SUMMARY: NATIONAL AUTOCHTHONIES AND THE MAKING OF POSTCOLONIAL NATIONAL-NATIVES

In this chapter, Sharma examines the current political state of affairs in multiple countries and observes a rise of autochthonous discourse within them. She further argues that the decision to restrict political membership to the state, in former colonies, based on autochthony has intensified and exacerbated divisions placed by prior colonialists. In this essay, I will summarise how claims to autochthony work politically in the provided case studies so as to support Sharma’s claim that “national liberation did not result in decolonisation, nor could it have”.

 

Claims to citizenship, territory and sovereignty within a state have been tied to nativeness. Sharma argues that this has led to the territorialization of people, resulting in a binary between national natives and migrants. These demands for territory are in themselves political claims as they define the sovereign’s domain over land as well as the labour of the people living on it” (Sharma, 2021, pg. 209).  Such a process can explain why national natives feel that they are entitled to the economic and material benefits of a territory as opposed to the migrants who are not from the territory. In doing so, anti-immigrant politics become a mechanism that national natives leverage to uphold the state’s national sovereignty and fight against a “new colonialism” by migrants (Sharma, 2021, pg. 266). Sharma argues that this was the main cause of the Rwandan genocide carried out by Hutus against Tutsi who they saw as colonizing migrants (Sharma, 2021, pg. 222). To claim to be the original people of a place is to therefore claim that place and a specific position within the hierarchy of that place in dialectical opposition to another  (Sharma, 2021, pg. 209). In cases where autochthonous claims may not be able to grant people national sovereignty e.g native-Americans in the US, they allow for them to be recognized as a nation of people under the current international system of nation-states (Sharma, 2021, pg. 210).

 

This leads us to an important distinction on how this autochthonous discourse differs between newly-independent states and former white settler colonies like the USA. Sharma argues that in the former, autochthonous discourses have organised themselves into a binary of indigenous national-natives and white supremacist national natives (Sharma, 2021, pg. 210). White supremacist autochthonous claims are derived from discourses that connect sovereignty to their profitable colonial exploitation of the land. Indigenous national-natives autochthonous claims are derived from being the “first” settlers within the land. Sharma argues that it would be dangerous to overlook the latter’s claims as unproblematic because they could cast all other groups (black, hispanic, etc) as settler immigrants which is not the case (Sharma, 2021, pg. 211).

 

Autochthonous battles in India and Pakistan are illustrative of the failures of the process of national liberation as a mechanism of decolonization. Both these states were created as a result of the formal partitioning of territory and a violent sorting and expulsion of people based on religion  (Sharma, 2021, pg. 212). Aside from briefly highlighting the eventual divisions inside Pakistan that lead to the formation of Bangladesh, Sharma dedicates most of her analysis towards India and Hindu nationalism. Sharma first identifies the heavy role played by Hindu nationalism in informing the criteria for who would eventually become an Indian citizen: arguing that it is an indigenous product of the “primordial and authentic ethnic and religious traditions of India” (Sharma, 2021, pg. 213).  It is this logic that the ruling BJP party has used to classify Hindus as national natives and the followers of “foreign religions” as migrants or, rather tellingly, “infiltrators”. In doing so, the imagined idea of an autochthonous Hindu nation is maintained by preserving the status quo initiated by the former colonial powers

 

Another tactic used in the struggle for national liberation, in sub-Saharan Africa was the process of indigenization. This saw the classification of some people as natives and more authentic and relevant for the process of decolonisation as opposed to migrants. Sharma later classifies a sub-process of indigenisation known as Africanization which saw the expulsion of non-nationals (even black Africans) under the guise of providing opportunities for citizens. In Uganda, this took the shape of expelling Ugandan Asians who they claimed as non-autochthonous. In Kenya, the mechanisms of the state were engaged to prevent Asians from working in certain professions. All this was done in the name of providing employment for African citizens whilst othering other groups of people as migrants.

 

Sharma later describes how autochthonous discourses were appropriated when deciding the date from which one would become a member of the newly liberated nation. In Uganda, 1926 was chosen as the year to determine nativeness as it explicitly excluded racialised Asians from British India. Other autochthonous claims were augmented depending on who was present at the time a  country was colonised. Sharma terms this as National-Native time whereby postcolonial states define nativeness based on the colonizer’s gaze. Those unable to provide evidence of their residency within the state by the specified date were therefore excluded as migrants. Examples of this included Eritrea and the DRC which excluded people who might not have been present at the time of the countries’ independence. She further explains how they not only have to have been present but also have been part of so-called “indigenous” communities. Such vagueness is exemplified by countries like Swaziland which define indigenousness by standards set by colonizers. Parallels to this could be observed outside of Africa whereby hierarchies in citizenship were constructed according to classifications by former colonial masters. For example in Indonesia whereby the claim to nativeness known as “pribumi” is derived from Dutch colonial classifications for Inlanders (Sharma, 2021, pg. 218). 

 

She later concludes this thread by analyzing the formation of autochthonous discourses in Sudan (and later South Sudan). The classification and administration of the state, by the British,  as two regions: one Muslim and the other Christian bled over into postcolonial Sudan whereby nationality laws marginalised those from the South (Sharma, 2021, pg. 223). When the two states split, nationality was assumed according to racialised terms whereby each ethnic group was granted a particular nationality. Sharma then argued that this cascaded into the labelling of people as natives and migrants despite having been members of the same country till relatively recently. It is here, that Sharma points out that many “migrants” were deported to either South Sudan or Sudan out of arbitrarily defined notions of autochthony such as having a single great-grandparent born in South Sudan (Manby, 2012). Many were stripped of their citizenship and expelled into a country (South Sudan) in which they had never resided (Sharma, 2021, pg. 224). Following the thread of the previous examples, these people were later classified as migrants and not true citizens like those that had been there when the country gained independence. 

 

In short, Sharma used these case studies to illustrate how the reliance on colonial distinctions and classifications doomed the effectiveness of national liberation as a method for decolonization. 

 

Bibliography

Manby, Bronwen. (2012). “The Right to a Nationality and the Secession of South

Sudan: A Commentary on the Impact of the New Laws.” Open Society Initiative

for Eastern Africa. Accessed 2 July 2014. http://www.afrimap.org/english/images

/report/OSIEA-AfriMAP-Nationality-Sudans-full-EN.pdf.

 

Sharma, N. (2020). NATIONAL AUTOCHTHONIES AND THE MAKING OF POSTCOLONIAL NATIONAL-NATIVES. In Home Rule: National Sovereignty and the Separation of Natives and Migrants (pp. 205–267). Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv11smzfs.11