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To
tribe or not to tribe in Africa
By
Jonathan
Power
TFF Associate
since 1991
Comments to JonatPower@aol.com
May 25, 2006
LONDON - There was a time, not that
long ago, when African leaders insisted that it was
politically incorrect to discuss tribalism. Tribalism was
the face of old Africa that the modernizers, inheriting
their domains from the departing colonialists, refused to
accept.
Forty years later, the independence
movement has more than come of age and today's African
leaders have learnt to be not so glib. Sudan is the
latest turn of the screw that started with Katanga and
Biafra and went on to Angola, Rwanda and Burundi with
passing stops in Zimbabwe, Uganda and Senegal. One
hundred years of colonialism (less in many countries) and
the creation later of four dozen new national states,
each insisting on the sanctity of colonial boundaries as
a sensible way of avoiding future inter state conflicts,
could not blot out 800 natural tribal
boundaries.
On Africa's left it has been a
common jibe that the Europeans "divided" Africa. In fact
they brought Africa together. Indeed, as in Nigeria,
where Lord Lugard forced into one political unit over 250
ethnic groups involving today's 130 million people, you
could argue that the colonialists went overboard in the
quest for unity. In Uganda, the young Winston Churchill's
"pearl of Africa", the British fashioned a country out of
the mixture of Nilotic and Bantu peoples, despite the
fact they'd been hostile for centuries. Once the British
left it was not long before the country fell apart. Idi
Amin's murderous regime was the product of tribal enmity
not the cause. In the Sudan the British tried to push
together not just diverse African tribes but Arab peoples
too. War erupted 50 years ago, long before oil or China
came on the scene.
Sudan is African tribalism in its
extreme form. But everywhere on the continent tribalism
lives and breathes in everyday life. It is the glue that
holds ordinary society together. It is also the gunpowder
that can tear it part when politics, economics or the
increasing pressures of a degraded, overcrowded,
environment combine to ignite the charge.
In day to day village life (and in
much urban) tribalism operates like free-masonry or the
old school-tie: helping each other with jobs,
introductions and sweethearts, sharing the burden of
harvest or building a new house, resolving disputes
(whether marital or material) and, not least, fashioning
art and music. It is only when conflict erupts that these
virtues mutate into a virulent, spare-no-quarter,
contagion and the wrong tribal scar becomes a death
warrant.
This is not to argue that Africa
should now be broken up again into 800 parts. This
theoretically might work in parts of Nigeria where a
tribe like the Igbo, who unsuccessfully fought for their
own state of Biafra nearly 40 years ago, is as large as
such European nations as Sweden and Holland, but African
leaders, and indeed the voters, given the choice, have
tried to keep old colonial boundaries intact, deciding
that the virtues outweighed the negatives.
If the northern Muslim states were
not part of Nigeria it is clear that life under the emirs
would be even more old fashioned and less receptive to
modern ideas on the necessity for education and health
services than it already is. Traditional leaders, even if
"closer" to the people, are not necessarily models of
virtue. Who, after all, would want to be ruled these days
by the late paramount chief of the Lunda, Mwatayamvo, who
wore a necklace of human testicles passed down by his
ancestors? His writ ran from Zambia to Angola to Zaire
and his power was such as to give pause to Zaire's late
dictator, Mobuto Sese Seko.
Still some redrawing of the map of
Africa could be a good thing if quietly negotiated.
President Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria took his dispute
with neighbouring Cameroon over ownership of the Bakassi
peninsular to the World Court and has accepted a ruling
that will give this oil rich land to Cameroon in
July.
Nigeria, in fact, despite its many
simmering tribal disputes, shows that most of them can be
contained and the enmity softened, as long as the
political leadership works on the problems, using as it
does the negotiating skills of its ranks of experienced
politicians and clergymen combined with the financial
patronage of the centre. People today forget how terrible
the war in Biafra was, yet, despite losing one quarter of
their population, Igbos are today well integrated into
Nigeria and many of the scars have healed. Moroever,
given Nigeria's large and diverse population, the number
of deaths in recent inter-tribal disputes remains modest.
Africans are better at forgiveness than most other
people.
Even in Sudan peace may be
possible. All of us, inside and outside Africa, must
persist in trying to achieve it.
Copyright © 2006 By
JONATHAN POWER
I can be reached by
phone +44 7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
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