African
Revolutionary Writers, Part 7c
Mahmood Mamdani
What remains for us in this part is an extract from Mahmood
Mamdani’s “Citizen and Subject” (downloadable below).
Like Issa Shivji and Walter Rodney, both of whom we will
come to later, Professor Mamdani is a product of the famous Dar-es-Salaam
campus. He is now head of the Makerere Institute of
Social Research (MISR) in his native Uganda.
Note that Mamdani's sense of the word “subject” in this work
is different and opposite from the one usually found in communist literature.
Here it means a subordinate person, as opposed to a free person.
It is typical of the English language that, just when you
need certainty, it gives you ambiguity. Mamdani is referring to the “subjects”
of a king or of a feudal lord or "traditional leader".
Neo-colonial class alliance
In the book, Mamdani’s principal insight is to recognise the
class alliance typically sought by the Imperialists in neo-colonial Africa
countries. In other words, whereas the partisans of the working class and other
anti-Imperialists will form a National Democratic Revolutionary Alliance of
certain classes and fractions of classes, the Imperialists will seek a
countervailing alliance of their own, and it is the nature of this
pro-Imperialist, neo-colonial alliance that Mamdani probes.
According to Mamdani, the Imperialists prefer to ally with
the most backward rural feudal elements, commonly called “traditional leaders”
or “chiefs” in Africa, in opposition to the modernising bourgeoisie and
proletariat of the cities and towns.
Mamdani regards South Africa as the classic case in this
regard, although he quotes many other examples. Mamdani’s analysis stands in
contrast with common presumptions about the existence of a sellout or “comprador”
bourgeoisie allied to the Imperialists in Africa.
This other theory says that the Imperialist
monopoly-capitalists tend to work through the “compradors”, who are local
aspirant bourgeoisie, or bourgeoisie-for-rent, and who do the Imperialists’
work for them.
Such compradors do exist, and clearly they are seen to exist
in South Africa. Yet Mamdani’s scheme reflects the facts and the history of
Imperialism better, at least up to now.
Imperialism is in general hostile to the national
bourgeoisie.
The typical neo-colonial war of recent decades, including
the Iraq war, is a war of Imperialism against a national bourgeoisie that wants
national sovereignty and control over its country’s national resources.
In the light of this analysis it becomes easier to see why
it is that the South African proletariat has long been, via the ANC, in
alliance with parts of its national bourgeoisie, for national liberation,
against the monopoly-capitalist oppressors with their Imperial-globalist links.
The Imperialists make a marriage of convenience with the most
retrogressive social power that they can find – tribalism – in a pact to hold
Africa where it was under colonialism, i.e. partly rich, but mostly dirt poor.
In Mamdani’s view, backed with data, it is the feudals who
have betrayed Africa and not the African bourgeoisie, whether called
“comprador” or anything else. In Swaziland today, we can see a perfect example
of this. In Swaziland, the comprador is king – literally.
In South Africa the Imperialists relied heavily on Bantustan
leaders, and especially on the Inkatha Freedom Party, but the ANC was able to
form better links with the rural as well as with the urban masses - thus
achieving a liberation class alliance that could, and did, dominate the country
in terms of its mass support.
The (national) Bourgeois and Proletarians are the modernisers
and the democrats, who are compelled by necessity to combine together to fight against
the feudals for the democracy that forms the nation.
- The above is to
introduce the original reading-texts: Mahmood
Mamdani, Linking the Urban and the Rural, 1996.
- To download any of the CU courses in PDF files please click here.
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