was not demolished as an ideology, but it was given a new meaning under the two-state model. Germany succeeded to push Jews out to Israel, which in turn created a fertile ground for the Zionist settlers to eject Palestinians from their territory.
The much publicised “two-state” solution as regards to solving the Israeli-Palestine conflict is the worst thing that may ever happen: occupied lands must be returned to their rightful owners, the Palestinians. Another example of a “two –state” solution was the division of Sudan. Today there are two Sudans: The Republic of Sudan (Khartoum), and the South Sudan (Juba).
The territory of what is now Sudan and South Sudan has been home to impressive human diversity for at least half a millennium, but only for the past hundred years or so has this diversity been a source of conflict. That is due to the logic of indirect colonial rule. British colonial authorities tribalised Sudan, erecting legal and physical barriers between groups that previously intermingled in spite of their cultural differences.
The British therefore invested these differences with political meaning. They turned differences of culture into boundaries of authority and decided what power that authority would possess. False historisation of the relations between the people produced a caste system. Influential thinkers and politicians understanding themselves to be Arab sought to define Sudan as an Arab nation, with Africans as an inferior caste that would forever be marginalised from political power.
The term ‘Indians tribal authority’ under the Federal Bureau of Indian Affairs has the same meaning and philosophical foundations as the then Ministry of Bantu Affairs during apartheid to administer homelands, which were a very important and notable importation from the US two-state model. European settlers established their state in 1910 but they had no clue in what to do with Africans.
After the South African settlers attained their independence in 1910, at about 1912 a delegation visited Canada and the USA to study how the Native Americans were governed. This was the same year the ‘amazemtiti’ class were going up and down visiting England to beg the monarch to give them equal rights and status within the Union of South Africa. Their disappointment led to the formation of the ANC which neither stopped the apartheid (racial segregation) and Bantustans (two-state system).
Nonetheless, the delegation came back with serious lessons from North America and imported certain elements of the white settler rule over the Natives in both Canada and the US, namely homeland, traditional authority and customary law.
The starting point was that every tribe had a territorially contained homeland, using the mega-tribe lens which obfuscated the reality that there was not like Zulu, Tswana, Sotho, Venda, Xhosa and so on. The historical fiction of homelands engineered the expulsion of people from their settlements to quasi self-governing territories as the Americans did to the Natives.
Secondly, it was claimed that from time immemorial each homeland had been governed by a traditional authority, sanctioned by custom and thus not subject to being elected. Hence, a place like KwaZulu homeland head the Zulu monarch as its head and Mangosuthu Buthelezi who claimed he was a prime minister of the paramount chief (and later king) of the mysterious Zulu people that had been fabricated by the white establishment.
Thirdly, the obligation of this traditional authority was administer customary law on the subjects. Such things as reed dance and virginity testing and other so-called African cultural practices like the payment of lobola, circumcision rituals, domba dance, etc. should be understood in this context. As previously stated in other posts, the African cultural practice is not only fictitious or manipulated but it was designed to support the white economy through consumption, taxes and cheap labour.
The argument about custom was that it too, like the territorially contained homeland and traditional head, had been there since time immemorial. That is the reason the oppressed have developed cultural fundamentalism and tribalism which manifest in more ways than one. This is not a coincidence, the three governance elements for homelands were differentiators that were used to separate people.
Nevertheless, in deciding which customs to retain the settlers insisted that only the cultural practices that were not repugnant to civilisation were going to be practiced. Do we still insist that there is such thing as African culture in the South African context?
As the Third Reich in Germany, Adolf Hitler drew to key lessons from the US, i.e. that genocide was feasible and doable or thinkable as well as that there can be second and third class citizenship. The notion of differentiated citizenship in the US manifested in the treatment of blacks, Natives, Puerto Ricans and others. Hitler appointed a committee lawyers to study US citizenship laws that led to the Nuremberg laws. This is discussed in some detail in the book ‘Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law’ (2017) by James Whitman.
It is important to highlight that apartheid, Nazism and Zionism had/ have one thing in common and that was to deal with anyone that was not considered a constitutive part of the Nation State. At the end of the day, it is understandable why no one has really been held accountable for the atrocities that were/ are committed under each. These are/ were political projects that were important to re-define the notion of a Nation State, see Franz Neumann’s book ‘Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism Book’ (1942).
Finally, what needs to be appreciated is that the goal in South Africa was to subordinate Africans and place them in more or less a similar position as African Americans in sugarcane fields. One may also argue that the settler community opted for a combination of reservations and sugarcane fields. Africans were forcibly moved to homelands (colonial subjugation), and others like in Soweto were retained within the borders of the South African state ad citizens but with no rights or sovereignty.
These differentiated statuses of the population in terms of who is a superior citizen and who is not are important in understanding such things as inequality, development, poverty and unemployment. As in America or Palestine, the black population occupies the base of a white state that was created in 1910 to create a multi-layered sovereignty in South Africa.
Like everywhere else, the political change that purportedly happened in the early 1990s did not punish anyone for apartheid nor did it roll out decolonisation of a mixed political system of subjugation and racial discrimination. It also did not remove buffoonery on the formerly oppressed (second and third class citizens) who proudly carry apartheid definitions and notions without questioning.
In his book ‘The New Apartheid’ (2021), Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh correctly points out that the concept of apartheid in South Africa never died but it was privatised instead. Such things as Zulu nationalism and yearning for the old days of Bophutshwana are living proof that apartheid is alive and well.
Siya yi banga le economy!
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