Chambi Chachage
3 July 2009
(Page 2 of 2)
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.
Be the first to Write a Comment!
Copyright © 2009 Fahamu. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections — or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here.
AllAfrica aggregates and indexes content from over 125 African news organizations, plus more than 200 other sources, who are responsible for their own reporting and views. Articles and commentaries that identify allAfrica.com as the publisher are produced or commissioned by AllAfrica.
