De-politicising the project of unity

Dear Professor Mamdani,

I’ve read your article ‘An African reflection on Tahrir Square’ with great interest and delight gaining much food for thought from your insightful writing. One urging question has remained in my mind though that I’d like to raise.

I had to swallow it, somehow, each time when I was reading the word ‘politicized’ in your analysis – and it was used quite often in the course of the text. Each time the word seems to be paraphrasing the result of the strategic moves by a ruling political power to ‘divide & rule’.

Each time I found myself puzzling over the question whether those results were truly in effect ‘politicizing’ ones; or, if another word could be or should be used…? And if those ‘politicizing’ effects were not, - also?, ultimately? - de-politicizing…? … since, if they were politicizing, then, if I followed the argument rightly, only in the limited way of a militantly sectarian one…? And until now I’ve failed to come up with a convincing term resolving the puzzle.

Each time you seem to be referring to a certain effect of a directed politicization from above under the prefix that culture was indeed territorial.

Perhaps , this could be called a fascist, or fascist-oid politicization…?

While, if I’m following your reading correctly, the effects of ‘Tahrir Square’ could be said to be a politicization from below – or, in your sense perhaps, a re-politicization – of the project of unity as a common of everyone considering him/herself a citizen.

I’m following the latter with great interest against a background of having lived in the UK for a number of years as a cultural worker (with an activist head) over a period in which the ruling political powers managed to, I’d say, de-politicize the project of unity among its diverse citizens, and quasi domesticate it in/as a solely cultural domain (satirically speaking, in to a kind of multi-cultural zoo).

Thinking about it a bit further, what happens then, or threatens to happen, in result is a perverse ‘individualization’ of the project of unity under the auspices of a highly professionalized cultural industry. And, since that highly professionalized cultural industry is also globalised, the effects I think can also already be seen - travelling old colonial trading routes as well as global culture-industry infrastructure - exported to, and replicated on the African continent.

Wondering, how these thoughts & questions might resonate…