Reviewing Africa's tribes and borders
"
UNLIKE hyphenated Americans, most Africans are not mere ethnics who wear funny hats and eat indigestible food on the national day of their old country. They are proud tribes people. They honour their ancestors, respect traditional customs and have a strong sense of solidarity with fellow members of their tribe. Yet any mention by outside commentators of
tribalism in twenty-first century Africa is taboo, unless it is a mocking reference to the 'white tribe' which dominated the continent's southern tip during the apartheid era.
So Robert Guest, one of the best and brightest of the younger generation of journalists on my old paper, The Economist, must be congratulated. He is a brave man when he confronts tribalism directly in the longest and strongest chapter of his new book, The Shackled Continent (Macmillan, [pounds sterling]20.00. ISBN 1-4050-3388-6). Most Africans, he writes incontrovertibly yet controversially, 'feel more loyalty to their tribe than to the young nation-states of which they are citizens'.
A main reason for this non-national loyalty is obvious, and oddly, given the aversion to any mention of tribalism, is accepted by everybody who takes an interest in Africa. All agree to the following. The borders of African countries were drawn up arbitrarily by the European powers during the age of imperialism. In consequence, national boundaries cut through the middle of some tribes, and place parts of them in two or more countries. Worse still, insensitive borders sometimes compel tribes that hate each other to share a country. The colonial powers made bad matters worse by exploiting, and so widening, tribal differences. They did this in part on the old imperial divide-and-rule principle and in part because they favoured some tribes over others. The British, in particular, had a fondness for 'warrior tribes' in Africa, the Hausa of Nigeria, the Masai of Kenya, the Ndebele of then Southern Rhodesia and so on, just as they had for the 'martial' Gurkhas and Sikhs on the Indian sub-continent.
The solution seems plain: why not, at least in extreme instances of ethnic tension, consider redrawing boundaries so that they are based on modern African realities rather than past European colonial fantasies? Here even Guest has lost his nerve, just as I lost mine on the same issue when I wrote a lengthy article on Africa for The Economist about ten years ago. Neither of us was willing to question the territorial status quo--to suggest that there might just be a case for some adjustments in the map of Africa. As Guest writes: 'African countries have themselves determined not to tamper with the colonial borders, for fear that this might spark new conflicts, rather than end old ones.'
Any outsider who questions this decision risks being labelled a reactionary, if not a racist by Africans. Debate is just as inhibited in the United Nations, where the old colonial powers sometimes seem even more determined than the Africans themselves to avoid what is pejoratively called Balkanisation of Africa. Indeed, in the mid-twentieth century, when the imperial powers became more well-meaning and less exploitative, Britain promoted the precise opposite of Balkanisation. It aimed instead for the 'Yugoslavation' of Africa through regional groupings of its colonial territories. Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) and Nyasaland (Malawi) were combined by Whitehall into the Central African Federation: an arrangement that fragmented within a decade. The looser grouping of Tanganyika (now Tanzania), Uganda and Kenya proved no more durable. Post-colonial Nigeria remained united but only after one million lives were lost in a civil war in which Western governments financed the central government's offensive against the secessionist eastern province of Biafra. Ditto in the ex-Belgian Congo, where secessionist Katanga was forced back into the fold.
This is not to sneer at the generally well-intentioned outside powers which promoted such amalgamations. In an ideal world it would make sense for African countries not just to retain their existing boundaries but to co-operate more with their neighbours. For, as Guest eloquently argues, tribe and state should be separated in African countries just as faith and state are separated in the United States. Governments, he writes, should not discriminate on grounds of ethnicity. Civil servants should be recruited on merit alone. State contracts should be awarded to bidders who offer the best value for money. Aid to the poor should go to the poor, not to the rich members of ethnic groups that are, on average, poor. One can only say 'amen'.
As he concedes, his vision may be 'hopelessly idealistic'. In the real world, as opposed to Guest's Utopian one, tribalism remains the most potent political force in Africa. That is not to say that all divisions in African countries are as extreme as those in, say, Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe, where the Shona are fed and the Ndebele starved. Or indeed in Sudan, where the Islamic Arabs in the north are no more likely to make common purpose with the Christian Africans in the south than the Israelis are to befriend the Palestinians. But it is to say that in many African countries neither politicians nor their constituents feel much sense of
national identity. A politician expects, and is expected, to favour members of his own tribe. Far from being deplored, nepotism is applauded.
Only a few countries are immune from the virus. In some, like Tanzania, tribal communities were shattered by the depredations of the slave trade. In consequence, the tribes are now so weak and numerous that they have only a marginal influence at the national level. Other countries, like Botswana, are granted immunity by the fact that almost everybody belongs to associated tribes and speaks the same language.
The trend in some other African countries is mostly in the right direction, away from tribalism and toward a shared national identity. South Africa, the continent's most successful big economy, is the most important case in point. Inspired by such extraordinarily enlightened leaders as Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu and F.W. de Klerk, people of all tribes and races there are learning to rub along together. Which is just as well, since they have no sensible alternative. Indians and Zulus, Xhosas and coloureds, Anglos and Afrikaners are so geographically and economically integrated that they could not be parted without catastrophic consequences. It is now obvious even to the Afrikaners that the apartheid fantasy of a South Africa split up into tribal homelands, known as Bantustans, was bound eventually to collapse under what Marxists would term its own contradictions.
In some other African countries redrawn boundaries are conceivable but undesirable. Zimbabwe, perhaps surprisingly is among them despite the apparently strong case for the formation of an independent Matabeleland along the lines of the quasi-tribal southern African states of Botswana, Swaziland and Lesotho. The widening of tribal divisions in Zimbabwe between the dominant Shona and the cowed Ndbele are largely a result of Mr Mugabe's exploitation of atavistic forces. When this increasingly rancid dictator finally goes, voluntarily or involuntarily, there is still a chance that Zimbabwe will be able to rebuild its once enviably strong civil society and that tribal differences will narrow again.
But in some African countries a redrafting of boundaries could do more good than harm. Not, unfortunately, in Rwanda. After the Holocaust of 1994, its Tutsi and Hutu people have good reason to distrust each other but their lives are so closely interwoven in one of the most densely populated areas of Africa that new borders are impractical. Sudan, fortunately, has more room to manoeuvre. The hatred between its Arab/Islamic north and its Christian/animist black south is palpable. Even African nations are now ready to concede, however reluctantly, that there is an argument for new frontiers drawn along racial/tribal/religious lines. If all goes according to the current peace plan, the people of the south will eventually be given the opportunity in a referendum to vote on whether or not they want to form an independent country.
Similar plebiscites ought also to be considered in Nigeria, the most populous country in black Africa and the most powerful after South Africa. The main argument against a break-up is by now tired and discredited. During the forty years since Nigeria gained independence from Britain, the one-Nigeria lobby has incessantly argued that if its oil-rich parts were allowed to break up they would monopolise the
oil revenues and leave less lucky regions destitute.
Somehow they are unable to see that Nigerians are destitute anyway. As Guest notes, between 1974, when oil prices soared, and 1998, Nigeria received some $280 billion in oil revenues. 'Through corruption, waste and foolish investments, governments squandered the lot. In fact, since they borrowed billions against future oil revenues and squandered that money too, it is fair to say that Nigeria blew more than all of its windfall. By 1998 Nigerians were poorer than when the
oil boom began.'
Surely, in such circumstances, the possibility of a new beginning could at least serve to concentrate minds. Nigerians need to ask themselves whether the existing borders make sense; whether the 130 million people who now call themselves Nigerians would not be better off if they were divided into three nations based on its northern, western and eastern regions. For each of these regions has a shared sense of identity that Nigeria as a whole lacks.
Other Africans states riven by tribal loyalties could also usefully contemplate a correction of the old colonial boundaries. As Nigeria's sad experience has shown, it does not make much sense for countries to operate on the premise that their people share a national identity when the premise is patently false. Disunity is undesirable. It ought to be resisted, but not at all costs. Sometimes unity saps strength."
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2242/is_1663_285/ai_n6172492/?tag=content;col1