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Mahmood Mamdani, CITIZEN AND SUBJECT: CONTEMPORARY AFRICA AND THE LEGACY OF LATE COLONIALISM (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996), xii + 353 pages, cloth $55.00, paper $19.95.
In Citizen and Subject, Mamdani explores two issues of paramount importance to democratization in Africa: "how power is organized and how it tends to fragment resistance in contemporary Africa" (p. 3). He splendidly illustrates the continuity between the colonial and the postcolonial state with regard to individual rights and obligations. Mamdani also explains why attempts at democracy, in both its liberal and its popular versions, have been thwarted. Finally, he argues that the colonial authoritarian state has endured, especially through the preservation of a "decentralized despotism" in local administration-the inheritor of the indirect-rule instruments of colonial authority.
In eloquent prose, Mamdani asserts that the genius of indirect rule was to create two categories of peoples: the citizen and the subject. He elaborates this thesis in the four chapters that make up the first part of the book. In the second part, he explores the problem this bifurcation of peoples poses for democratic movements, with chapters focusing on the Republic of South Africa and central and eastern Africa. For instance, Mamdani recounts with compelling evidence the transformation of precolonial traditional authority, whose power was clearly checked through various mechanisms. During the colonial period these mechanisms were undermined with the introduction of indirect rule. As a result, the traditional chiefs' powers were augmented in two...