Mamdani succeeds in breaking the colonial political system into pieces drawing the distinction between urban direct rule which spoke the language of civil society and civil rights, and rural indirect rule, which spoke of community and culture and describes them as different faces of the bifurcated colonial state. This bifurcated system dissipated with Independence revealing the need of a new agenda for the newly created state. The first duty of the state was to bring together the different stratums in the society for the reconstruction of a both ethnical and political identity. Democracy was the prescribed solution to react against apartheid and a tribalized native society. Mamdani's claims that whereas democratization brought winds that will remove erstwhile privileges inherited from a colonial, white dominated central power; it failed to conquer the system that kept the peasants under the hold of a tribal authorit

Since the time of Thomas Malthus, problems of resource scarcity and social pathology have frequently been attributed to "overpopulation," largely caused by the alleged overbreeding by the world's poor. If only those impoverished masses who bear so very many children realized the error of their ways, the reasoning goes, the "population explosion" and its attendant problems could be diffused. Moreover, their own poverty would be alleviated, since they would have fewer mouths to feed.

Champions of this Malthusian perspective generally have eschewed any efforts to actually investigate what life is like for the high-fertility poor who fuel the world's rapid population growth. In this slim but incisive book, however, sociologist Mamoud Mamdani demonstrates that by actually investigating and analyzing social reality from the perspective of those who choose to have large families, one can gain an understanding of the rationality behind this lifestyle choice. Indeed, in his study of a village society in northern India, he shows that these rural peasants are not poor because they have many children, they have many children because they are poor. High fertility is, in fact, a reasonable, even necessary choice for people with few resources other than their own labor power and that of their children. Mamdani shows that only when people's basic human needs for material security, health care, and support in old age are met can they begin to consider different life strategies that do not involve having large numbers of offspring.

When it first appeared during the 1970's, Mamdani's book was revolutionary in its influence on the population/resources debate among environmentalists. Some hardline neo-Malthusians have refused to budge from their "population control by any means" position, but many others have come to realize that for people to be amenable to family planning measures, social and economic reforms on a large scale must be implemented.

The one area where Mamdani's perspective is too narrow involves the role of women in fertility decisions. His study emphasizes the husband and wife as a decision-making unit making successive choices regarding additional births. In reality, however, women often don't have any choice at all as to how large their finished family size might be, and their husbands frequently insist on a larger family than the wife might desire. Indeed, over the past twenty years, it has become clear that empowering women and providing them more choices in their lives is another avenue to lower fertility.

Mamdani fails to emphasize this feminist aspect of the population question, but in presenting a concise and thoughtful analysis of how population growth occurs at the local level, he has made a lasting contribution to social and environmental science.

Well written, very good explanation why it happened on such a massive scale.
Most of us have a kind of feelling that "history" happened in the past and somewhere far away. This books tells how history is made today, giving the insight into the regional context of the confict (Congo)...

The Rwandan genocide was a horrible affair of unequal proportions. I have always wondered though how a whole population can commit such horrendous acts against fellow countrymen/women en masse, as was reported. Surely there must've been something that must've been brewing all along; there must've been an underlying "cause". Despeakable it maybe I wanted to know what in Rwanda's history could've given rise to this. I have read Phillip Gourevitch'sr "We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda", although a good book, is mostly a narrative and I was still left with the unfinished business of why? why? why?. This book filled the void for me. With a historical background of precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial sociopolitical Rwanda, the author provides an amazingly rich analysis of the Rwandan state leading to what heppened in 1994. It has given me the picture I needed to see, to begin to address the issues of why did this awful thing took place. It's a must read to anyone interested in Rwanda and what went on there.

This new book by Mahmood Mamdani, one of the world's most respected Africa scholars, stands a good chance of replacing Gérard Prunier's "The Rwanda Crisis" as the standard English-language introduction to Rwanda and its genocide. Mamdani's highly-readable account focuses on the political construction of Hutu and Tutsi as racial/ethnic identities, tracing the tale from the pre-colonial era, through Belgium's administration of the country, to the 1959 Revolution and subsequent attempts to develop an overarching sense of Rwandan nationhood. These attempts were cut short by the rise of Hutu Power in the early 1990s, culminating in the horrific outbreak of mass killing in April 1994. The advantage of Mamdani's book is that it offers "history from below," arguing that the racialized hostility between Hutu and Tutsi helps to account for the extraordinary (perhaps unprecedented) degree of popular involvement in the 1994 killing campaign. He also stresses the regional context of the Rwandan civil war and genocide, with separate chapters on Uganda and Congo/Zaire. The book is rich in theoretical insights but never ponderous or pretentious. A "must" for any student of Rwanda or modern African politics more generally (see also Mamdani's award-winning 1996 book "Citizen and Subject," which fleshes out some of the theoretical frameworks used in "When Victims Become Killers").