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Why plural societies should replace inherited ownership with inherited obligation
By Joshua W.J. Brown
The argument over who belongs after empire is usually conducted with two incompatible clocks. One begins when conquest occurs and, after enough generations, declares the conquest ancient history. The other keeps the moment of conquest permanently present and can treat later descendants as if they arrived yesterday. Neither clock gives plural societies a workable future.
Southern Africa shows why. Modern state names such as the Republic of South Africa and Republic of Mozambique are recent constitutional forms, but the societies within their borders are not recent. Nor did European arrival create the first external relationships. African regions were connected through migration, trade, political competition and Indian Ocean networks long before European empires consolidated territorial control. At the Cape, the Dutch East India Company established a station in 1652 that expanded into settlement and dispossession. A modern state’s date of birth cannot be used to make precolonial political life disappear.
The necessary correction, however, should not trap the future in a reverse version of the same logic.
A third category: inherited obligation
Colonialism treated arrival as a claim to possession. If a foreign power could occupy, administer and reproduce itself in a territory, it could eventually speak as though conquest had become natural order. The anti-colonial response rightly rejects that conversion of power into legitimacy.
But descendants create a different ethical problem. A person born generations later did not personally perform the original conquest. Their existence does not legitimate it, but neither can a stable society make civic belonging depend entirely on whether an ancestor crossed a border before or after an arbitrarily chosen date.
A more useful category is inherited obligation. Descendants can inherit benefits, institutions, property arrangements and social positions shaped by earlier conquest. Those inheritances can create duties of recognition and repair. What should not be inherited is an automatic right to dominate—or an automatic sentence of permanent foreignness.
This distinction is the centre of a framework I call Uncolonization. It is not a synonym for decolonization. Decolonization addresses colonial structures and their continuing consequences. Uncolonization asks what kind of political relationship should exist among distinct peoples once domination itself is rejected as the organizing principle.
Belonging as a relationship
This moves belonging away from three inadequate tests: military victory, blood purity and administrative naming. Instead, belonging becomes reciprocal.
A reciprocal political order asks whether people recognize the rights and authorities that preceded them; whether they accept obligations to the land and communities from which they benefit; whether they contribute without claiming supremacy; and whether institutions allow distinct groups to remain distinct without turning difference into hierarchy.
That approach is particularly relevant to Africa because the continent’s future will be shaped by movement. The African Continental Free Trade Area, urban growth, regional labour markets, displacement, diaspora investment and return migration will deepen the mismatch between ancestry, residence, citizenship and economic participation. The policy question is not whether movement can be stopped. It is how movement becomes durable belonging without reproducing domination.
What governments can do
First, teach historical continuity. School curricula and public institutions should avoid beginning local history with the modern state or the colonial administration. Political communities that predate current borders must remain visible in the national story.
Second, design participation around affected authority, not only population counts. Where communities hold constitutionally or legally recognized rights over land, culture or resources, consultation should not be treated as a ceremonial step after the main decision has already been made.
Third, separate integration from assimilation. A state needs common rules for citizenship, public safety and economic participation, but common rules do not require a single cultural identity. Integration works when people can participate fully without surrendering every prior affiliation.
Fourth, make contribution measurable. Newcomers and long-settled minorities should have clear routes through which work, taxation, language learning where necessary, public service, local participation and long-term residence translate into secure civic membership. The purpose is to prevent permanent guest populations while making belonging a reciprocal commitment.
Fifth, connect historical repair to present material conditions. Restitution, land reform, community ownership, revenue sharing and institutional recognition are stronger when they are designed as durable governance mechanisms rather than symbolic declarations detached from economic power.
Beyond the oldest receipt
None of this requires pretending that conquest was simply another migration. It was not. Nor does it require declaring every later contribution benevolent. Empires brought technologies and institutions alongside coercion, racial hierarchy, extraction and violence. A contribution becomes a gift only when it can enter a relationship of consent and reciprocity. A gift imposed at gunpoint is not a gift.
But human history after empire is irreversibly entangled. The political challenge is to prevent entanglement from becoming an excuse for amnesia and to prevent memory from becoming a demand for endless civil exclusion.
The goal is a society in which prior sovereignty can be recognized, repair can be material, descendants can belong, migrants can become participants, and no group’s belonging requires another group’s disappearance.
That is a harder project than choosing which civilization gets to claim the oldest title. It is also the only project capable of turning post-colonial coexistence into something more than a temporary truce.
Selected sources
South African History Online, “The Dutch Settlement” (updated July 21, 2026): https://sahistory.org.za/article/dutch-settlement
South African History Online, “Establishment of the Cape and its impact on Khoikhoi and Dutch” (updated July 20, 2026): https://sahistory.org.za/article/establishment-cape-and-its-impact-khoikhoi-and-dutch
United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples: https://www.un.org/development/desa/indigenouspeoples/declaration-on-the-rights-of-indigenous-peoples.html
Government of Canada, Principles respecting the Government of Canada’s relationship with Indigenous peoples: https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/csj-sjc/principles-principes.html