Mamdani argues that Western approaches to conflicts in Africa, like Darfur, are shaped by colonial assumptions of African inferiority and a "savior mentality." Colonialism disrupted indigenous social structures and boundaries in Darfur, exacerbating conflicts over scarce resources. Western groups like Save Darfur simplify the conflict as a genocide and call for military intervention, ignoring its complex historical roots. By labeling it a genocide, they attract attention and funds but undermine local peace efforts. Mamdani calls for removing exploitative influences and allowing indigenous societies to rebuild sustainable social systems.

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Politics of Africa
Book Summary 1
Mahmood Mamdani: “Saviors and Survivors”
Mahmood Mamdani’s “Saviors and Survivors” argues that Western-style democratic, capitalist and
humanitarian institutions behave in their approaches to African violence quite differently than they have in
parts of the world in which non-humanitarian interests are the prevailing factor in military and economic
intervention. Specifically, Mamdani highlights the assumptions underlying the Western processes of
identifying (and naming) a civil conflict, responding to non-economically sensitive international crises, and
implementing aid and development strategies. Critical to the formation of these assumptions, Mamdani
argues, is the undergirding struggle of ideologies between an exogenous and endogenous root of African civil
unrest and a willingness to ‘adopt’ a cause in which an easily identifiable, if casuistic, paradigm of good versus
evil is steeped in capitalist notions of “cause as commodity,” or cause fetishism, and a politically expedient
tethering of Arab aggression to the war on terror.
Mamdani gives the reader a brief history of the Darfur conflict as the product of both endogenous
and exogenous factors. Mamdani stresses that all peoples have settled conflicts in varying ways, often
violently, yet a strictly endogenous explanation cannot account for the conflict. It is a particularly insidious
Western assumption of African savagery and misunderstood African “tribal” rivalries coupled, of course, with
geopolitical and economic strategic wrangling among other colonial powers, that has left the Darfur region
partitioned without regard to traditional, but climatically necessary nebulous social boundaries. This
Westphalian model of creating defined territories with sovereign (if intentionally dependent) hierarchical
structures was (at partitioning) and remains an incomplete approach to indigenous African notions of civil
society and migration patterns.
These influences of colonialism – arbitrary imposition of political boundaries not commensurate with
longstanding ethnic and community boundaries – collude with endogenous problems of desertification,
drought and resource depletion with disastrous effect. Mamdani explains that traditional patterns have been
upset by restrictions on movement between political regions created in response to independence

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movements which where a kind of “scramble for independence and self-determination” - a recursive pattern
mirroring the “scramble for Africa.” The word “scramble” - unpacked to mean a rush to create political
boundaries without regard for tradition and sustainability - is important here. Existing climate patterns in
Africa, what Mamdani identifies as the highlands, savanna and the Sahel, (Mamdani 10-11) have been the
levers of cultural evolution with which climate change may wreak havoc, particularly given changing political
structures not in accord with the sustainable symbiotic living patterns in place before partition. Mamdani
states:
Until the Sahelian drought of the 1960s, each nomadic group had its own discrete cycle of
movement, either within the belt that borders mud and flies in the south or along the
semidesert in the north. The need to access different types of land in different seasons
dictated the nature of water, grazing, and cultivation rights, with joint rights over grazing
and surface water but individual ownership of gardens and wells. Constant movement made
for a constantly fluctuating relation to political power, leading to a process that involved
splitting, migrating, and resettling both among and within kin-based groups. This is why
close kinship relations did not necessarily translate into close political alliances, whether at
the highest or lowest levels. (Mamdani 11)
Given the externally-contingent endogenous roots of the Darfur conflict, Mamdani builds an
exogenous-cause component of the violence “in a national, African, and global context, which over the past
century has been one of colonialism, the Cold War, and the war on terror.” (Mamdani 7) Colonial influences
have often left indigenous populations with depleted resources and radically altered socioeconomic patterns
and the Cold War machinations of Western governments in Africa have propped up strategic dictators and
authoritarian oligarchies which might have been reformed or removed by natural political processes, as
happened in the West throughout its history, had the sinews of civil society not been atrophied by
colonialism. The analog with terrorism is complete with an us-versus-them mentality and a oversubtle
statement of the problem in terms of Arab-African conflict.

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It is into the complex admixture of colonial legacy and environmental factors that the Save Darfur
Coalition and other aid and advocacy groups have introduced what I label cause fetishism and what Mamdani
cites as a feel-good constituency fueled by the “CNN Effect.” (Mamdani 56) Mamdani identifies Save Darfur
as representative of the growing movement to bring international aid and political intervention to Darfur
without a full appreciation of the context of the violence. He explains that past errors in identifying, labeling
and confronting seemingly similar conflicts, particularly in the shadow of the Holocaust, give momentum to
a post-modern impetus to “recognize something [people] have already seen elsewhere and conclude that
what they know is enough to call for action. They need to know no more in order to act.” (Mamdani 3)
Mamdani stresses that Save Darfur began as an alliance of religious movements. Early rallies involved
the dissemination of Christian, Muslim and Jewish “faith packets.” The Christian faith packet explained that
God had empowered Christians to lead humanity and had invested believers with “the burden to save,” (eerily
evocative of the UN’s R2P – the ‘Responsibility to Protect’ now enshrined in the UN zeitgeist). The Jewish
packets “emphasized the special moral responsibility of Jews as, ‘quintessential victims’ particularly sensitive
to sensing genocide when it occurs. The Muslim packets stressed the responsibility of Muslims to fight
oppression, particularly when, as Dr. Mamdani has explored in previous writings, ‘good Muslims’ were called
upon to check ‘bad Muslims.’ (Mamdani 58)
Although these faith packets are indicative of a tendency to view the conflict as a dichotomy between
Arab Muslims and African Muslims - between perpetrators and victims – the cause fetishism community also
thrives on what Mamdani calls the ‘CNN Effect,’ the predisposition to view certain conflicts “as the camera
sees it.” This cinematic retelling of a complex narrative has much in common with religion’s glossing of
complex, often impenetrable moral and philosophical human truths and Hollywood’s love of the blockbuster
and the morality tale. It has attracted religious personalities like Al Sharpton and celebrities like Angelina
Jolie, George Clooney, Mia Farrow, and Bono – who appears ubiquitous in the fabric of the ‘CNN Effect.’
Though exogenous AND endogenous death counts in Iraq may be an order of magnitude greater
than conservative estimates of deaths in Darfur (based upon sources at either end of the ideological

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spectrum), Mamdani claims that the Save Darfur followers, who are well known to harbor resentment of the
intervention in Mesopotamia, have utilized war slogans like “out of Iraq, into Darfur,” to redistribute
interventionist ideology from a nation where Americans are forced to consider their own powerlessness to a
region where a savior mentality sustains a vast humanitarian-industrial complex.
Indeed, Mamdani explains that Save Darfur’s highly de-contextualized documentation of atrocities
has no place for a historical or political narrative, instead promulgating evidence of killing, raping and ethnic
cleansing. This ‘pornography of violence,’ is defined by Mamdani as a form of voyeurism meant for the good
of the one who views it, not for the good of the one who is being viewed. Mamdani stresses Save Darfur’s
focus on ‘naming and shaming’, punishment, and criminal justice rather than reform. It is this bellicosity that
Mamdani links to the war on terror, as an underlying assumption of the problem-as-violence begets an
assumption of solution-as-violence.
Mamdani suggests that, unlike the peace movement of the 1960s which turned the world into a
classroom and stressed ‘teach-ins’ and from whose tradition Save Darfur claims provenance, interventionists
in Darfur garnered greater support as propaganda became more and more estranged from actual happenings
on the ground. Instead of educating the world about the complexities underlying the violence in Darfur, the
Save Darfur Coalition has turned the world into an advertising medium. It relates to its constituency not as
an educator but as an advertiser; it has played obscurantist to an informed movement while courting and
creating a “feel-good” constituency. The West has regained a sense of potency in Darfur after a decade long
crisis of confidence in the war on terror and a disastrous adventure in Mesopotamia, where economic
ambitions and political realities confound easy attempts to identify saviors. Darfur presents an opportunity
to approach a suffering population not as citizens, as the West must in Iraq, but as victims who require our
assistance, for whose lives we may expiate some of our guilt, and whom we have a responsibility to protect.
This savior-victim dichotomy is inherently racist, Mamdani argues, tacitly ascribing to African civil
society a lesser capability to achieve self-determination than has been observed in the Western World.
Genocides, without complete alienation from reason of the circumstances surrounding the violence, are non-

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western aberrations, we are told, and the few Western genocides the West admits to having occurred have
been excused as the whims of madmen or the product of mass-delusion. Only non-white peoples, it seems,
have the everyday capacity to rape, torture and murder each other with impunity, and the definitional
contortions with which the West grapples shed light on this process of insidious, if well-meaning imposition
of genocidal terminology on non-white domestic conflict.
The statistics used by various reporting services illuminates the difficulty in identifying victims of
genocide and the danger of allying one’s data to one’s ideology. Mamdani identifies the common definition
of genocide not as killing – even on a monstrous scale – but as killing with intent to extirpate a defined group.
Given this definition, sheer numbers of deaths in a conflict, however alarming, must first be shown to be the
result of a concerted effort by one group to eliminate another. Without this caveat, the numbers reported by
the US Department of State (60,000 – 160,000), the World Health Organization (70,000+) the Center for
Research on the Epidemiology of Diseases (118,142), the Coalition for International Justice (CIJ) (396,563), and
the Save Darfur Coalition (400,000+) are estimates only of a tragedy, not a genocide. Still, one might be able
to supply least a proportional enumeration of these organization’s numbers without the raw data, given a
dossier of information about the organization’s methodology and ideology. The low numbers produced by
the State Department, Mamdani argues, are surprisingly so, given the US Government’s dedication to a
definition of genocide. Mamdani credits deputy secretary of state for Africa, Robert Zoellick for investigating
personally the violence in Darfur and reaching a reasonable conclusion free of ideological overtones.
(Mamdani 26-27) Highlighting the backlash from this “low estimate,” Mamdani cites a Washington Post
article written shortly after Zoellick’s report:
The Post [after ‘correcting’ its numbers to the 400,000 CIJ and Save Darfur accounting] went
on to point out the real damage done by Zoellick’s low estimates: “International partners are
likely to drag their feet unless they are forced to confront the full horror of the killings.” And
for that reason [emphasis added] it advised: “Next time he should cite better numbers.” The
editorial left little doubt as to what it meant by “better numbers.” (Mamdani 27)

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Mamdani’s point here is clear: politics and ideological a prioris shaped the US Government’s and
other Western nations’ official accounting of the violence in Darfur. Colonialism, leaving a legacy of disrupted
political and regional ties, has both drawn an unsustainable political map and insisted upon an untenable
concord between groups previously capable of working out disputes peacefully and politically. Changing
climate conditions have compounded this colonial legacy, giving Darfur over to the humanitarian-industrial
complex and cause fetishism. Rebuilding African socioeconomic patterns from within, at which, Mamdani
argues, the African Union has been particularly adept, and removing exploitative economic influences may
allow indigenous African society an opportunity to heal and reconstruct a sustainable civil society in Darfur.