The Colonial Dilemma, The Minnesota Somalis, And "Shooting An Elephant"

Yesterday I began to think about the incongruous problem the Minnesota Somalis represent and what good writers like George Orwell, as opposed to the silly hacks in alt media, would say about it. I mentioned in passing that the Minnesota Somalis represent a peculiar inversion of what British writers early in the last century would have called the "colonial dilemma" which for now I think is well enough expressed in Orwell's 1936 story "Shooting an Elephant".

I was prompted the more to think about this by remarks from New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani's father:

Mahmood Mamdani, the Columbia University professor and father of New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani (D.), called Columbia's new anti-Semitism task force a "prosecutorial agency" during a recent University Senate meeting. Professor Mamdani compared the panel to imperial British colonizers using their race-based "divide and rule" strategy to maintain power, according to an unofficial transcript obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

According to Wikipedia, Mahmood Mamdani

is an Indian-Ugandan anthropologist, academic, and political commentator. He is the Herbert Lehman Professor of Government and a professor of anthropology, political science, and African studies at Columbia University. . . . [He] was born on 23 April 1946 in Bombay (now Mumbai), India, the year before the end of British Raj. He was raised in Kampala, Uganda, as part of the Indian diaspora in Southeast Africa. Both his parents, a Gujarati Muslim couple, were born and raised in the British territory of Tanganyika (present-day Tanzania). The couple moved to Bombay while his father attended college there. The family returned to Dar es Salaam, Tanganyika, when Mamdani was two, and moved to Uganda when he was five or six years old.

. . . Mamdani was one of 23 Ugandan students in the 1963 group of the Kennedy Airlift, a US-funded scholarship program that brought hundreds of East Africans to universities in the United States and Canada between 1959 and 1963. Mamdani graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Pittsburgh in 1967.

He then rose through the US, UK, and African academic establishments until his appointment at Columbia in 1999. His orientation is fashionably Marxist and postmodern. However, I'm puzzled that a US university would be interested in an anthropologist who specializes in British colonialism, since the US had limited experience with colonies of the European sort -- the most important was the Philippines, which it held for less than 50 years, giving them independence at the very start of the decolonization movement. Marxist and postmodern analyses of colonialism have little to do with the actual US experience.

In fact, Mamdani seems to owe his career to what might be called US "inverse colonialism", programs of importing former colonials to the US, in his case the Kennedy Airlift. From this perspective, later phenomena like the mass immigration of Somalis to the US, primarily in Minnesota, is just a special case of an overall trend. But this trend, as far as I can see, turns the Marxist interpretation of colonialism on its head.

Along with slave-grown cotton in the United States, primary production by impoverished Irish farmers was one of the pillars of English industry. Irish dispossessed peasants, moreover, fled the country in search for better conditions, swelling the ranks of the unemployed and underemployed in British industrial centres. Processes of colonisation and impoverishment in Ireland thus affected the condition of the working class in England as well, from both material and moral points of view. Workers in England did not just compete against each other. The anti-Irish racism instigated by the English ruling class fomented antagonism between Irish and English workers, the latter being seen by the Irish as complicit in English domination over Ireland. And this antagonism, for Marx, “is the secret by which the capitalist class maintains its power.”

To make up for their losses, capitalists in less developed nations increase the amount of absolute surplus value they extract from the working class. They do so by lengthening and intensifying the working day and, crucially, pushing wages to below the value of the labour power. Marx himself had these processes of “super-exploitation” in mind when he affirmed that wages in India were depressed even below the worker’s modest needs.

So according to Marx, directly importing African workers to the US drives down wages for the US working class and foments continued antagonism between black and white workers. This is one effect of the programs that have imported Haitian and Somali workers. But this bypasses the conflict between the younger Marx and the older Marx over the actual benefits of colonialism:

The Communist Manifesto is pretty rhapsodic about the power of capital to 'create a world after its own image', by drawing 'all, even the most barbarian nations into civilization' through its improvement of productive techniques and washing the world with cheap commodities by which it 'forces the barbarians intensely obstinate hatred of the foreigners to capitulate'.

This brings us to the colonial dilemma and George Orwell. Wikipedia makes the important point that there is no separate record that Orwell ever actually shot an elephant in the course of his duties as a police officer in 1920s Burma, and there's "no conclusive evidence to prove it to be fact or fiction". Let's add to this the textual evidence that the narrator is unreliable, or at best has reassessed his youthful views:

For at that time I had already made up my mind that imperialism was an evil thing and the sooner I chucked up my job and got out of it the better. Theoretically – and secretly, of course – I was all for the Burmese and all against their oppressors, the British. As for the job I was doing, I hated it more bitterly than I can perhaps make clear. In a job like that you see the dirty work of Empire at close quarters. . . . But I could get nothing into perspective. I was young and ill-educated and I had had to think out my problems in the utter silence that is imposed on every Englishman in the East. I did not even know that the British Empire is dying, still less did I know that it is a great deal better than the younger empires that are going to supplant it.

The narrator's problem is simple. A local domesticated elephant has gone into musth (Orwell spells it "must"), a hormonal condition that makes male elephants highly aggressive and unpredictable. In the situation in the story, only the elephant's mahout, or handler, can control it when this happens, but the handler is out of town. The elephant has broken loose and is destroying native huts, as well as killing a laborer. The narrator, as the closest local police officer, has received orders that he must shoot the elephant.

He finds this assignment abhorrent, especially because a crowd of local Burmese has gathered to watch the spectacle, but also because they expect to harvest the elephant's meat once it's been killed. But also, when he encounters the elephant himself, it's just calmly eating grass and no longer hurting anyone. Nevertheless, he has his orders, and the crowd clearly expects him to do this. At the end of the story, he reflects,

Afterwards, of course, there were endless discussions about the shooting of the elephant. The owner was furious, but he was only an Indian and could do nothing. Besides, legally I had done the right thing, for a mad elephant has to be killed, like a mad dog, if its owner fails to control it. Among the Europeans opinion was divided. The older men said I was right, the younger men said it was a damn shame to shoot an elephant for killing a coolie, because an elephant was worth more than any damn Coringhee coolie. And afterwards I was very glad that the coolie had been killed; it put me legally in the right and it gave me a sufficient pretext for shooting the elephant. I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool.

But let's put this last paragraph in the context of the earlier: he's already told us he was working from a pseudo-enlightened perspective of a young Englishman with all the right views, which in the intervening years have apparently moderated -- "I did not even know that the British Empire is dying, still less did I know that it is a great deal better than the younger empires that are going to supplant it", speaking particularly in 1936 of Mussolini's Ethiopian invasion, and possibly of the Spanish Civil War as well.

In working his way through the ethical problem of whether the elephant should be shot, even if at the time of the shooting it seemed no longer to be on a rampage, he raised the question of whether a rabid dog should be shot, and he determined it should. He raised the question of the elephant's value to its owner, but he realized that the elephant had broken loose, its handler was out of town, and the owner was still responsible for the elephant.

In the final paragraph, he trots out the views of his European colleagues. The older ones say he was right; the younger ones say the elephant was worth more than a human laborer; too bad it had to be shot, which poses its own ethical issue. He then gives a past-tense account of his immediate emotions -- if the coolie was killed, it put him legally in the right, but mostly he was happy to keep from looking a fool. But this is an older self looking at a younger self whom he's already established is unreliable.

The real colonial dilemma we see here is that despite his immediate emotion, shame that he was glad to avoid looking a fool, the narrator was about as right as anyone can be who's been put into that situation. His experienced colleagues say he was right. He realizes his action was legally right. He's still not comfortable with it; nobvody likes to shoot a rampaging elephant, especially one that's just contentedly eating grass when he finds it.

But he's found himself in a colony where he's part of colonial authority, which means protecting the native population from rampaging elephants, and in fact, without Western industrial weapons, Burmese indigenous authority wouldn't be able to protect its own population even as well from rampaging elephants. Whatever the justice or injustice of colonial rule, the natives are probably better off than they'd have been without it. And it's worth repeating that there's no evidence Orwell himself ever had to shoot an elephant under such circumstances; he's speaking of the issue as a general matter here.

This is Orwell's notion of the colonial dilemma, and it's not terribly far from Marx's colonial dilemma: under European capitalism, even at its least restrained, colonial people are probably better off than otherwise. But now wee get to the incongruous situation of the Minnesota Somalis, which applies equally to those in Ohio or Seattle: they're an indigenous third-world population that at one time was variously under Italian, French, and British colonial rule, becoming independent in 1960.

At no point were Somalis ever under US colonial rule, and as East Africans, they were never subject to the Atlantic slave trade that put West African descendants into the US. Yet as a matter of latter-day US policy, they've been imported in the scores of thousands into the US interior, where they aren't indigenous, and they essentially act as colonial people under colonial rule with colonial grievances, something the US on the whole never imposed in most areas, never for long, and certainly never in Africa.

But the outcome is that the US is facing something very much like the colonial dilemma Orwell outlines. As of now, we have little concrete information on how this policy developed, apparently in the wake of the Immigration Act of 1990, augmented by the activities of "faith-based NGOs" that developed the specific paradigm of importing colonial populations en masse into specific US localities, in the process replicating the worst conditions of the early industrial revolution that so horrified Marx.

Backing oursleves out of a situation in which we find oursleves having to act like a colonial power with a colonial population we never intended to have isn't a pretty picture. A big part of the problem is that the Somalis and some others seem to be behaving as though they want to continue to be colonial populations with permanent colonial grievances, when under the US paradigm, they're expected to assimilate and become prosperous as an assimilated group. Solving the problem is going to present difficult issues akin to shooting an elephant.