Political Identity, Citizenship and Ethnicity in Post-Colonial Africa’, keynote address at the Arusha Conference,“New Frontiers of Social Policy” – December 12-15, 2005.

Mahmood Mamdani
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My starting point is the generation that inherited Africa’s colonial legacy. Our generation followed on the heels of nationalists. We went to school in the colonial period and to university after independence. We were Africa’s first generation of postcolonial intellectuals. Our political consciousness was shaped by a central assumption: we were convinced that the impact of colonialism on our societies was mainly economic. In the decade that followed African political independence, militant nationalist intellectuals focused on the expropriation of the native as the great crime of colonialism. Walter Rodney wrote How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.1 But no one wrote of how Europe ruled Africa.

We were convinced that political economy was the most appropriate tool to come to analytical grips with the colonial legacy. The great contribution of underdevelopment theorists was to historicize the construction of colonial markets and thereby of market-based identities. The popularity of political economy spread like a forest fire in the post-independence African academy precisely because it historicized colonial realities, even if in a narrowly economic way. Political economy provided a way of countering two kinds of colonial presumptions, embedded in various theories of modernization.2 The first was that colonial cultures were not grounded in historical processes. The second was that colonial contact marked the beginning of a history for these societies, since colonialism was presumed to have animated them culturally, economically, and politically.

What is postcolonial thinking?

An interview with Achille Mbembe
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The faults in Europe's universalism, especially when confronting its colonial history, have nurtured a variety of critical perspectives in the West. Talking to French magazine Esprit, theorist Achille Mbembe says that postcolonial thinking looks so original because it developed in a transnational, eclectic vein from the very start. This enabled it to combine the anti-imperialist tradition with the fledgling subaltern studies and a specific take on globalization, he says.

Esprit: "Postcolonial theory" is present in Africa, India, Great Britain, Australia and the United States, but hardly at all in France. Can you tell us what it is all about and what lies behind it? How, in particular, does it differ from anti-western and third-world currents of thought?

Achille Mbembe: What's known in the English-speaking world as "postcolonial studies" and "postcolonial theory" is characterised by its heterogeneity, so what constitutes its originality cannot be summed up easily in a few words.