Chambi Chachage
9 July 2009
opinion
Chambi Chachage explores when and how 'subjects' become 'citizens', in the second part of a series of three articles exploring the idea of dual citizenship with reference to Tanzania. The making of 'modern' as opposed to 'traditional' citizenship in colonial Africa was primarily based on race, writes Chachage, with race as the criterion for determining social, political and economic status.Later, black nationalists used the 'language of an inclusive Tanganyikan citizenship based on human rights rather than racial privileges', but it was Nyerere's 1964 policy that came to define 'what it means to be a citizen, rather than a subject, in post-colonial Tanganyika', says Chachage.
The making of 'modern' as opposed to 'traditional' citizenship in colonial Africa was primarily based on race. It should be noted that colonialism was a product, or rather a by-product, of the discourse of scientific racism that had roots in earlier Euro-American thoughts and which became a bedfellow with the ideology of capitalism/imperialism. In line with patriarchy they created a discourse, or rather a myth, of 'virgin'/'fertile' land for colonial conquest/settlement.
The tragedy of Sarah Baartman, for instance scandalously illustrates the development of these racial and colonial notions and how they generally turned the African/black into a subject, that is, made him/her uncitizen. Her story epitomised what happened within the context of British early colonialism in Africa. It thus set the stage for segregation and subjection of Africans.
As Mamdani aptly noted in 1996 in Citizens and Subjects: Decentralised Despotism and the Legacy of Late Capitalism, segregation was not a South African invention but, rather, it was an idealised form of rule that the British Colonial Office dubbed 'indirect rule.' It was the Briton Lord Lugard who pioneered indirect rule in Uganda and Nigeria three decades before Jan C. Smuts applied it in South Africa. As a pioneer of a form of indirect rule that Mamdani refers to as 'decentralised despotism', the British theorised the colonial state as more of a cultural one than a territorial construct. This shift from a focus at the repudiation of the customary to confirmation of tradition and from civilizing/rejuvenating to conserving/preserving colonised society began in India. By the time Britain came to Africa with its wealth of experience in colonising India it was ready to complete this shift to prevent what it had to cure in its then 'precious colony' of India.
Thus in order to prevent the dissolution of society in colonial Africa, which would render it virtually uncontrollable, the British focused on the customary as both a binding and dividing legal and cultural construct. It was binding in the sense that it held together members of a given 'tribe' by subjecting them to certain form of authority that made it easy to contain them. Yet it was dividing in the sense that it separated a number of invented 'tribes' by subjecting them to their respective authorities that made it easy to divide and rule them.
These authorities came to be known as Native Authorities and the law that they used came to be known as Customary Laws. But their jurisdiction only applied to those categories of (African) natives and (African) strangers-cum-natives. As Mamdani correctly stated in 1998, they could not apply to those who did not have a 'customary' home, that is, an 'ethnic', 'tribal' or 'native' home in Africa. In other words, since those categories of (Euro-American) settler and (Asiatic/Arab) settler were defined in racial rather than ethnic terms, they could not have a respective Native Authority and its associated Customary Law. The policy and legal implications of these dichotomies is thus sharply captured:
'The colonial state divided the population into two: races and ethnicities. Each lived in a different legal universe. Races were governed through civil law. They were considered as members, actually or potentially, of civil society. Civil society excluded ethnicities. If we understand civil society not as an idealised prescription but as a historical construct, we will recognise that the original sin of civil society under colonialism was racism. Ethnicities were governed through customary laws. While civil law spoke the language of rights, customary law spoke the language of tradition, of authenticity. These were different languages with different effects, even opposite effects. The language of rights bounded law. It claimed to set limits to power. For civic power was to be exercised within the rule of law, and had to observe the sanctity of the domain of rights. The language of custom, in contrast, did not circumscribe power, for custom was enforced. The language of custom enabled power instead of checking it by drawing boundaries around it. In such an arrangement, no rule of law was possible.'
It is not surprising, then, that in the case of colonial Tanganyika, as elsewhere in colonial Africa, race - and thus racism - was the primary criterion for determining social, political and economic status. Before independence, as the author of Who are Indigenous Tanzanians? Competing Conception of Tanzanian Citizenship in the Business Community, Bruce Hailman, correctly noted in 1998, Tanganyika was segregated into three distinct racial groups.
The first group, which was primarily Euro-American, enjoyed full privileges of British citizenship. Most Asians comprised the second group and were treated as second-class citizens i.e. British-protected persons. The last group, the natives or Africans (read blacks), were more subjects than citizens. Needless to say, this preferential treatment fermented resentment. To put it crudely, it ignited racial struggle. Even the social-cum-political organisations were coloured by race. There was an African Association and an Asian Association.
However, in the 1950s, as Chachage S.L. Chachage noted in 1986 in his unpublished PhD dissertation entitled Socialists Ideology and the Reality of Tanzania, it became clear to the African/black nationalists who were fighting for independence that Euro-Americans and Asians had a major role to play in making Tanganyika have political stability based on a rapidly expanding economy. Tellingly, their agitation for uhuru was not couched in the language of customs or tradition. Rather, it spoke the language of civics and rights. Thus the last years of the 1950s, Chachage further notes, witnessed the attack by Nyerere and his fellow nationalists on racialism in its scientific guise and other forms.
In the language of an inclusive Tanganyikan citizenship based on human rights rather than racial privileges they urged immigrants of other nationalities - whether (Asiatic/Arab) settlers or (Euro-American) settlers - to regard themselves as Tanganyikans. To that end in the 1958 campaigns for the general elections non-Africans were even invited to address meetings of Tanzania African National Union (TANU) supporters even though TANU's membership was by then restricted to Africans. In his address to the Pan-African Freedom Movement of East and Central Africa (PAFMECA) in September 1959, the chairperson of TANU, Julius K. Nyerere, thus pragmatically affirmed his stance on equal rights of all citizens regardless of race:
'Here we are, building up sympathy of the outside world on the theme of human rights. We are telling the world that we are fighting for our rights as human beings. We gained the sympathy of friends all over the world - in Asia, in Europe, in America - people who recognise the justice of our demands for human rights... Are we going to turn round then, tomorrow after we have achieved independence and say, 'To hell with all this nonsense abut human rights; we were only using that as a tactic to harness the sympathy of the naive'? Human nature is sometimes depraved I know but I don't believe it is depraved to that extent. I don't believe that the leaders of the people are going to behave as hypocrites to gain their ends, and turn round and do exactly the things which they have been fighting against. I say again to my friends the non-Africans in East Africa, that when we say we want to establish the rights of individuals in our countries, irrespective of race, we mean it.'
What Nyerere and his fellow African nationalists were articulating was not a form of racial blindness. Rather, it was an tacit acknowledgement that through the Lugardian doctrine of divide and rule, Africans had been constructed as an assortment of ethnicities which, although collectively seen as 'black' and thus the quintessential opposite of the 'white' race, had not fully enjoyed the privileges then associated with a racial identity. In other words, theirs was a call to be admitted into the concert of humanity and comity of nations which was then defined racially. In this regard it makes a lot of sense to conceptualise their nationalism in Mamdanian phraseology as 'a struggle of natives to be recognised as a transethnic identity, as a race, as 'Africans,' and thus - as a race - to gain admission to the world of rights, to civil society, which was a short form for civilized society'.
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