Ethnicity in Africa: The Cauldron

In Great Decisions 2001, I. William Zartman poses the following question about conflict resolution in Africa: "can it succeed?" In a continuing series of reflections on this piece, In Focus looks at ethnicity in Africa and its role in fomenting conflict.

Zartman notes that "Africa's conflicts are mainly internal" and ethnic conflict is a substantial component in many of these conflicts. However, even when the ethnic dimension is not culpable or is a minor constituent in a struggle, ethnicity is often blamed.

Such reductionism has been a core value of western attempts to label and to describe Africa since the dawn of the European encounter. By placing conflicts and disagreements in a simple framework, external viewers are spared the tedium and the concentration of having to make sense of situations that may have no clear good guys or bad guys, and which also may show no signs of imminent resolution. This is not say that conflict along ethnic lines is not serious, rather that observers with ulterior motives have skewed its importance.

In his classic text Nations and Nationalism, Ernest Gellner makes the argument that while there are many nations, there are a limited number of nation states. In Africa this means that dozens or even hundreds of ethnic groups may coexist with the boundaries of a single sovereign nation. Many groups have just a few thousand members, far too few to keep up the burdens of maintaining a state. Yet, in the absence of a stable system of laws and a developed state apparatus, minor ethnic groups are easily swamped by dominant ones, and violence often ensues. Gellner also makes the point that too many groups also can make the polity unstable, further increasing likelihood of conflict.

The west also has its fingerprints on many of these conflicts, particularly when European powers carelessly drew the maps of Africa, dividing ethnic groups with artificial boundaries, while yoking historic enemies within territories. Exacerbating this situation, the Colonial powers often gave preferential treatment to historically weak of minor groups. After independence, these same groups quickly learned to use the coercive instruments of the State to suppress their enemies and retain their ascendancy.

One of the ironies of the subject of ethnicity in Africa is the powerful force for good that ethnic identity and affiliation can play. In Chinua Achebe's novel No Longer At Ease it is the Umuofia Progressive Union that collects funds to send Obi Okonkwo abroad for University education. In countless communities in Africa, "hometown associations" work to promote development and civic improvement.

In Africa, irony and paradox are common phenomena. One cannot help but marvel at Kenya and Tanzania, which share a common border, much shared history, and several overlapping ethnic groups. However the latter, led by the late Julius Nyerere, has managed to steer around divisive ethnic conflict, while the former has become ever more polarized and divided along ethnic lines.

The divergent experience of these two neighboring states shows that ethnicity when managed and accommodated properly can be neutralized and even used as a force for positive change. But in the hands of corrupt and desperate leaders, ethnicity provides a powerful rallying tool for retaining power. Ethnic conflict is not unique to Africa, as the former Yugoslavia shows us, but its scale and pervasiveness within African nations suggests that conflicts, which are charged with an ethnic or "tribal" dimension, will not be easy to quell.

For More Information:

Ethnologue

Ethnologue is an extremely valuable site that catalogs language grouping around the world. What makes this so valuable in Africa is that in the absence of other discrete measurements, the number of primary speakers of a particular language is often a useful proxy for the size of the ethnic group that speaks that language. In Nigeria for example, Ethnologue catalogs 478 different languages.

Ethnicity and Africa Bibliography

This site, which is housed at H-Net (Humanities Net) is a good starting point for further inquiry into the question of Ethnicity in Africa.

Rwanda and the Great Lakes Region

The Genocide in Rwanda of 1994 is one of the most recent and most horrific examples of ethnic conflict. However, the conflict cannot be solely understood in ethnic terms even as the combatants were nominally Hutu's or Tutsi's.

Valentina's Nightmare

This Frontline piece, first broadcast in 1997, examines the conflict through the eyes of Valentina, who was 13 at the time of the massacre in which her family was wiped out and tries to place the savagery into human, that is to say individual terms. The piece very powerfully underscores the hollowness and emptiness of the promises of the UN Convention on the Prevention of Genocide.

Heinemann Press: Social History of Africa Series

This series of monographs on African social history looks at the lives of people, their societies and challenges in the present and past. Many of the texts provide an excellent insight into the social and human dimensions of African events.