Essay: ON TRIBALISM AS THE BLACK MAN’S BURDEN

THE bitter war in Biafra (see THE WORLD) is a symbol of the continent’s divided soul, and the most discouraging example so far of a profound impasse that is crippling many of Black Africa’s 30 newly independent states. It is an impasse between tribe and nation, which is also a clash between tradition and change, fact and aspiration.

On one side is tribalism: the tenacious loyalty of 140 million Africans to primitive subgroups that represent certainty amid bewildering social and economic upheavals. On the other side is nationalism: the heady hope of creating modern states that will lead to African affluence and power. Until African leaders unify divisive tribes and build strong economies, the dream cannot be attained. Over most of Africa, false expectations of instant progress have incited unrest and power drives by rival tribes. Exploited by ambitious politicians, tribalism has become the chief complication of almost every major African conflict.

Shock Absorber

But tribalism is not only the black man’s burden; it is also the ground of his being, and therein lies its strength. Nearly every Black African, even the most elegant minister in Savile Row suits, with a Mercedes in his garage, is a member of one of the continent’s 6,000 tribes. However cosmopolitan he may be, he still derives his primary identity from his tribe, together with a loyalty toward his fellow tribesmen that is as fierce as is his utter disregard for any outsider. Makonde tribesmen still slit their cheeks to identify themselves to the world, but it is unnecessary surgery. So inseparable are the images of a man and his tribe in Africa that it is as if he carried an invisible mark on his skin.

Tribal lines, not national boundaries, make up the true map of Black Africa. The Congo’s latent disorder stems more than anything else from its stubborn attempt to throw a skein of nationhood over no fewer than 200 tribes. Even tiny Dahomey numbers more than a dozen tribes within its borders. Worse for national unity, tribalism is growing almost everywhere as a cushion against the shocks of transition into the 20th century. In Africa’s multiplying ghettos, tribal “unions” or associations flourish as a kind of foreign embassy in the city for dazed tribesmen from the country. When things go wrong, the tribe itself remains, as Robert Frost said about home, the one place where, “when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”

Says Ivory Coast President Felix Houphouet-Boieny: “Tribalism is the scourge of Africa.” Unless tribalism goes, adds Kenya’s Minister of Economic Planning Tom Mboya, “much of what we have achieved could be lost overnight.” Yet no African leader would stamp out tribalism overnight, even if he could. For safety’s sake, the leaders themselves pack their governments with fellow tribesmen. Houphouet-Boigny keeps Baule kinsmen in key posts. In his heyday, Ghana’s deposed Kwame Nkrumah heavily favored aides from his Nzima tribe. Mboya, for all his brilliance, may never reach top power in Kenya because he belongs not to the dominant Kikuyu, but to the Luo. So it goes: the central fact of Africa is that no leader can ignore the tribal grouping of peoples linked by common ancestors, speech and customs.

Whether by hunting or herding or harvesting, a basic tribal function is subsistence in a harsh environment. As relatively powerless people, tribesmen believe in magic, usually hate outsiders and respect any kinsman who survives long enough to grow old.

At some point in history, all men belonged to tribes,*and most of them resisted efforts to integrate them into nation-states. The Scots were tribal until well into the 18th century, and the Welsh partly so. Even the modern West is not wholly free of tribalism, as witness Canada’s French-speaking separatists and the bitter divisions between Walloons and Flemings in Belgium.

What makes tribes different from nations? Unlike tribes, nations are inclusive and pluralistic; they contain large bodies of unrelated citizens governed by complex political institutions through such abstract notions as patriotism. What caused most of the world’s tribes to become part of nation-states was a combination of forces that widened loyalties to ever larger political units. As farming and industry advanced, tribes became economically interdependent. Most were consolidated by the military force of empires, such as the Roman and Chinese; the growth of great religions, intertribal languages, technology and unifying national crises did the rest.

Among Africa’s first known tribal groups were the artistically talented Bushmen, who scratched out their lively rock drawings of hunters and wild animals in the Stone Age. Some 7,000 years ago, the Hamites came across the Suez, bringing a rudimentary knowledge of agriculture, and soon they intermarried with Bushmen and early Negroes to produce new races. Over the continent’s vast distance, these groups scattered into the polyglot tribes that fractionalize Africa today. Each went its own way. Some tribes raised empires based on hereditary rulers. In other tribal cultures, outstanding men or women and sometimes even children were elected chiefs. Many tribes shaped profound attitudes toward life that now haunt modern Africa’s advancement. The Ibos developed a culture that stressed personal competition, and are thus born overachievers. In contrast, a Fang finds individual excellence so reprehensible that the talented are treated as outsiders or even outlaws. Yoruba see nothing wrong with saving money, while the Tiv see worthwhile wealth only in the number of women they acquire. French Sociologist Jacques Binet found the forest people of Gabon “afraid of wealth: the possession of money was sinful to them.”

The variety is endless. An African’s language may be spoken by a million other people or by only a few thousand. A man may believe that work is degrading—or the proof of manhood. He may have been taught that eating people is wrong; then again, he may relish them. He may believe in the lofty concept of one god who lives on a nearby mountain; or he may believe there is a god in every tree in the forest.

Murderable Strangers

Amid such diversity, certain tribal customs developed almost universally. Unless he is citified indeed, for example, the African believes in the ubiquitous presence of both good and evil spirits, all of whom must be constantly appeased or deceived. However exotic to Westerners, African superstitions reflect past heroic efforts by very real people to cope with overwhelming dangers. Those efforts also produced strict rules of conduct for the general welfare. Even accidental homicide might bring exile; people suffering loathsome diseases were cast out to perish in the “bad bush.” Within the village, male strength was celebrated through communal wrestling games, but real authority was carefully granted only to elders. Masked morality plays, songs and proverbs endlessly warned against those who broke tradition. Unchanging rites governed birth, puberty, marriage, death, inheritance—all giving tribal life a remarkable strength and cohesion.

Part of the cohesion still derives from the fact that long ago, most African tribes talked out problems to the point of group consensus—and chiefs or elders demanded a conformity that made individualism as difficult then as it makes dictatorship easy now. Few bothered about how a decision should be carried out; the main goal was tribal equilibrium, a heritage that has hindered rational planning all over Africa.

Lack of compassion for anyone outside one’s immediate family or tribe became almost automatic. A non-tribesman was virtually a nonperson—and hence quite murderable. Belgium pacified the entire Europe-size Congo with a 20,000-man African force carefully made up so that its soldiers were never used in their own tribal regions. Their standard method was to round up all the inhabitants of a rebellious village, pack them into a few huts, open up with machine guns and then set the village afire. Such reprisals became so commonplace after independence, as Congolese murdered Congolese, that the world press hardly reported them.

Some people argue that the typical African’s inability to externalize his personality in relation to strangers partly accounts for his inability to accept the abstract idea of nationhood. If so, European colonialists bear heavy blame. For one thing, they did little to end the Africans’ isolation from one another. Most roads and railroads were built away from the interior, linking coastal cities and easing communications with the mother country. Back in the bush, enforced separation flowered into hundreds of cultural divergencies and peculiarities, all destined to make future unity exceedingly difficult. Moreover, colonial boundaries were drawn entirely according to European economic interests—not Africa’s own ethnic realities. To compound future strife, most freed colonies were simply handed over to African regimes whose legitimacy had not been tested by revolutionary struggle.

Disloyal Opposition

Perhaps nothing is more poignant in Africa today than the mental and spiritual effects of detribalization, a process that began when white missionaries undercut the tribal status system by proselytizing its lowliest members, such as women, children and assorted outcasts. As elders lost prestige, the young flocked to cities; severed from tribal morals yet longing for them, some sank into alcoholism, prostitution and petty crime in order to attain Western luxuries. Most were victims of “alienation”—also a Western luxury of sorts.

In some Nigerian cities, for example, an estimated two-thirds of the population suffer from some form of mental illness—mostly anxiety. Unable to teach such people, a number of Western-trained psychiatrists have lately employed witch doctors to allay their demon-ridden patients’ fears—and only then succeeded in treating them.

In countless other ways, tribalism has impeded African progress. Polygyny is still widely practiced throughout tribal Africa, as is the costly custom of buying a bride, which may mortgage a young man’s income to his father-in-law for nearly his lifetime. And the bride price is going up with the times: every year a girl spends in school increases her value to otherwise detribalized young urban men eager for educated wives.

In industry, it is not only a matter of getting people to work whose tribal ethics disdain labor or money. “Africanized” companies have other personnel problems. Where once an African hand would take orders from a white, he now loathes doing so from a black foreman of another tribe. Too-youthful management also goes down hard with tribesmen accustomed to the rule of the senior elder.

In politics, civil servants are plagued by tribal kinsmen who expect to be put on the dole if not put up in the city man’s home. Ministers and senior civil servants can usually afford a separate wing for the “tribal family.” Youthful civil servants cannot, and hence often ask to be sent to work in a village as far from their own as possible. To help relieve the burden, Niger’s President Hamani Diori has declared war against “family parasitism.”

With few exceptions, multi-party forms of democracy left behind by the departing colonial powers have vanished from Africa. Reason: the tribal tradition of decision by consensus leaves no room for a “loyal opposition.” To the African mind, a political group is either for the government or against it, and if the latter, it has no business existing. More than half of the 30 independent Black African nations are still ruled by the same men who took over in the first days of freedom. While this reflects a stability of sorts, only one African leader has been voted out of office; inevitably, coups still outrank ballots, and will for a long time to come.

Great Drama

The world undoubtedly expected too much of the Africans: invaded by foreigners as different from themselves as Martians would be from Americans, they were governed like Helots for less than a century, then abruptly cast aside. Africans were roughly in the late Iron Age when the 19th century European colonizers arrived; yet they have been expected to do in a decade or two what took the U.S. and Europe, with far more natural and human resources, several centuries to accomplish. Compared with the West’s bloody record of religious and world wars, the Africans have been surprisingly restrained.

The future is another matter. In recent years, some African nations have coped with tribalism rather well—notably Kenya, where Jomo Kenyatta, the charismatic Kikuyu, is so surely in the saddle that he long seeded his government with other tribes and allowed Kenya a two-party system. Unfortunately, Jomo has just banished the opposition party from the current local elections on the ground that its candidates filed the wrong papers.

By contrast, Kenya’s neighbors, Zambia, Malawi and Tanzania, have governed themselves better than anyone expected. One paradoxical reason is the very profusion of East African tribes; no one tribe dominates the rest. Moreover, it is one of Africa’s many ironies that tribalism can be used to create national unity as well as shred it. In Zambia last year, for example, the country’s angry young university graduates pressured older politicians to step aside, and typically inflated assorted tribal claims to clothe their ambitions. Seizing the tribal issues, President Kenneth Kaunda created a unifying nationalist ideology—a supratribal humanism based on what he called the old tribal concept of “a mutual aid society.” With that New Dealish theme, Kaunda remains firmly in power.

What Africa needs is precisely such transmutations of tribal loyalties to the larger loyalties of nationhood. The task is formidable, and not only because of the weight of tradition. In many ways, as M.I.T. Professor Harold Isaacs points out, “Africa is the most inhospitable of the major continents to human existence.” For all the image of a banana-tree civilization, with food for the reaching, most Africans are permanently undernourished and physically below par or diseased. Life expectancy is barely 40 years at best. Illiteracy is the highest in the world.

For the foreseeable future, African expectations must constantly outrace gratification—a spur that gives hope for ultimate progress but also inevitably promises more civil wars and revolutions. Unfortunately, a new order and a new map of Africa may eventually emerge only after tribes and the would-be nations have gone through many violent tests of strength. If Africa does surmount its troubles, it will have to find substitutes for tribalism, with its emphasis on order, authority and belonging. To harness those values in peaceful ways is Africa’s challenge—and a great drama.

*The word is derived from the the Latin tribus, meaning “one-third” of the Roman people, and originally referred to any of the three ethnic communities (Luceres, Ramnes, Tides) perched on the hills of Rome when the city was founded in 700 B.C.