Comment: Tribalism in Africa. (1994)
Tribalism refers to the political mobilisation of ethnic identity, so that loyalty to a descent group shapes votes, jobs, coalitions and violence. Colonial observers read it as Africa’s timeless past. Modern scholarship reads it as largely a modern product: colonial rule shaped it, and competition for the post-colonial state keeps it alive.
Primordial or Constructed?
- The primordial view. Clifford Geertz (“The Integrative Revolution”, 1963) described the new states as held back by primordial attachments of blood, language, region and custom that competed with civil loyalty. Modernisation theory expected them to dissolve.
- The constructivist correction. Terence Ranger (“The Invention of Tradition in Colonial Africa”, 1983) showed administrators and missionaries codifying fluid, overlapping identities into fixed “tribes” with “customary” law. John Iliffe (A Modern History of Tanganyika, 1979) put it memorably: Europeans believed Africans belonged to tribes; Africans built tribes to belong to.
- The institutional argument. Mahmood Mamdani (Citizen and Subject, 1996) traced tribalism to indirect rule. The colonial state was bifurcated: urban “citizens” lived under civil law, while rural “subjects” lived under chiefs who enforced ethnic customary law. He called this decentralised despotism. Independence changed the rulers but often kept the structure.
- The instrumental view. Daniel N. Posner (2004) showed that Chewa and Tumbuka are allies in Zambia and adversaries in Malawi, because group size relative to the national arena decides whether ethnicity is worth mobilising. Political arithmetic, not culture alone, activates it.
How Tribalism Works
- Borders. Post-Berlin Conference (1884–85) frontiers enclosed dozens of groups in single states.
- Winner-take-all politics. Where the state is the main source of wealth, neo-patrimonial rulers reward co-ethnics. Jean-François Bayart called this the politics of the belly.
- Violence. After Kenya’s disputed election of December 2007, Kikuyu, Luo and Kalenjin clashes killed over 1,100 people and displaced hundreds of thousands. In Rwanda, Belgian identity cards had turned Hutu and Tutsi into fixed categories, which the organisers of the 1994 genocide used to find their victims.
- Institutional answers. Kofi Annan’s 2008 mediation produced power-sharing in Kenya, and its 2010 Constitution devolved power to 47 counties. Ethiopia’s 1995 ethnic federalism, with a secession clause in Article 39, did not prevent the Tigray war (2020–22), whose estimated deaths range from 100,000 to 600,000.
Critique and Counter-cases
- The label itself. Similar mobilisation in the Balkans is called nationalism. Calling it “tribalism” in Africa implies backwardness.
- Not only divisive. John Lonsdale distinguished moral ethnicity, a community’s internal debate about virtue and obligation, from political tribalism, the competitive use of ethnicity by elites.
- Salience can be reduced. Julius Nyerere‘s Tanzania combined Swahili, a single national party and curbs on chiefly power to keep ethnic salience low.
An Indian Parallel
India, following Jawaharlal Nehru‘s Tribal Panchsheel, protects tribes through the Fifth and Sixth Schedules and does not rule through them. Yet Manipur since May 2023 shows the African lesson: a dispute over Scheduled Tribe status turned into Meitei–Kuki-Zo violence that killed over 250 people.
Conclusion
Tribalism in Africa is less an ancient survival than a political technology: colonial rulers built it and competition for scarce state resources keeps it in use. Inclusive institutions, devolution and broad-based parties can reduce it; condemning it as backwardness cannot.