"Define and Rule" focuses on the turn in late nineteenth-century
colonial statecraft when Britain abandoned the attempt to eradicate
difference between conqueror and conquered and introduced a new
idea of governance, as the definition and management of difference.
Mahmood Mamdani explores how lines were drawn between settler and
native as distinct political identities, and between natives
according to tribe. Out of that colonial experience issued a modern
language of pluralism and difference.
A mid-nineteenth-century crisis of empire attracted the
attention of British intellectuals and led to a reconception of the
colonial mission, and to reforms in India, British Malaya, and the
Dutch East Indies. The new politics, inspired by Sir Henry Maine,
established that natives were bound by geography and custom, rather
than history and law, and made this the basis of administrative
practice.
Maine s theories were later translated into native
administration in the African colonies. Mamdani takes the case of
Sudan to demonstrate how colonial law established tribal identity
as the basis for determining access to land and political power,
and follows this law s legacy to contemporary Darfur. He considers
the intellectual and political dimensions of African movements
toward decolonization by focusing on two key figures: the Nigerian
historian Yusuf Bala Usman, who argued for an alternative to
colonial historiography, and Tanzania s first president, Mwalimu
Julius Nyerere, who realized that colonialism s political logic was
legal and administrative, not military, and could be dismantled
through nonviolent reforms."
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