From Conquest to Obligation: A Governance Framework for Plural Belonging After Empire

Guest Commentary | Joshua W.J. Brown

Editor’s note: This article is an opinion contribution. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Towncrier Africa.

Africa’s post-colonial states inherited a difficult political problem that independence alone could not solve: how can a country repair conquest without making permanent civil peace depend on either historical amnesia or demographic purification? The problem is not uniquely African. It appears wherever conquest, migration, slavery, settlement and state-building have layered populations over time. Southern Africa simply makes the problem unusually visible.

A claim circulating in public debate says that because European settlement at the Cape predates the modern Republic of South Africa by centuries, European rule can be treated as historically prior to the state and therefore somehow foundational to the land itself. This confuses the age of a political label with the age of the peoples and political orders that preceded it. The Cape of Good Hope was a specific geographic and colonial designation, not the name of southern Africa. The Dutch East India Company established its Table Bay station in 1652 in a region used by Khoikhoi pastoralists; settlement expanded through land acquisition and dispossession. Modern state names do not erase pre-state histories.

Correcting that mistake is straightforward. Building a stable political principle for the centuries after it is harder.

From inherited ownership to inherited obligation

One common colonial principle is that successful conquest eventually becomes legitimate possession: hold territory long enough, raise descendants there, build institutions, and the violence at the beginning fades into background. That principle rewards endurance of domination.

But the opposite principle is also unstable if applied without limit: anyone whose ancestors arrived through a colonial order must remain permanently foreign, regardless of birth, conduct or generations of attachment. That risks turning ancestry into a perpetual civic status.

A more durable framework is to separate inherited presence from inherited supremacy. Descendants do not inherit a conqueror’s moral right to dominate. Nor do they need to be treated as the original conquering force reincarnated. What they can inherit is obligation: obligations to acknowledge prior political communities, to support lawful repair, to respect living sovereignty, to accept limits on extraction, and to contribute to a common political order without demanding that everyone else become culturally identical.

I call this framework Uncolonization. It is distinct from decolonization. Decolonization addresses the structures and consequences of colonial rule. Uncolonization asks what institutional relationships should replace the colonizing logic once domination itself is rejected as a legitimate way for peoples to organize their coexistence.

Five design principles

First, prior sovereignty remains politically relevant. The absence of a modern republic’s current name in 1500 or 1650 cannot be used to erase the communities, authorities and land relationships that existed before colonial rule.

Second, conquest cannot generate moral title merely through age. A long-lasting injustice may create complex reliance interests and generations of descendants, but duration alone does not convert force into consent.

Third, descendants should be governed by present obligations rather than inherited collective guilt or inherited collective innocence. This keeps responsibility concrete. Land, wealth, public institutions and legal privileges can all carry historical consequences that demand remedies, while individual civic standing does not have to become a racial genealogy test.

Fourth, pluralism must be constitutional rather than decorative. A society that celebrates cultural difference while centralizing every meaningful form of authority into one dominant political culture has not fully solved the problem. Where distinct peoples possess continuing rights or jurisdictions, the structure of the state must be capable of relationship between authorities, not only representation inside a single authority.

Fifth, contribution must be distinguished from possession. Migrants and descendants can become genuine contributors to a place: through work, family, culture, public service, knowledge, enterprise and care. Their contributions do not retroactively justify conquest, and recognizing those contributions does not require denying the people who were there before them.

Why this matters for Africa’s future

Africa is already one of the world’s most internally mobile and internationally connected regions. Urbanization, regional economic integration, climate displacement, diaspora return, cross-border trade and demographic growth will continue to create communities in which ancestry, citizenship, language and local belonging do not line up neatly. A political theory that only knows how to classify people as original owners or permanent outsiders will become less workable, not more.

The alternative is not to erase historical claims. It is to make belonging relational. A person or community belongs not because a conquest succeeded, and not because history began with their arrival, but because they participate in a reciprocal order whose rules acknowledge the people and obligations already present.

For states, that suggests practical questions. Are land and resource decisions made with the authorities and communities whose rights are directly affected? Do constitutional arrangements recognize more than symbolic cultural difference? Can migration and citizenship policy ask not only who may enter but how durable reciprocal belonging is built? Do public institutions teach history as a sequence of interacting political worlds rather than as a prelude to the modern state? Do economic policies allow communities to retain meaningful authority over the conditions of extraction and development?

These are governance questions, not exercises in moral theatre.

The end state is relationship

The most dangerous habit inherited from empire may be the belief that political order is complete only when one people, one law and one historical narrative have displaced all competitors. That model can be reproduced by the colonizer or by the post-colonial state. Changing who controls the centre does not automatically change the architecture of domination.

Uncolonization proposes a different end state: peoples can remain distinct while being joined by enforceable obligations, common institutions where appropriate, separate authority where necessary, and a shared prohibition on domination as the price of coexistence.

That is more demanding than reconciliation as sentiment. It requires states to redesign relationships. It also offers a way beyond a sterile argument between ‘the past no longer matters’ and ‘the past determines everyone’s permanent civic status.’

Southern Africa’s history is too complex for either slogan. The future will be more complex still. The task is therefore not to determine which population has the oldest receipt. It is to build institutions in which belonging no longer depends on someone else becoming subordinate, invisible or absent.

Selected sources

• South African History Online, “The Dutch Settlement” (updated July 21, 2026)
• South African History Online, “Establishment of the Cape and its impact on Khoikhoi and Dutch” (updated July 20, 2026)
• United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples
• Government of Canada, Principles respecting the Government of Canada’s relationship with Indigenous peoples