Citizen and Subject

Rating:
Summary: Intelligent, but make sure you have time for it...
Review: Mamdani succeeds in breaking the colonial political system into pieces drawing the distinction between urban direct rule which spoke the language of civil society and civil rights, and rural indirect rule, which spoke of community and culture and describes them as different faces of the bifurcated colonial state. This bifurcated system dissipated with Independence revealing the need of a new agenda for the newly created state. The first duty of the state was to bring together the different stratums in the society for the reconstruction of a both ethnical and political identity. Democracy was the prescribed solution to react against apartheid and a tribalized native society. Mamdani's claims that whereas democratization brought winds that will remove erstwhile privileges inherited from a colonial, white dominated central power; it failed to conquer the system that kept the peasants under the hold of a tribal authorit