Chambi Chachage
3 July 2009
opinion
Chambi Chachage explores when and how 'settlers' or 'natives' become 'citizens', in the first of a series of three articles exploring the idea of dual citizenship with reference to Tanzania. Definitions of citizenship in modern nation-states in 'societies other than Euro-American ones' were influenced by how the notion developed in Euro-America and how it was 'selectively applied in the Africa, Asia, Australia and Latin America in the context(s) of colonialism, imperialism and developmentalism,' Chachage argues. 'It is this colouring that we need to unpack as we trace the historical and political trajectories and implications of the idea and praxis/practice of citizenship in Africa,' says Chacage.
In 2005 Tanzania issued new passports to its (eligible) citizens. Now it wants to issue national identity cards. At the same time it is expected to start allowing dual citizenship.
What is Tanzania really up to? Why a sudden shift in its conception of citizenship? When did dual citizenship become an issue? Who is behind the move to formalise Tanzanian identity/identities?
There are many answers to these questions. Some are speculative. Others are concrete. Whether patriotic/matriotic or not, those answers are either driven by collective and/or self-interests.
All this, claim the opportunists, is about becoming citizens of the world. We are living in a global village therefore we need to be able to move here, there and everywhere. After all Tanzania will benefit a lot if it allows us to share freely the privileges of our citizenship in developed countries.
But hey, exclaim the alarmists, this is about doing away with our nationalism! It is about opening the doors for settlers to appropriate the land we fought so hard to reclaim from colonialists! Just look at the way foreign biofuel companies are acquiring thousand of hectares to farm jatropha!
So, how do we separate the factual from the fictional? How do we make sense of conspiracy theories that claim it is The Prevention of Terrorism Act of 2002 that is redefining and regulating our identities? Or how do we come to terms with racial practices of rendering us second-class citizens?
More concretely: When - and how - does one acquire (full) citizenship? Whither - and what is - the relationship between (dual) citizenship and first/second class citizens? Who - and which community - benefits from (multiple) citizenship? Why - and to whom - is (transnational) citizenship becoming a popular discourse?
History has a cruel way of reminding us of who we are and how we became who we are. The history of how we fought to become citizens in the first place sheds a lot of light on the prospects and pitfalls of being dual citizens in a dual world of citizens and subjects. Let's revisit this history.
The idea of citizenship in its modern, or rather contemporary, sense developed in Euro-America in the context of modernity and its quest for universality. However, this by no means implies that there was no such idea or closely related ideas outside the Euro-American polity/polities. But it implies that the definition(s) of what it means to be a citizen of a modern nation-state in societies other than Euro-American ones became coloured by the way that notion developed in Euro-America and particularly in the way it was selectively applied in the Africa, Asia, Australia and Latin America especially in the context(s) of colonialism, imperialism and developmentalism.
It is this colouring that we need to unpack as we trace the historical and political trajectories and implications of the idea and praxis/practice of citizenship in Africa/Tanzania. Mahmood Mamdani's question 'When does a Settler become a Native?' offers an insightful starting point. Any attempt to address that question would also lead us to note that people become natives or indigenous to a place when there are other people who can be defined as not being native to that place. By virtue of coming (later) to settle in that place they become settlers. As Mamdani aptly put in his inaugural lecture at the University of Cape Town (UCT) on 13 May 1998, the two categories belong together therefore to do away with one we have to do away with the other, since it is the relation between them that makes one a settler and the other a native.
We ought to always bear in mind that when early Euro-American explorers, civilisers, traders and missionaries reached the shores of the African continent in varying times and spaces, they encountered inhabitants. These inhabitants varied from those who thought of themselves as having always been there to those who knew they - or their ancestors - had migrated into those areas at a certain point in time. Of particular interest here is the fact that by the time the West, or Euro-America as it now widely known in academic circles, encountered Africa again - for that was not the first time - in the age of mercantile capitalism it found societies that had varying forms of social organisations and a sense of belonging in those communities.
Whether they referred to that belongingness as 'citizenship' or not is not the main concern here, as important as it is. The main concern is that these communities in Africa had that sense, and thus they developed forms of governance to regulate belongingness. They also developed discourses that differentiated who belongs, who does not belong and who could or could not belong - a cursory look at a cross-section of names/ terms, such as 'Chasaka', 'Umnyamahanga' and 'Mnyika' from African languages attest to that for they literally meant those coming from far lands in and/or beyond the 'bush.'
As such, as expected in any grouping or community, the idea or discourse of a 'stranger' and someone who want to 'settle' or even 'invade' for that matter was present in Africa prior to its encounter with Euro-America. The history of the so-called Bantu migration in Africa, though still a contentious area of study with varying accounts of it, is a classical case. So is the history of the migrations of the so-called nomadic tribes of which the Maasai is seen as its epitome. The Hamitic Myth and the Rwanda Genocide of 1994 have rendered the Tutsi migration another classical case. There is also that migration of Nguni speaking people in the wake of the Mfecane war in South Africa in the 19th Century. If there were such cases of settling within Africa prior to colonialism what then makes the settling that was ushered by Euro-American colonial modernity a very peculiar case?
A clue to an answer can be found in Mamdani's 1998 Inaugural Lecture on When does a Settler become a Native? Reflections of the Colonial Roots of Citizenship in Equatorial and South Africa. Another clue can be found in Frantz Fanon's 1952 reflections in Black Skin White Masks.
Mamdani differentiate between what he calls 'Settler Proper' and 'Native Settler.' The former included the 'whites' who came from Euro-America. These did not have an ethnic home in Africa therefore they were not tied to any specific ethnic or tribal territory. The 'Settler Proper', also contends Mamdani, included Asians who came from Euro-American colonies outside Africa, and Arabs who came from both within and from outside Africa as well as the Tutsi who, though wholly from within Africa, were turned into settlers by the colonial state. According to the Mamdanian conceptual categorisation, these cases and particularly that of the Tutsi shows that in the context of Euro-American colonisation you didn't have to be 'white' to be a settler or to be considered one. The latter paradoxical category thus defined his UCT Inaugural Lecture:
'But the homeless people [Settler Proper] were not the only settlers. There was also a 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 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 racialised; it was ethnicised. Every ethnic area made the distinction between those who belonged and those who didn't, between ethnic citizens and ethnic strangers.'
Imperfect as it is, this Mamdanian categorisation helps one to make sense of why within the same century the Nguni speaking people who 'trekked' all the way from South Africa to the area that is now within what is known as the United Republic of Tanzania settled and became (ethnic) strangers-cum-natives in the eyes of other (ethnic) natives of that area - including those they bitterly fought with - while the Afrikaner speaking people who trekked northward from the southern tip of Africa remained (racial) strangers in the eyes of (ethnic) natives of an area that is now known as the Republic of South Africa. The 'whites' saw themselves and were thus seen by non-whites as a racial category whilst the non-whites did not see each other as racial categories.
Thus the battle between the then settling Ngoni and the then settled Hehe for land among other things was a battle between natives and natives of Africa but the battle between Ngoni alongside the Hehe against the Germans during the Maji Maji War of Resistance (1905-1097) was a battle between natives and settlers. The same can be said about the skirmish between the then settling Ndebele and the then settled Shona in what is now known as Zimbabwe vis-à-vis the battles between the Shona alongside the Ndebele in the battles against white settlers. Other more or less similar cases include the making/remaking of the Kingdoms of Basotho, Bunyoro and Buganda vis-à-vis their opposition to white settlement/colonisation. The former's native consciousness could not 'nativise' the latter. Here is where Fanon's 1952 analytical toolkit comes in handy.
Drawing from John Paul Sartre's analysis of Jews being overdetermined from the inside - in the context of the anti-Semitism of World War II - because they appeared as white outside and hence could only be precisely recognised as being Jewish by other whites through their actions, Fanon argued that the 'black man/woman' does not have a similar guise - s/he is simply recognised as soon as s/he appears. What follows below is the classical scenario that the black person encountered in contrast to a white person who happened to be a Jew:
'All the same, the Jew can be unknown in his Jewishness. He is not wholly what he is. One hopes, one waits. His actions, his behaviours are the final determinant. He is a white man, and, apart from some rather debatable characteristics, he can sometimes go unnoticed... The Jew is disliked from the moment he is tracked down. But in my case I am given no chance. I am overdetermined from without. I am the slave not the "idea" others have of me but of my own appearance...When people like me, they tell me it is in spite of my colour. When they dislike me, they point out that it is not because of my colour...'
It is this form of racialisation, of overdetermining the native vis-à-vis the settler from without during colonisation that led to the conflation of being settler with being white and native with being black. Thus, as Mamdani aptly puts it, the proto-type settler was, of course, the white who came to be known in Kiswahili and many other African languages as Mzungu, that is, someone who performs an act of Kuzunguka, that is, trek or wander from one place to another. Even in the case of the Tutsi, which appears to be the exception, it is the so-called 'caucasian' or 'white' features of theirs that were used to construct them as a Hamitic race that was distinct from other people of Africa such as the Hutu. Thus the Hamitic Hypothesis was a colonial attempt at overdetermining the Tutsi vis-à-vis the Hutu with respect to blackness/whiteness from without.
This differentiation between two main sets of opposite categories, that of (1) the (African) native vis-à-vis (African) settler-cum-native and the (African) native vis-à-vis (Euro-American) settler as well as that of (2) the (African) native vis-à-vis (Asiatic/Arab) settler and the (Asiatic/Arab) settler vis-à-vis (Euro-American) settler is what informed the colonial state formation and the making of citizenship within colonies in Africa. At the heart of this citizenship problematic was the notion of race, for the term African did not simply denote someone of or from a geographical space known as the continent of Africa and its islands. African was - as still is - virtually synonymous to black. It this paradox of identity that made it possible to form a tautological identity known as 'black African', that is, 'black black' or 'African African' in an attempt to distinguish those 'native proper'/'native settler' from those 'settler proper' who were neither white/Euro-American nor black/African. In the spirit of the Lugardian doctrine of 'divide and rule' such categorisation was constructed to enable yet another construction, that of 'citizen and subject', in order to consolidate the colonial state in Africa as - and more than - elsewhere.
How, then, does someone belonging to those categories of settler/native became or become a citizen of the-called modern nation-state? That question can only be answered by analysing why people/communities belonging to some of those categories and who have/had their forms of citizenship prior to colonial/imperial conquest and migration became 'uncitizen' in the first place, to use a term popularised by Issa G. Shivji's article 'From Citizen to Uncitizen' that appeared in The Citizen on 25 May 2007. To that issue of the 'unmaking of citizenship' we turn.
Chambi Chachage is an independent researcher, newspaper columnist and policy analyst.
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