Settlers are made by conquest, not just by immigration. Settlers are kept settlers by a form of the state that makes a distinction – particularly juridical – between conquerers and conquered, settlers and natives, and makes it the basis of other distinctions that tend to buttress the conquerers and isolate the conquered, politically. However fictitious these distinctions may appear historically, they become real political facts for they are embodied in real political institutions.

The settler-native question is a political question. It is also a historical question. Settler and natives belong together. You cannot have one without the other, for it is the realtionship between them that makes one a settler and the other a native. To do away withone, you have to do away with the other.

Mahmood Mamdani, ‘When does a settler become a native? Reflections on the colonial roots of citizenship in Equatorial and South Africa’, Inaugural Lecture as A. C. Jordan Professor of African Studies, UCT, 1998.