In the clearing smoke of the ashes of the ancien regime, Mahmood Mamdani was invited to teach at the University of Cape Town, and to grow the African studies department, to make it in his own image. He left in protest at the insufficient level of Africanisation in the South African institution, and wrote a now-famous missive in criticism of the colonial legacy of UCT. While I was studying there, he made a grand return after the fall of the Statue of Cecil John Rhodes, openly offering his full-bodied and uncritical support to the Fallist movement which tore it down. The unmistakeable resemblance of this movement to the quasi-metaphysical racialism of interbellum Germany was entirely ignored, as he strode past crowds calling for the slaughter of all white people in broad daylight. Perhaps one can chalk it up to naivete, but not in someone of his age, his intelligence, nor of his particular expertise.
The irony is not lost on me. I first encountered his writing during my obsession with the slaughter in Rwanda, which came 35 years after the Hutu majority had already seized power from the Tutsi minority in the little state, an interval of time ominously similar to that of the rise of the new black national-socialism in South Africa, an equivalent distance from the transfer of white minority rule. Mamdani of course, saw, and still sees, no similarity between these movements, even though the language of the calls to violence and the promotion of genocide is far less ambiguous here than it was even at the height of the slaughter in Kigali. I called Fallism fascism, and I paid a large social price. I was followed, got mocking death threats in broad daylight in front of my family, and was avoided like the plague by every white person in the academy, lest my stigma rub off on them. Despite the transparency of Fallism’s racism, what with the valorisation of bloodshed, the obsession with native soil, and the promotion of segregation, it was denied.
But it is not the first time that fascism has manifested in Africa. The archetypical test case is Uganda under Idi Amin, first documented in these terms by none other than Mamdani himself. But true to his Marxist roots, Mamdani attributed all fascism to unspecified market forces (ignoring the fact that fascist governments’ arbitrary confiscation of property, price controls and introduction of state industrial monopolies were in fact extremely harmful and frightening to markets). This, together with a quasi-Leninist reading of the connection between capital and colony, allows him to attribute everything that goes wrong in Africa to what the kids these days are calling White Monopoly Capital.
Worse, as he lambasts Amin and dissects his vast ethnofascist kleptocracy, he completely neglects to mention the similar system of revolutionary ethnonationalism in neighbouring Rwanda. Until the genocide broke out, Mamdani’s only mentions of Rwanda were in passing, as a migrant labour force. Despite the mass exodus of the late 50’s, due to a mass ethnic cleansing that saw approximately 100 000 Tutsi killed, Mamdani sees no reason to include this in his analysis, apostrophising it as a “political crisis”. Mamdani called his book on Rwanda When Victims Become Killers. Well, what does happen when victims become killers?
When he gave his first lecture back at UCT after 16 years, the professor was asked what it means to decolonise education. His explanation was that it meant identifying the categories being used to validate some facts and invalidate others, and to use this discovery to craft a different narrative. Unfortunately, the audience had already set about this process, but with the explicit aim of invalidating the humanity of settlers like me. So I think it is time for Mamdani to receive a little of his own medicine.
2.
Fascism is an easy concept to understand. It is a system of revolutionary nationalism in a modern state context – the totalitarian subjugation of all society, economic, social and spiritual, under a state defined first by its ethnicity. This means that it shares many of the qualities of Socialism, and any even cursory examination of the early history of the fascist movements of Europe bears this truth out. Perhaps a cute way to put it would be to say that fascism is National Socialism, while Marxism is Cosmopolitan Socialism. Mamdani himself insists that fascism is some kind of false consciousness (as any good follower of Marx would do, it’s just too easy). Fascists “exploit” the people’s suffering with “revolutionary slogans” (because of course, the people are too stupid to tell the difference between “real” and “fake” revolutions), and fascists are sponsored by the US and Israel, whereas true revolutionaries are sponsored by the Soviet Union.
One of the great consequences of this dichotomy for those of us living in the shadow of colonialism, is that the colonial subjects and their successors have been dragged into this awful, stupid dichotomy, teased into believing that all evil is exclusively the domain of the European traditions, all wrapped into the ever-expanding definition of colonialism (the right), and that any struggle against anything in the name of the revolution or liberation (left) is good. True believers of the left, like Mamdani, attribute moral purity to their side, and make out that any evil that comes into the world is the result of some impurity introduced by the “right”. This is a Western game which has defined the intellectual territories of European civilisation since 1789. We, the left, are pure, and only when we are stained, is evil possible.
Eventually its material and spiritual effect becomes too evil to be denied, at which point leaders and intellectuals turn to accusing the people of being corrupted by colonialism. When used in political practice, this means a totalitarian and uncompromising crushing of any popular dissent to the revolutionary reforms, and the theft and cronyism of the elite, for which I suggest a cursory glance at Ethiopia (more), Tanzania, Somalia, Zimbabwe and, why not, even happy old South Africa. If your plan fails, blame transnational capital for collusion with a “third force”, and when you write the history, deny anything bad happened, or accuse them of “mimicry” (for the uninitiated, this means “acting like Europeans”).
Ironically, one of the worst culprits of this farce is that champion of Africa, Mahmood Mamdani. In writing on black fascism in Uganda, he cannot lay the slightest blame at the feet of any left-wing ideas, from revolutionary violence, to the one-party state, ideological totalitarianism or the vagaries of central planning. In fact, in a great ironic turn, he fails to notice the biggest similarity between black and white fascists – their hungry insistence on economic autarky. After all, if he were to admit any even passing similarity in goals or tactics between True Africa and Evil Europe, he would have to abandon his one dimensional, manichean approach to the scholastic analysis of the postcolonial world. He even finds time to defend Mugabe, quietly glossing over the suffering caused by food insecurity, vicious totalitarian persecution and ethnic cleansing.
The harsh game that is played by Mamdani and his intellectual kin is that there are only two grounds on which they are allowed to criticise each other. One, on the possibility of having not attributed a significant enough proportion of the evils of the world to the perpetual continuity of colonialism and whiteness, or two, of not offering radical enough solutions. In the case of my campus, energised by the RhodesMustFall protest, this accelerated from happy consensual nonracialism to genocidal rhetoric and Blut und Boden in just over a month’s time, with the aid of a bit of Critical Theory cynicism. Now even the Vice Chancellor is in on the game.
The left is radical skepticism, even radical suspicion, to anything outside itself, utilising a Scholastic synopticism of its own kind to present a united front, and when criticising anyone within, degenerates into a purity spiral. This kind of totalised externalisation of non-left thinkers and doers may be all well and good for those countries seeking a sound and solid identity in the wake of colonial abandonment, but where there are still settlers cluttering up the place, being externalised is not without moral consequences, and from my personal experience, not fucking funny. Zimbabwe got off light. They only had nationalism, racism and thuggery. We have a totalitarian, metaphysical manichean ethnoreligion embedded into every tertiary education institution, promoted by half the ruling party, and three opposition parties, each with an armed wing and active involvement in organised violence, such as land grabs. I.e., Fallism. Mamdani is a part of this tradition, and happy to be so.
3.
Arguing with such a singleminded individual must be taxing; looking at an academic exchange with Martin Hall in 1998 reveals this queer passage:
“In correspondence with Mamdani I have pointed out his misinterpretation of my argument, but he has chosen to persist with a clearly incorrect reading. Why? Again, I think, because he is determined to have the nature of the South African academy conform to his expectations in Citizen and Subject. Colonial and apartheid education functionaries were obsessed with mechanisms of control, separation and subjugation, and Mamdani needs the mechanisms of academic support to look the same, proving the thesis of continuity – the contemporary university is the colonial regime in disguise.”
This is not to say that I disagree entirely with Mamdani’s original critique of UCT. Nor is this to say that Mamdani does not wield a most extraordinary intellectual arsenal. Half the time I read his work, I get an almost giddy feeling – he can juggle with complexity like the best, and the ability to sublimate all spiritual blame for half a century of Rwandan slaughter and oppression, and coolly crystallise it solely on the tongues of the colonial administrators and scholars long dead, is no mean feat. He is responsible for creating that beautifully effective nationbuilding narrative, memorably expounded by Paul Kagame, that the colonial ideology of race is the prime cause of the Rwandan genocide. While I am sure that he would, if questioned, deny that he is completely exculpating Africans from their crimes (i.e., depriving them of their agency in a high-handed neocolonial fashion), one gets the impression that their ultimate sin was not the killing itself, nor the hatred of their fellow man, but more the fact that they were playing into the hands of the spirit of colonialism, at least as Mamdani conceptualises it.
This is in fact what he argues in When Victims Become Killers:
“The great crime of colonialism went beyond expropriating the native, the name it gave to the indigenous population. The greater crime was to politicize indigeneity in the first place: first negatively, as a settler libel of the native; but then positively, as a native response, as a self-assertion. […] To understand the logic of genocide, I argue, it is necessary to think through the political world that colonialism set into motion. […] It is in this context that Tutsi, a group with a privileged relationship to power before colonialism, got constructed as a privileged alien settler presence, first by the great nativist revolution of 1959, and then by Hutu Power propaganda after 1990 […] This was not an “ethnic” but a “racial” cleansing, not a violence against one who is seen as a neighbor but against one who is seen as a foreigner; not a violence that targets a transgression across a boundary into home but one that seeks to eliminate a foreign presence from home soil, literally and physically.
4.
Paul Kagame doesn’t have this problem, he is focused on practical means of holding onto power, extending his ability to stitch together a seamless new Rwandan social fabric, impervious to coming apart at the seams. As a keen student of realpolitik, he adopts whatever narrative will consolidate the national identity. The new erasure of ethnic difference adopted by Kagame is an even more simplified version of Mamdani’s narrative – Hutu and Tutsi were more than exaggerations, they were fictions. Despite this, many people have long memories. Luckily, a class-accent and a bureaucratic identity can be erased easier than skin colour. Nevertheless, we all know it is in fact, if not always as a visible fact, a Tutsi minority state. Better than genocide, better than Habyarimana’s Ethno-Socialist kleptocracy, but no happy Scandinavian social democracy.
Seeing as we have varying degrees of support for genocide in South Africa from several smaller political parties (BLF, PAC, EFF), and a vast Habyarimana-esque wing of the ANC led by the chuckling chameleon Jacob Zuma, I wonder what answer Mamdani would have for those of us who saw the sinister forces accumulating, and watched him waving what to the rest of us were red flags? The truth is he would probably say that somehow black South Africa was provoked. Perhaps he would say it was an inevitable backlash for the humiliations that preceded. But what I am certain of, is that he would refuse to acknowledge the Africanness of whites. In fact, since any violent confrontation that occurs will result in the generation of a white ethnonationalist resistance, I am fairly willing to bet that he will justify every cruelty against us, on the basis that our only shelter will be bloodthirsty racists, unreconstructed colonialists.
Mamdani is much gentler a man than my classmates were, and certainly a country mile gentler than the men who carry out the topics of his study. But the path of absolutist logic in the process of apportioning blame leads down dark corridors:
I argue that the Rwandan genocide needs to be thought through within the logic of colonialism. The horror of colonialism led to two types of genocidal impulses. The first was the genocide of the native by the settler. It became a reality where the violence of colonial pacification took on extreme proportions. The second was the native impulse to eliminate the settler. Whereas the former was obviously despicable, the latter was not. The very political character of native violence made it difficult to think of it as an impulse to genocide. Because it was derivative of settler violence, the natives’ violence appeared less of an outright aggression and more a self-defense in the face of continuing aggression. Faced with the violent denial of his humanity by the settler, the native’s violence began as a counter to violence. It even seemed more like the affirmation of the native’s humanity than the brutal extinction of life that it came to be. When the native killed the settler, it was violence by yesterday’s victims. More of a culmination of anticolonial resistance than a direct assault on life and freedom, this violence of victims-turned-perpetrators always provoked a greater moral ambiguity than did the settlers’ violence. [my emphasis]
By expounding on his thesis that the Tutsi were transformed through the false consciousness of colonial concepts into alien settlers, and then saying to kill settlers is not only not despicable, but even an affirmation of life, he has strayed way out of the realm of humanity, and into the centre of Dachau to find his Jerusalem.
Much like Franz Fanon, Mamdani seems to believe that settlers are a separate moral category. In this context, Mamdani is explicitly diminishing not only the Hutu fascist’s culpability for the murder of his neighbour, but the moral wrong of the genocide itself. See, the trouble with his argument is that it is aesthetic. Ultimately, whether the victimisation of the majority by the minority is real (South Africa; Rwanda) or imagined (Germany, Hungary), the motives and the actions are the same. It is only the superficial narrative that is changed. But as a historicist, it is the narrative that ultimately matters to Mamdani. He seeks to exploit the Fanonian theory of violence to ameliorate the moral burden of the third most brutal act of evil of the 20th century by portraying it as a misguided act of postcolonial liberation. He quotes this famous passage from Fanon:
For the native, life can only spring up again out of the rotting corpse of the settler . . . for the colonized people, this violence, because it constitutes their only work, invests their character with positive and creative qualities. The practice of violence binds them together as a whole, since each individual forms a violent link in the great chain, a part of the great organism of violence which has surged upwards in reaction to the settler’s violence in the beginning.
As the old proverb goes, “the blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb”. Mamdani has no criticism of Fanon at all, even when Fanon gets to calling for murder as a means of therapy.
5.
As far as I can tell, only one left wing scholar has ever challenged Fanon on this point, an Indian Marxist called B.K. Jha, who points out that Fanon’s own clinical notes from his days in the psych ward show the awful consequences of killing on the perpetrator, even when there is a dimension of colonial vengeance:
Fanon’s own psychiatric case histories prove beyond doubt that the act of killing is dehumanizing and that it leads to neurosis and distortion of personality. An African militant had planted a bomb in cafe, killing ten. Every year, at about the same time, he suffered from acute anxiety, insomnia and suicidal obsessions. An Algerian, whose own mother had been wantonly murdered, himself wantonly killed a white woman who was on her knees begging for mercy. As a result, he suffered, what Fanon calls “an anxiety psychosis of the depersonalization type”. Thus Fanon’s own deep understanding of such cases makes his theory of renovating violence more difficult to understand.
It is not at all difficult to understand. It is informed first by a hatred of the other, and beneath that by an envious resentment of him. Fanon, since a young age, aspired to be accepted to high French society, and saw himself as French. It was only through his encounter with rea, white, France that he realised he was, in their eyes, merely black. Relegated to the back of the dancehall in Italian liberation celebrations, and to the back of the victory march in the aftermath of Paris’s liberation, Fanon knew he was not seen as fully human. It was only through reading Fanon myself that I realised what the Fallists had done to me. Like Fanon, I came from a well-to-do middle class family. I spent my whole youth looking up to heroes like Mandela and Sisulu, men of unwavering principle, and wanted only to take part in the great adventure of rescuing my fellow citizens from poverty, racism and hopelessness, a mere bit-part would have sufficed. But with their borrowed American and German ideas, filtered through bitter race hatred and centuries-old ethnic grudges, my fellow South Africans made it clear to me in no uncertain terms that I was not their equal, and did not deserve to live amongst them.
Sometimes I dream that I have escaped the psychological “South African exceptionalism” my folk have been accused of in Citizen and Subject, by insisting that my darker brothers and I are equally capable of cruelty, but I sincerely doubt that I have escaped, since, while my point of comparison is in Africa, and my generalisations and concepts transcend race, I still see the inevitable curse of my caste, and that as something undeserved. When I encounter political difference, it is always attributed as a product of my skin colour, and what’s more, my interlocutor can always win the argument by threatening to kill me if I persist in disagreeing with him. This is not hypothetical. Failure to recognise that we deserve to die is difficult to even get away with in some white circles these days.
So what does happen when victims become killers? The answer, according to Doctor Mamdani, is that they are immediately forgiven, never mind the details, like the horrifying suffering of the people who lived through the troubles of Uganda, Rwanda, Zimbabwe, Cambodia or central Europe. But Mamdani is wrong – human beings are not the puppets of blind forces controlled by colonial masters. In fact to say so amounts to a gross form of racism – his argument would lead anybody to the conclusion that when whites kill, they do it despite knowing right from wrong, but that when blacks do, it is because they don’t know, like some lower form of life that cannot be blamed, children, or animals. The reality is that actual human beings made concrete decisions to accelerate and participate the insanity around them for the benefit of their egos, while manufacturers quietly stepped in to hand out arms, and the world turned a blind eye to the monumental task of providing moral judgment.
And as he passed the crowds of angry fallists chanting “shoot them all”, so did Mamdani, now for the third time in his own home continent.
The Eccentric Flock 
Excellent blog. Favorited.
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