Mamdani: Colonialism and Apartheid

Maybe you are right by saying that even as we build a Nigerian citizenship, we must build it with certain provisions of qualified protection. In the middle of the 19th century, colonialism faced a huge crisis; revolts in India, and in 1857 there were revolts in West Indies. And the colonial masters began asking how they could stabilize the enterprise because an enterprise, which is excluding the majority, is doomed; sooner or later the majority organizes as a majority. And the solution for them was to turn the majority into minorities; they implemented it in Africa between the Sahara and the Limpopo. Those were the parts they colonized after the Berlin Conference.

The British claim was that in African colonies, there were no majorities, that there were only minorities. And that was true because they (the British) created them. How did they do that? In every place they identified groups; they claimed to protect them against the majorities. So, colonialism was put forth as a regime of protection, an affirmative action regime whose political objective was to prevent the development of a majority. But we can't throw the baby out with the bathe water; we must save the baby, but the bathe water is unclean.