(2012) - Define and Rule: Native as Political Identity- Mahmood Mamdani
In Define and Rule, political theorist and historian Mahmood Mamdani argues that European colonial powers invented rigid “native” identities to divide colonized populations and entrench domination. In much of Africa, where ethnic and political affiliations were fluid, colonial administrators fixed people into “tribes” like Hutu and Tutsi in Rwanda or Baganda and non-Baganda in Uganda, using censuses, land laws, and legal categories to formalize hierarchy and exclusion. These identities enabled settlers, as a ruling minority, to claim political and economic supremacy and to extract resources from a fragmented, divided population. Long after colonial rule ended, these imposed categories continued to fuel inequality and conflict. If colonial powers could manufacture and enforce identities to secure their control, how do those same logics still shape power today?
To read more of Mamdani's work, see here.
Unlike what is commonly thought, native does not designate a condition that is original and authentic. Rather, the native is the creation of the colonial state: colonized, the native is pinned down, localized, thrown out of civilization as an outcast, confined to custom, and then defined as its product.