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Africa: "Tribe" Background Paper, 2
Africa: "Tribe" Background Paper, 2
Date distributed (ymd): 971221
APIC Document
APIC Background Paper 010 (November 1997)
This series of background papers is part of a program of public education
funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Ford Foundation.
The attractively produced typeset version of this background paper is
available from APIC for $2 each ($1.60 each for 20 or more). Add 15% for
postage and handling. Order in bulk for your class or study group, or to
send to news media in response to stereotypical coverage of Africa.
Talking about "Tribe": Moving from Stereotypes to Analysis
November, 1997
(continued from part 1)
Case in Point: Zambia
Zambia is slightly larger than the U.S. state of Texas. The country
has approximately 10 million inhabitants and a rich cultural diversity.
English is Zambia's official language but it also boasts 73 different indigenous
languages. While there are many indigenous Zambian words which translate
into nation, people, clan, language, foreigner, village, or community,
there are none that easily translate into "tribe."
Sorting Zambians into a fixed number of "tribes" was a byproduct
of British colonial rule over Northern Rhodesia (as Zambia was known prior
to independence in 1964). The British also applied stereotypes to the different
groups. Thus the Bemba, Ngoni and the Lozi were said to be "strong."
The Bemba and the Ngoni were "warlike" although the Bemba were
considered the much "finer race" because the Ngoni had intertwined
with "inferior tribes and have been spoiled by civilization."
The Lamba were labelled "lazy and indolent" and the Lunda considered
to have "an inborn distaste for work in a regular way." These
stereotypes in turn often determined access to jobs. The Lunda, for instance,
were considered "good material from which to evolve good laborers."
After Zambia gained its independence in 1964, the challenge was how
to forge these disparate ethnic groups into a nation-state in which its
citizens would identify as Zambians. To a large extent, this has succeeded.
Zambians identify with the nation as well as with individual ethnic groups.
Many trace their own family heritage to more than one Zambian group. Most
Zambians live not only within but beyond their ethnic boundaries. Identities
at different levels coexist and change.
With an economy focused on copper mining, the urban areas and mines
became a magnet for Zambians from across the country and all ethnic groups
seeking employment. By the 1990s almost half of all Zambians lived in urban
areas. Despite ethnic stereotypes, no group had an overwhelming advantage
in urban employment. Cultural diversity was combined with a common national
experience, which was reinforced by several factors.
First, Zambia adopted a boarding school system for grades 7-12. This
system brought together children from all ethnic groups to live and learn
together for nine months of the year. Along with English, several Zambian
languages and social studies also became a major component of school curricula
enabling Zambians to learn about and to communicate with each other. As
a result of living together, interacting in the towns and cities, and going
to school together, the average Zambian speaks at least three languages.
Second, Zambia's first president, Kenneth Kaunda, made a point of establishing
policies and using tools that would promote nation-building. For example,
he popularized the slogan "One-Zambia, One Nation". This slogan
was supported by the use of tools such as ethnic balancing in the appointments
to cabinet and other key government positions. The intent was to provide
Zambia's various ethnic groups with representation and hence a stake in
the new nation that was being forged. Ethnic background has been only one
among many factors influencing political allegiances.
Third, after independence the marriage rate among people of different
ethnic identities increased. In the same way that one should not immediately
assume that an American called Syzmanski speaks or understands Polish,
neither should one necessarily expect a Zambian with the last name of Chimuka
to speak or understand Tonga. As with most Americans, Zambian names are
increasingly becoming no more than one indicator of one's ethnic heritage.
Many Zambians do use the word tribe. Its meaning, however, is probably
closer to that of an "ethnic group" in a Western country than
what Westerners understand by a "tribe." The word does not have
negative undertones, or necessary implications of the degree of group loyalty,
but refers to one's mother tongue and, to lesser extent, specific cultural
traits. For example, in the same way that Jewish Americans celebrate Bar
Mitzvah as a rite of passage into adulthood, various Zambian ethnic groups
have similar rites of passage ceremonies, such as Siyomboka among the Lozi
and Mukanda for the Luvale. An urban family may or may not celebrate a
particular rite, and may need to decide which branch of the family's older
generation they should follow.
Case in Point: Hutu/Tutsi
The deadly power of the split between Hutu and Tutsi in central Africa
is witnessed not only by the genocide of more than half a million carried
out by Hutu extremists against Tutsi and moderate Hutu in Rwanda in 1994,
but also by a long list of massacres by extremists on both sides in recent
years, in Rwanda, in Burundi, and in eastern Congo.
Trying to understand this set of conflicts is as complex as trying to
understand the Holocaust in Europe, or current conflicts in the Middle
East or the Balkans. No outside framework or analogy to another region
can substitute for understanding the particularities of the tangled recent
history of the Great Lakes region. But one point is clear: there are few
places in Africa where the common concept of "tribe" is so completely
inappropriate as in this set of conflicts. Neither understanding nor coping
with conflict is helped in the slightest by labelling the Hutu/Tutsi distinction
as "tribal."
Before European conquest the Great Lakes region included a number of
centralized, hierarchical and often warring kingdoms. The battle lines
of pre-colonial wars, however, were not drawn between geographically and
culturally distinct "Hutu" and "Tutsi" peoples.
Furthermore, within each unit, whether pre-colonial kingdom or the modern
countries defined by colonial boundaries, Tutsi and Hutu speak the same
language and share the same culture. Stereotypes identify the Tutsi as
"pastoralists" and the Hutu as "agriculturalists,"
the Tutsi as "patrons" and the Hutu as "clients," or
the Tutsi as "rulers" and the Hutu as "ruled." Some
scholars have tried to apply the concept of "caste." Yet each
of these frameworks also exaggerates the clarity of the distinction and
reads back into history the stereotypes of current political conflict.
In two respects, such stereotypes are misleading. First, shared economic,
social and religious practices attest to the fact that interaction was
much more frequent, peaceful and cooperative than conflictual. Second,
the historical evidence makes it clear that there was at least as much
conflict among competing Tutsi dynasties as between Tutsi and Hutu polities.
What is clear from recent scholarship is that the dividing line between
Hutu and Tutsi was drawn differently at different times and in different
places. Thus, leading Burundi scholar Rene Lemarchand notes the use of
the term "Hutu" to mean social subordinate: "a Tutsi cast
in the role of client vis-a-vis a wealthier patron would be referred to
as 'Hutu,' even though his cultural identity remained Tutsi" (Burundi:
Ethnic Conflict and Genocide. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996,
10). But both "clients" and "patrons" could be either
Hutu or Tutsi. There were Hutu as well as Tutsi who raised cattle. A family
could move from one group to the other over generations as its political
and economic situation changed.
As historian David Newbury notes, the term "Hutu" in precolonial
times probably meant "those not previously under the effective rule
of the court, and non-pastoralist (though many 'Hutu' in western Rwanda
owned cattle, sometimes in important numbers)" (David Newbury, Kings
and Clans. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991, 277). More generally,
the Tutsi/Hutu distinction seems to have made sense in relation to the
political hierarchy of a kingdom. It accordingly differed, and changed,
in accord with the political fortunes of the different kingdoms and with
the degree of integration of different regions into those kingdoms.
Under colonial rule, first by the Germans and then by the Belgians,
this hierarchical division was racialized and made more rigid. Ethnic identity
cards were required, and the state discriminated in favor of Tutsi, who
were considered to be closer to whites in the racial hierarchy. This was
reinforced by versions of history portraying the Tutsi as a separate "Hamitic"
people migrating into the region from the north and conquering the Bantu-
speaking Hutu. In fact, current historical evidence is insufficent to confirm
to what extent the distinction arose by migration and conquest or simply
by social differentiation in response to internal economic and political
developments.
In the post-colonial period, for extremists on both sides, the divide
has come to be perceived as a racial division. Political conflicts and
inequalities in the colonial period built on and reinforced stereotypes
and separation. Successive traumatic conflicts in both Burundi and Rwanda
entrenched them even further. Despite the efforts of many moderates and
the existence of many extended families crossing the Hutu/Tutsi divide,
extremist ideologies and fears are deadly forces. Far from being the product
of ancient and immutable "tribal" distinctions, however, they
are based above all in political rivalries and experiences of current generations.
[For a collection of articles introducing the complex Great Lakes crisis,
see the Association of Concerned Africa Scholars Great Lakes Briefing Packet,
December 1996 (available for US$9.00 from ACAS, 326 Lincoln Hall, 702 S.
Wright St., Urbana, IL 68101; e-mail: acas@prairienet.org;
web: http://www.prairienet.org/acas).]
Case in point - Zulu identity in South Africa
Zulu identity in South Africa is historical, not static. What it means
to be "Zulu" has changed over time, and means different things
to different people today. Before the nineteenth century, "Zulu"
was the clan name of the kings of a small kingdom, which was tributary
to the Mthethwa kingdom. Beginning around 1815, the Zulu kingdom displaced
the Mthethwa kingdom and conquered dozens of other nearby small kingdoms
which gradually took on Zulu identity on top of older local identities.
Culturally these communities already had much in common. Similarities
of culture and mutually intelligible language extended south to the Xhosa,
Mpondo, Thembu, Xesibe and Bhaca kingdoms, as well as north to many but
not all of the political communities in what are now Swaziland and Mpumalanga
province in South Africa. Ethnic identities within this continuum of culture
and language came mainly from political identification with political communities.
The expansion of political powers, such as the Zulu and Swazi kingdoms,
created new identities for many people in the 19th century.
White colonization began in the 1830s, when the Zulu kingdom was still
quite new. White conquest took decades. Many chiefdoms remained in the
independent Zulu kingdom while others came under the British colony of
Natal. Many people and chiefs only recently conquered by the Zulu kingdom
fled into Natal, rejecting political Zulu identity, although retaining
cultural affinity. But as all Zulu-speaking people came under white South
African rule, and as white rule became more oppressive, evolving into apartheid,
the Zulu identity and memories of the powerful independent kingdom became
a unifying focus of cultural resistance.
Under South African rule, the term "tribe" referred to an
administrative unit governed by a chief under rules imposed by the white
government. Tribes were thus not ancient and traditional, but modern bureaucratic
versions of the old small kingdoms. Yet the Zulu people or nation was also
referred to as a tribe by whites. Thus the Zulu "tribe" was composed
of several hundred tribes.
With apartheid, the government fostered ethnic nationalism or tribalism
to divide Africans, claiming that segregated, impoverished land reserves
("homelands") could become independent countries. Conversely,
when the African National Congress (ANC) formed in 1912, it saw tribalism
--- divisive ethnic politics --- as an obstacle to creating a modern nation.
But it saw diverse linguistic, cultural and political heritages as sources
of strength. The new nation had to be built by extending and uniting historic
identities, not by negating them.
Since the 1980s severe conflict between followers of the ANC and followers
of the largely Zulu-based Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) has killed tens of
thousands of people. Sometimes portrayed as reflecting primitivism and
ancient tribal rivalries, this violence illustrates how "tribe"
misleads.
Most of the conflict has been Zulu people fighting other Zulu people
in the province of KwaZulu-Natal. There are complicated local causes related
to poverty and patronage politics, but the fighting is also about what
Zulu ethnic or national identity should be in relation to South African
national identity. Zulu people are deeply divided over what it means to
be Zulu.
In the early 1990s the violence spread to the Johannesburg area and
often took the ethnic form of Zulu IFP followers vs. Xhosa ANC followers.
Yet this was not an ancient tribal conflict either, since historically
the independent Zulu and Xhosa nations never fought a war. Rather it was
a modern, urban, politicized ethnic conflict.
On the one side, the IFP has continually stressed its version of Zulu
identity. Also, since the ANC has followers in all ethnic groups, as the
1994 elections showed, neighborhoods with many Xhosa residents may have
been specifically targetted in order to falsely portray the ANC as a "Xhosa"
organization. On the other side, the ANC at the time tried to isolate the
IFP in a way that many ordinary Zulu people saw as anti-Zulu, making them
fearful. As has been recently confirmed, the apartheid regime's police
and military were actively involved in covert actions to instigate the
conflict.
The IFP relies heavily on symbols of "tradition." But to see
that as making Zulu identity "tribal" obscures other realities:
the IFP's modern conservative market-oriented economic policy; the deep
involvement of all Zulu in an urban-focused economy, with half living permanently
in cities and towns; the modern weapons, locations and methods of the violence,
and the fact that even as the IFP won the rural vote in the most recent
elections, a strong majority of urban Zulu-speakers voted ANC.
Case in Point: The Yoruba People
There are 20 million or more people who speak Yoruba as their mother
tongue. Some 19 million of them live in Nigeria, but a growing diaspora
are dispersed around Africa and around the world. Yoruba-speaking communities
have lived in other West African countries for centuries. Yoruba culture
and religion have profoundly influenced the African diaspora in Brazil,
Cuba and other New World countries, even among communities where the language
itself is completely or partially forgotten.
Taking a quick look at linguistic or national communities of similar
size, one can see that this is roughly equivalent to the total numbers
of Dutch speakers (21 million, including Flemish speakers in Belgium).
It is more than the total population of Australia (18 million) or the total
number of speakers of Hungarian (14 million) or Greek (12 million).
Like parallel communities of Igbo-speakers (16 million) and Hausa-speakers
(35 million), situated largely within but also beyond the borders of the
state of Nigeria, the Yoruba people has a long and complex history which
is hard to encompass within "tribal" images. There is a long
artistic tradition, with terra-cotta sculpture flourishing in the Ile-Ife
city state a thousand years ago. There is a common mutually understandable
language, despite many dialects and centuries of political and military
contention among distinct citystates and kingdoms. There is a tradition
of common origin in the city of Ile-Ife and of descent from Oduduwa, the
mythical founder of the Yoruba people.
Notably, Yoruba common language and culture predate any of the modern
"nations" of North or South America. In the 17th and 18th centuries,
the Oyo kingdom ruled over most of Yorubaland, but included non-Yoruba
speakers as well. Today that territory is within the nation of Nigeria,
with borders created by European conquest. Yoruba identity does not coincide,
then, with the boundaries of a modern nation-state. Its historical depth
and complexity, however, is fully comparable to that of European nations
or other identities elsewhere in the world that do.
Among Yorubas, a religious pluralism of traditional religion, Islam
and Christianity has prevailed for more than a century, with political
disputes rarely coinciding with religious divisions. Ancestral cities or
polities (ilu, comparable to the Greek polis) are a far more important
source of political identity, along with modern political divisions.
In short, Yoruba identity is real, with substantial historical roots.
But it corresponds neither to a modern nation-state nor to some simple
version of a traditional "tribe." It coexists with loyalty to
the nation (Nigeria for most, but many are full citizens of other nations),
and with "home-town" loyalties to ancestral cities.
In determining what term to use in English, one cannot resort to the
Yoruba language, which has no real equivalent for the English word "tribe."
The closest are the words eniyan or eya, with literal translations in English
as "part" and "portion." The term may refer to the
Yoruba themselves, subgroups or other groups. In Yoruba, Hausa-speakers
would be referred to as awon eniyan Hausa or awon Hausa, meaning "Hausa
people." Non-Yoruba-speaking Nigerians of whatever origin may be referred
to as "ti ara ilu kannaa" -- "those of the same country."
In English, no term actually fills in the complexity that is in the
history and present reality so that outsiders understand it as do the people
themselves. Terms such as "ethnic group" or simply "people,"
however, carry less baggage than "tribe," and leave room open
for that complexity.
For Further Reading
There is an abundant academic literature on "tribe" and ethnicity,
much available only in specialized academic publications. The following
are a few shorter sources which discuss the issue in general terms and
provide references to other sources.
In The Oxford Companion to Politics of the World edited by Joel
Krieger (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), the articles by A. B.
M. Mafeje on "Tribalism" and Okwudiba Nnoli on "Ethnicity"
are short essays with additional literature references.
A short statement from a standard textbook in African Studies, "On
the Concept of Tribe" can be found in John N. Paden and Edward W.
Soja, The African Experience (Evanston: Northwestern University
Press, 1970), Volume II, 20-22. This is followed by a section on the "Nature
of Ethnic Community."
An often-cited early statement by a prominent anthropologist rejecting
the term is Aidan Southall, "The Illusion of Tribe," in Peter
Gutkind, ed., The Passing of Tribal Man in Africa (Leiden: Brill,
1970), 28-51.
Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban, Richard Lobban and Linda Zangari, "'Tribe':
A Socio-Political Analysis," writing in UCLA's Ufahamu VII:
1 (1976), 143-165, also argue the case for discontinuing the use of the
term.
"If It's Africa, This Must be a Tribe," originally published
in a special 1990 issue of Africa News, "Capturing the Continent:
U.S. Media Coverage of Africa," is available online at http://www.africanews.org/info/tribe.html.
In the H-Africa discussion group of Africanist historians and other
scholars, there have been two recent discussions of the use of the word
"tribe," as well as other related discussions of Western stereotypes
of Africa.
See http://h-net2.msu.edu/logs.
Then choose the H-Africa discussion, and check the logs for June 1995 and
October 1997 in particular.
This material is produced and distributed by the Africa Policy Information
Center (APIC), the educational affiliate of the Washington Office on Africa.
APIC's primary objective is to widen the policy debate in the United States
around African issues and the U.S. role in Africa, by providing accessible
policy-relevant information and analysis usable by a wide range of groups
and individuals.
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