Beyond Settler and Native as Political Identities: Overcoming the Political Legacy of Colonialism

Abstract

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. The limits of political economy as a framework for political analysis began to surface in the face of postcolonial political violence, for political economy could only explain violence when it resulted from a clash between marketbased identities-either class or division of labor. From this point of view, political violence had to be either revolutionary or counterrevolutionary. In the face of political violence that cut across social classes rather than between them-violence that was neither revolutionary nor counterrevolutionary but simply nonrevolutionary, violence animated mainly by distinctions crafted in colonial law rather than sprouting from the soil of a commodity economy-ex