ARTS DISCUSSION 2

3

THE ORIGINS OF ''DARKEST AFRICA''

Across the grasslands ofWest Africa, the epic of Sundiata continues to be told

almost eight hundred years after this hero united the kingdoms of the upper

Niger River and founded the massive Mali empire. In the best-known prose

translacion of che epic, the singer-storyteller Mamoudou Kouyace begins by

relating his qualifications as speaker:"My word is pure and free ofall untruth:'

For him, "the arr of eloquence has no secrecs:' He chen commands his audi­

ence to pay attention:"Listen then, sons of Mali, children of the black people,

listen co my word, for I am going to cell you of Sundiata, the father of che

Bright Country, of che savanna land, the ancestor of those who draw the bow,

the master ofa hundred vanquished kings:'1 In any of its many versions, the en­

suing story is full of confidence, adventure, and wisdom. le is the story of

"the Bright Country:'

How different the Sundiata epic is from the stereotypical Western view of

Africa as the Dark Concinenc. In the Western view, Africa has been a land

ofprimitives who practice the"darkest" of customs, including cannibalism, rit­

ual murder, incest, witchcraft, and incessant warfare. Everywhere Westerners

looked in Africa they found depraviry. Or they found peoples who had never

advanced beyond the stage achieved by European children. They had only rudi­

mentary languages, forms of government, and art- even a rudimentary abil­

ity to chink.

35

36 Chapter 3: The Origins of «Darkest Africa"

This dark view ofAfrica has been so predominant chat we must ask where

it came from. Scholars have investigated chis question by going back co the ori­

gins ofWestern civilization to see whether Africans have always fared so badly.

They have concluded chat the image of the Dark Continent is a recent fabri­

cation, d eveloped in the nineteenth century as Europeans became increasingly

interested in bot h science and African conquest.

Africans in Antiquity In ancient Greece and Rome, race does not seem to have been a significant

issue. Frank M. SnowdenJr., who h as prepared what is perhaps the most com­

plete study of race in the ancient Mediterranean, states chat these civilizations

regarded"yellow hair or blue eyes a mere geographical accident, and developed

no special racial theory about the inferiority of darker peoples:'2 Indeed,

Mediterranean peoples referred co exceptional physical traits to assert the fun­

damental unity ofhumanity. Thus, the extraordinary fairness of the Scychians

and the darkness of che Ethiopians became lessons in how physical difference

should make no difference in judging a person's worth.3 Cultural conflicts did

arise in these times, of course. The various city-states and empires frequently

displayed ethnocentrism toward ocher cultures, and they certainly engaged in

war. Nonetheless, at: most times a certain cultural equality prevailed chat al­

lowed interaction and relatively free traffic in goods and ideas. l e was not con­

sidered strange to find E thiopians residing and thriving in Greece, Rome, and

elsewhere in t h e ancient Mediterranean.

We also know that Africa contributed to the other cultures of the Mediter­

ranean. Pre-Arab Egypt and even the Upper Nile kingdoms such as Meroe

were relatively well known to Greeks by the fifth century BC.4 What we do

n ot know is how much the Greeks and others borrowed from Africa. Some

historians claim chat Greek civilization actually emerged from African ideas

and chat nineteenth-century European scholarship tried to hide the debt fo r

racist reasons. l e will take some time to sort out the evidence, but this debate

is largely a modern one over racial bias. In the ancient world, t h e debate would

not have made much sense, because the people of that time didn't think in

such racial terms. The question of race has also been raised with respect to ancient Hebrews

and Christians because they are the progenitors of modern Western religions.

No evidence, however, points to Jewish or Christian racism toward Africans or

37 Africans in Antiquity

anyone else. One does find an effort in Judaism to exclude t:hose who were not:

Jews, but this exclusion was based on religion and culture, not race. In modern

times, Christian racists have insisted that the Hebrew Bible supports the view

that God believes blacks to be inferior. Their primary evidence comes from

their understanding of Genesis 9:18- 29, in which Noah curses his youngest

son, Ham, and Ham's descendants, the Canaanites:"Cursed be Canaan; a slave

of slaves shall he be to his brothers.n Ham is supposed by some to have been

black, and the curse is believed to indicate God's approval ofslavery, American

segregation, the colonization ofAfrica, and apartheid. But there is no evidence

that the Hebrews saw it this way or that they were anti-African or racist.

Today's mainstream biblical scholars agree unanimously that th e passage in Genesis was not a condemnation of the black race but an attempt to explain

the rift between Israel and Canaan and to denounce Canaan for its immoral

culture. And there is no indication in the Bible that the inhabitants of Canaan

were black.5

The most frequently studied case in which race might be a factor in the

Christian testament comes from the story of Philip, a Christian who baptized

the black eunuch treasurer of the queen of Nubia. Superficially, this tale from

the Act:s of the Apostles might be understood as a comment on race and used

as an endorsement of either missions to Africa or racial equality. But modern

scholars assert that it was neither and that the issues of Africa and race were

not important in the story. Rather, the point was that Christians should accept

even eunuchs, whomJews had refused to receive as converts.6 Moreover, Snow­

den writes, the early Christians adopted the Greek view ofthe unity ofhuman­

ity and used both Ethiopians and Scythians to illustrate how Christianity was

for all. For example, both Origen and Augustine, early Christian commentators,

employed the metaphor·of blackness to describe the souls of sinners. But in a

play on words and ideas, they contrasted the blackness of the Ethiopian's skin,

which was natural, with the blackness ofa sinner's soul, which was acquired by

neglect. All sinners were black, whereas Ethiopians who followed Christ were

white. Although blackness was employed as a metaphor for sin, it was specifi­

cally dissociated from the blackness of the Ethiopians' skin.7

The Arab conquest of North Africa after AD 639 made direct contact be­

tween Europeans and black Africans difficult. Thus, black Africa was of minor

concern to Europeans for the next eight hundred years. Black Africans did ap­

pear in Europe, however, in various roles. One of their most interesting occu­

pations was as "black knights;' important characters in some medieval epics.

38 Chapter 3: The Origins of "Darkest Africa»

In these epics, African difference was treated in several ways and served as a de­

vice t:o construct: medieval ideas about: chivalry. In light of modern European

racism, it is striking that in the medieval epics, black knights were considered

fully human and often exceptionally competenc.8 We also know chat Euro­

peans traded regularly with Africans south of the Sahara through Arab inter­

mediaries. Evidence even suggests chat the Renaissance in Europe was fueled

by the importation of Large quantities of West African gold. In addition, the

works of a few Arab geographers who traveled to sub-Saharan Africa became

available in medieval Europe. Indeed, until the late 1700s, the best knowledge on

the interior of sub-Saharan Africa came from Arab sources.

Europeans in ancient and medieval civilizations were, it should be empha­

sized, ethnocentric, but not particularly racist. They all believed that their civ­

ilizations were superior and that ochers' civilizations were inferior. In general,

t:he less they knew about a civilization the worse they thought about it and its

inhabitants. But there is considerable evidence that Europeans considered the

Africans who lived in Europe co be fully human.

Western Views of Africans, ca. 1400-1830 With the opening of Europe's Age of Exploration in the mid-1400s, Africa

again entered European consciousness. This time, the relationship between

Europe and Africa and, indeed, between Europe and the rest of the world was

quite different. The Portuguese, Spanish, British, Durch, and French explor­

ers, and ochers who followed them, were a pugnacious lot out to profit from

non-Europeans. And yet, although they eventually conquered most of the

world, the Europeans were not mere predators. They felt a need to justify their

actions in moral terms, and they frequently wondered about the meaning of

their relations with other peoples. Historian Michael Adas argues that until the mid-eighteenth century, Eu­

ropeans' perspecrives on their relationships with non-Europeans tended to be

formulated by and confined to missionaries and philosophers. Less educated

Europeans who traveled would have found it difficult to originate such broader

views, because they were largely ignorant of the achievements of their own civ­

ilization. They could not have made comparisons, for example, between Europe

and Africa or between Europe and China. This was fortunate for Africa in the

sense chat ordinary travelers who wrote accounts of African societies did not

filter what they observed through any strong ideological biases.9

39 W este rn Views of Africans, ca. 1400-1830

In his book The Image of Africa : British Ideas and Action, 1780-1850, Philip

D. Currin makes the point more forcefully. Curtin says that in the eighteenth

century, when at least six million slaves were taken from Africa, Europeans in

general"knew more and cared more about Africa than they did at any later pe­

riod up to the 1950s:'10 This remarkable statement is based on the facts that

Europeans could obtain information about Africa from relatively unbiased

tradei:s and travelers, and that Europeans had not yet completely connected race and

culture in ways chat prevented chem from seeing Africa fairly.

And yet European att:itudes toward Africa were becoming more negative

and more racist. According to A. Bulunda Icandala, European artists-painters,

sculptors, playwrights, and poets-increasingly portrayed Africans stereotyp­

ically and unfavorably. He emphasizes that during the Renaissance, Europe

still relied heavily on the medieval worldview, which divided the world into

Christian and non-Christian spheres or, more starkly, into a struggle between

Christianity and the devil. Thus the story of Ham, mentioned above, was used

widely to justify the slave trade. As Europe's knowledge of Africa grew through

exploration and trade, including the slave trade, Europeans increasingly painted

Africa and Africans in negative terms. And those negative terms were increas­

ingly associated wi th physical features such as color and not just culrure.11

I n sum, eighteenth-century Westerners preferred their own culture to all

others and were not without racist ideas, but, unlike nineteenth-century Eu­

ropeans, they did not presume that everything Africans did was inferior sim­

ply because of their race. Eighteenth-century links between race and c ulture

were still largely unconscious and imprecise. Curtin calls this a form of "mod­

erate racism," which "condemned individual Africans as bad men- or all

Africans as savage men- but ... left the dear impression that Africans were

men:' 12

One way to illustrate this attitude is to point out the efforts that Europeans

made co help Africans who had been forcibly removed from Africa to return

to the continent. I n Britain, the example of S ierra Leone is foremost. Con­

ceived in the 1780s by philanthropists who wanted co give free b lacks residing

in Britain and non-African parts of the British Empire the opportunity to

repatriate, this colony on the west coast of Africa was organized on utopian

principles supposedly applicable to all human societies.

The effort was clearly racist in the sense thac it rid European territories of

many blacks. However, such·plans show that in the eighteench and early nine­

teenth centuries, Britons still believed that blacks could not only rule themselves

40 Chapter 3; The Origins of"Darkest African

in Africa but also establish utopian communities if they were provided the

proper tools and legal framework. Unfortunately, planners of such resettle­

ment experiments rarely took into account the actual physical conditions in

Africa, the training and skills of the settlers, or previous failed attempts to es­

tablish utopian communities. In 1808 the British government took over Sierra

Leone as a naval base and as a colony in which to resettle the thousands ofAfricans

freed during the effort to end the slave trade.13

An American example also illustrates the ambiguous Western attitudes to­

ward race. Beginning in the 1820s, the American Colonization Society sup­

ported a"Back to Africa" movement that attempted to colonize Liberia, on the

coast ofWest Africa, with groups offreed American slaves. As in Sierra Leone,

the organizers had mixed motives. Helping African Americans to live in Africa

was in one sense a vote of confidence for blacks' ability to rule themselves.

However, most society members were northern whites troubled by the grow­

ing number of freed slaves in northern cities, and many saw the enterprise as

an opportunity to establish Christian missions in Africa. The US government

contributed funds for colonization, and one settlement was named Monrovia

after President James Monroe, a member of the society.14 Like Sierra Leone,

however, Liberia was never prosperous.15

The antislavery movement provides another illustration. of the "moderate

racism" that existed in the minds of early-nineteenth-century Europeans and

Americans. From our perspective it seems logical chat abolitionists would at­

tempt to eliminate racism in their efforts to end slavery. Bur the abolitionists'

arguments were primarily about the immorality of slavery and the slave trade

rather than the immorality of racism. Proslavery and antislavery activists alike

were racist, but both assumed that cultural factors were at the heart of the slav­

ery question. For proponents of slavery, the Africans' inferior culture justified

the institution. Antislavery activists argued that Christian charity required

abolition and that Africans had the potential to acquire civilized culture.16

Birth of the Dark Continent Sometime in the mid-eighteenth century a new trend in the way Europeans

viewed the rest of the world began to develop. It did not reach its peak for a

century or more, but in hindsight it is clear that the old models were already

being challenged. The reason for this transition was the series of revolutions

under way in Europe: the Enlightenment, the scientific and industrial revolu-

41 Birth of the Dark Continent

tions, and the resulting global revolutions in trade and conquest. These new

conditions lent increased prestige and power to chose concerned with the ma­

terial world and with domination ofother cultures. The revolutions also helped

to undermine views of the world that promoted the essential equality of

humanity. Europeans had a growing sense that theirs was a superior and pow­

erful civilization.

Michael Adas argues chat, as rhe modern global revolutions began, the in­

terpreters of the non-West were increasingly traders, scientists, technicians,

soldiers, and bureaucrats. They, not missionaries or philosophers, subsequently

determined what Europeans choughr of the world. These new interpreters had

pragmatic interests- domination cacher chan conversion or understanding­

and they aggressively shaped European thinking to serve their goals.17

We can see this shift in perspecrive in Western attitudes and actions to­

ward China, which had been celebrated in the late seventeenth and early eigh­

teenth centuries as an example of a gifted civilization. A popular artistic style, chinoiserie, imitated Chinese motifs in furniture, architecture, art, fabrics,

porcelain, gardens, and the like. In the same way, Chinese laws, administration,

commercial practices, and ethics were considered solid, if not perfect. By the

late eighteenth century, however, China's image in Europe was in severe de­

cline. European traders complained about excessive bureaucracy, corruption,

and trade restrictions. Protestant missionaries complained about superstitions.

And many observers derided the Chinese for not achieving more in science

and technology. By the rime of the First Opium War (1839-1842), when Eu­

rope demonstrated its brutality as well as its new technological superiority,

Western assessments of China had turned overwhelmingly negacive. 18 In the

United Scates, meanwhile, che use and abuse ofChinese laborers in the Amer­

ican West contributed co this image.

For Africa the shift was equally significant but less noticeable, because

Africans had never been held in high esteem among Europeans. In the lase half

of the eighteenth century, portrayals of Africans became increasingly negative,

and they increasingly linked African race and African culture. This growing race

consciousness was frequently expressed in the new language of science. One of

the questions addressed was whether science supporred the biblical account of

the origin of the different races. Until the scientific revolution, the Hebrew Bible

provided the most common explanation of human diversity: God created

humans and they were dispersed after the fall of the Tower ofBabel. Those who

thought more deeply about the question, however, found problems with the

42 Chapter 3: The Origins of «Darkest Africa"

biblical stories. How, for example, was it possible for Adam and Eve's sons to find

wives (Genesis 4)? And if all humans descended from Adam, how could they

have achieved such physical diversity?

By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the principal contending expla­

nations for human diversity were either that all humans descended from

Adam- the monogenist position- or that separate creations accounted for sep­

arate races-the polygenist position. Slavers and slaveholders tended co be poly­

geniscs because che belief in separate races implied that God could approve of

inferior treatment for blacks. Reformers tended co be monogeniscs, but they

nonetheless believed chat Africans had degenerated and needed a great deal of

help to return to the level of Europeans, if such a return was possible at all.

The Bible could not settle che debate, but scientists in the United States

believed they mighc. They began to ask whether nature, by itsel£ could have

produced che immense diversity of plants and animals on Earth. They made

two basic assumptions: that nature could bring about diversity through the in­

fluence of climate and that the biblical account of creation was correct in dat­

ing the age of Earth ac between 4,000 and 5,000 years. The scientists then

concluded chat nature could not have produced Earth's biological diversity in

such a short time. Therefore, by the 1840s most A~erican scientists believed

that science supported the polygenist, multiple-creation position, a view con­

sistent with racism.19

Nineteenth-century science was, of course, heading for a collision with the

biblical view of creation. The monogenists and polygenists both assumed chat

the biblical account of creation was fact and that science needed only to fill in

the details. Meanwhile, new archaeological discoveries in Egypt near che turn of

the nineteenth century began to cast doubt on biblical chronology by demon­

strating that human life on Earth was far older than the Bible indicated. And che

study of fossils began co show that Earth itself might be vastly older than che

Bible allowed. If these findings were accurate, neither the polygenist nor the

monogenist theory could explain human origins or human interrelationships. As the long chronology of evolution became more apparent, scientists began

to work coward understanding che actual biological mechanism by which di­

versity could occur. Among the theories proposed early in the century were

Herbert Spencer's survival of the fittest and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck's inheri­

tabilicy of learned traits. Then, in 1859, Charles Darwin described the theory

ofnatural selection in The Origin ofSpecies and showed how species could evolve

through interplay between biology and the environment. Darwin's natural se-

43 B irth of the Dark Continent

lect:ion cheory prevailed, of course, but it caught on very slowly. Moreover, it still

lacked an adequate explanation of the biological mechanism by which individ­

uals came to vary from each other.

Darwin himself remained a Lamarckian, believi ng t h at learned traits were

inherited. H e thought that biological variation arose because parents learned

traits they passed to their offspring at conception. Interestingly, the Lamarck­

ian underst.anding of variation seems at least partially responsible for t h e fe.ar

some European colonists had of"going native" ( taking on African customs)

while in Africa. Many believed that by dressing up formally for dinn e r while

in the African "bush;' they were more likely to give birth to civilized children.

It was only in 1902 that Gregor Mendel's work wit h plant variation was redis­

covered after being lost for a century in an obscure journal, and t h e genetic

theory of v.ariarion began to spread. Noc until t h e 1920s and 1930s did Amer­

ican scientists commonly accept the genetic theory of evolution; American cul­

tural accept.ance took decades longer. I n fact, belief in these cheories still has not

permeated all corners of our society.

Well before Darwin, the new scientific theories of evolution began to add

fuel to Western racism. Race logic in America and Europe concluded that ifhu­

mans had evolved, presumably from apes, some humans had evolved more chan

others. Such logic naturally kept the creators of the new myths- white upper­

class, northern European males- at the top of the race hierarchy. Below chem

came other races and classes, and women. Among the inferior races, Asians

were most advanced, then Africans, Native Americans, and Australian Aborig­

ines.These scientific theories, unlike the older race cheories, in extricably linked

race and culture. Curtin notes that"whereas race had been an important influ­

ence on h uman culture, the new-generation saw race as the crucial determinant,

not only of culture but of human character and of all history. Hundreds of

variant cheor ies were to appear in the mood of this new emphasis:•20 The sci­

entific proofseemed to be everywhere- in the shape and size of heads, in skin

color, in differences between males and females, in comportment, in the com­

plexity of societies, and in the nature of art and religion. The greater the per­

ceived physical and cultural difference from European culture, the less

developed the race.

While Europeans developed these pseudoscientific ways of linking race and

culture, chey also became convinced chat they had to conquer Africa. What is

striking here is chat chey waited so long to begin. By the time Europeans invaded

sub-Saharan Africa in the 1880s and 1890s, Africa had long remained the only

44 Chapter 3: The Origins of "Darkest Africa•

continent unsubdued by European power. Reasons for the delay included the

difficulty of the environment, the danger of violence, the slave trade, and the

lack ofeasily tapped mineral wealth. But the second half of the nineteenth cen­

tury brought the end of the slave trade; improvements in guns, boats, and med­

icine; an intensified search for industrial raw materials and markers; and

heightened nationalist competition among the European states. Explorers set

out to"discover" the African interior, traders staked out regions, and mission­

aries founded stations as far inland as they could while still maintaining their

supply lines. As the century progressed, interest in Africa grew until it finally

became impossible for European governments not to colonize the continent.

This shift toward imperialist chinking was already apparent by midcentury.

In t heoretical terms, the shift was marked by fewer arguments for rhe conver­

sion of Africans than for European trusteeship over Africans. Conversion had

been an attempt to make Africans civilized like Europeans, implying that

Africans werejust as human as Europeans. In Senegal, for example, the French

allowed some educated Africans to become French citizens. Trusteeship, how­

ever, implied that Africans were biologically inferior and needed to be taken

care of, a perfect justification for conquest. Europeans in Africa naturally began

to look for evidence chat Africa needed European help.21 Educated Africans,

who had formerly been entrusted with responsibilities, were moved aside and

labeled incompetent. African customs were increasingly described as savage.

Cannibalism was imagined in practically every corner of the continent. Child­

hood became the universal metaphor for the African state of mental and cul­

tural development.

A Myth for Conquest Thus the myth of the Dark Continent was born. It originated in mid-nineceenth­

century Europe when scientific race theory was developed, without reference

to the actual cultures of Africans in Africa. Then it was transferred to Africa

by Europeans who had both a theoretical and a practical interest in seeing

Africa as primitive. And when scientific race theory combined with imperial­

ist urges co conquer, there was no end ro the primitiveness that could be found.

The Dark Continent myrh is still with us a century and a half later, at least

in diluted form. Its legacy leads us to many of the 'J\frican" words I listed in

Chapter 1. Anyone who reads che literature of late-eighteenth-century Euro­

pean travelers in Africa-who describe Africans as human-and then reads

45 A Myth for Conquest

the lace-nineteenth-century travelers- who criticize Africans as depraved­

will wonder if this is the same continent. In the eighteenth century, Europeans

on the whole were genuinely interested in discovering what Africans were

doing, even if they disapproved of what they found. For example, Mungo

Park- considered by some to be the first modern European explorer of

Africa-traveled to the upper Niger River in 1796; although he underwent

many difficulties, he evaluated individuals and experiences on their own mer­

its and did not generally condemn whole groups or culcures.22 By the late nine­

teenth century, however, Europeans could see only a primitive continent full of

tribes of savages and barbarians.

Of course, a great deal of hypocrisy was involved in this attempt to reduce

Africans to the lowest forms of humanity. European violence eradicated

African violence. Christian love justified missionary control. And the white

race, which had only recently scamped out its own slave-trading and slavehold­

ing practices, called Arabs and Africans inferior because they traded and held

slaves. When European slave trading in Africa came co an end in the 1870s

and 1880s, Europeans engaged in an antislavery campaign against Arab slave

traders on the Nile and in East Africa, and then against African traders. As

discussed above, in the antislavery campaign in Europe in the early part ofthe

century, the arguments made by both sides were more cultural than racial Now,

however, Europeans demanded that racially inferior Arabs and even more

racially inferior Africans allow themselves co be saved from their depravity by racially superior Europeans. Patrick Brantlinger, a scholar of Victorian litera­ ture, writes:

The myth of the Dark Continent defined slavery as the offspring of

tribal savagery and portrayed white explorers and missionaries as

the leaders ofa Christian crusade chat would vanquish the forces of

darkness.... When the taint of slavery fused with sensational re­

ports about cannibalism, witchcraft, and apparently shameless sex­

ual customs, Victorian Africa emerged draped in chat pall of

darkness that the Victorians themselves accepted as reality.23

Actually, several versions of the Dark Continent myth were available, the

choice depending on whether the source was Christian or secular evolutionist.

In the Christian version, God becomes the sponsor of the colonial effort.

Christian missionaries, who are mostly whites, are called upon co save God's

46 Chapter 3 : The Origins of"Darkest Africa"

pagan children in Africa. This version can be seen clearly in the mission move­

ment chat grew dramarically during the nineteenth century. More secular ver­

sions of the myth ranged from a crass survival-of-the-fittest conquest to a more

sophisticated"trusteeship on behalf of civilizarion:' Official government poli­

cies tended toward the latter definition, and cwenrieth-century colonial bu­

reaucrats spoke in terms of the care they were providing: colonialism was, they

claimed, a generous gift co Africans.

At the popular level, Rudyard Kipling's fa mous poem "The White Man's

Burden" illustrates the secular trend. Although not specifically about Africa,

Kipling's verses summarized che secular justification for dominarion of Africa

and other parts of the world at the turn of the century."White man's burden"

is now a common phrase used co capture the essence of the colonial mentality.

Kipling's poem was sent co President Theodore Rooseveltj use after the Amer­

ican annexarion of the Philippines in 1898. It urged Americans co embrace

colonialism as Britons had done:

Take up the White Man's burden­

Send forth the best ye breed-

Go bind your sons to e.:xile

To .serve your captives' need;

To wait in heavy harness,

On fluttered folk and wild­

Your new-caught, sullen peoples,

Half-devil and half-child.

Take up the White Man's burden­

Ye dare not stoop to less-

Nor call too loud on Freedom

To cloak your weariness;

By all ye cry or whisper,

By all ye leave or do,

The silent, .sullen peoples

Shall weigh your Gods and you.24

For Kipling, race itself is the sponsor of the colonial enterprise. The colo­

nial burden is not a call from God, but from whiteness. Americans are urged

47 A Myth for Conquest

to send "the best ye breed"-presumably upper-class white males-to serve

people at the bottom of the racial hierarchy who are"half-devil and half-child."

One might presume that the "half-devil" reference is a plea to Christians, but

the poem's audience has "Gods"-plural- who are surely secular as well as

Christian. Kipling is considered a defender of secular colonialism, not of re­

ligious missions. And the reference to"half-child" is pure scientific racism: the

more racially different, the more childlike ocher peoples were thought to be.

Furthermore, Americans were to serve rheir captives forever, in "weariness," because rhe captives were biologically incapable of learning the ways of civi­

lized peoples.

The most public examples of Dark Continent thinking among Americans

come from Henry Morton Stanley and Theodore Roosevelt. Scanley, an or­

phan who left England as a young man and was adopted by an American,

served on both sides during the American Civil War and was a newspaper re­

porter on the western frontier. He went to Africa in the late 1860s as a reporter

for the New York Herald. His goal was to find the famous missionary David

Livingstone, who had not been heard from in several years, and create one of

the biggest news stories of the century. Sta.nley found Livingstone, of course,

but more important, he became attached to Africa and spent the rest of his

life involved w ith the continent. From 1875 to 1877 he crossed the continent

from east to west, and he later described the harrowing journey down the

Congo River in his book Through the Dark Continent.25 In che late 1870s and

throughout: the 1880s, Stanley participated in the conquest of the Congo by King Leopold of Belgium.

In both Britain and the United Scares, Stanley was easily the most influen­

tial explorer of nineteenth-century Africa. Stanley's reputation was made as a

bold adventurer who conquered every obstacle, both natural and human. Al­

though some believe that he was not a racist because he did not use the racist

jargon of the day, he was nonetheless quick to judge Africans as inferior and

quick to turn to violence against those Africans who stood in his way.Through­

out the white world, red-blooded men and boys read and talked about Stan­

ley well into the twentieth century. Anyone interested in Africa certainly read

Stanley, and a direct line of influence extends from his books to nearly every

one of the white adventurers who followed him to Africa. Stanley also inspired

the stories ofEdgar Rice Burroughs (who created Tarzan) and H . Rider Hag­

gard, authors read widely by Americans.

48 Chapter 3: The Origins of «Darkest Africa»

Theodore Roosevelt also read St:anley and developed a remarkably similar out­

look on colonialism. Almough Roosevelt belonged co the American upper-middle

class and was not: known as a violent man, he was nonetheless a conqueror. He

was an enthusiastic proponent ofAmerican colonies, including Puerto Rico and

t:he Philippines, and as president he supervised the construction of the Panama

Canal. Like Stanley, Roosevelt: saw a similar uwildness" in the American West

and in Africa. After his presidency, Roosevelt spent: a year on safari in Africa (de­

scribed in Chapter 9). In a 1909 dispatch from Africa co American newspapers,

h e commenced mat:, '1ike all savages and most children , (Africans] have t:heir

limit:ations, and in dealing with chem firmness is even more necessary than kind­

ness; but the man is a poor creature who does not treat them with kindness

also, and I am rather sorry for him if he does not grow to feel for chem, and to

make them in return feel for him, a real and friendly liking:'26 This is, of course,

a restatement of the sentiment of "The White Man's Burden:• Roosevelt's pa­

ternalistic and racist views, encapsulated in the adventure of his safari, were

widely read and appreciated in the United Scat:es.

For most Americans-whether missionary, scientist, or ordinary citizen­

Roosevelt:'s Dark Continent: perspective was unquestioned in the first part: of

t:he twenciet:h century. Indeed, this view has been so widely and firmly held

t:hat it still persiscs in various forms and will likely survive well into the t:wenry­

first century.

8

AFRICANS LIVE IN TRIBES,

DON'T THEY?

When African srudents arrive at the college where I teach, one of the first ques­

tions they are asked is, "What tribe do you belong to:?'' The African students

usually respond happily until they discover that the American idea of tribe is

much different from theirs. Then they become amused or angry at American

ignorance and stereotyping. For us, to be part of a tribe sounds exotic and

somewhat savage. The label tribal can imply an unthinking, primal attachment

to kin. As this chapter reveals, however, Africans understand tribe in a differ­

ent way. Modern Africans have attachments to their kin, but they also have

professional, religious, regional, national, and other loyalties. Moreover, mod­

ern African tribes are just that, modern. They bear only superficial resemblance

to the organizations chat existed fifty years ago or to those that Europeans

found a century ago when they conquered the continent. Most scholars of Africa have, in fact, abandoned the term tribe as too con­

fusing and inaccurate. They fear that ifthey were to use the word in the African

sense, they would be understood in the American sense. Indeed, many schol­

ars see the almost knee-jerk American association of Africa with tribe as our

most salient stereotype about Africa. The myth ofAfrica as tribal confuses us

because it relies on outmoded concepts formed during a more racist and

113

114 Chapter 8: Africans Live in Tribes, Don't They?

imperialist era. IfAmericans are to understand Africa today, chey need co aban­

don their old ideas about tribes.

For this reason, it would be helpful to investigate what tribe means and why

it came to be associated in the American mind with Africa. We can also exam­

ine the alternative words that scholars now prefer. 1

A Textbook Definition The word tribe is used today by some anthropologists, so first, we ought to be

clear about what it refers co in a technical sense. One anthropology textbook

designed for college students defines tribe as one of five major cypes of politi­

cal organization: band, tribe, chiefdom, confederacy, and state. A tribe, says the

author, is"a political group that comprises several bands or lineage groups, each

with similar language and lifestyle and each occupying a distinct territory....

Tribal groupings contain from 100 to several thousand people:'2 Tribes consist

of one or more subgroups that have integrating factors but are not centralized

upon a single individual, as they are in a chiefdom. Frequently, such groups or­

ganize themselves through kinship (vertical unity) and associations and age

grades (horizontal unity). Some tribes are integrated by a "Big Man"who holds

the group together loosely by the force of his personality and whose position

is constantly contested and nor hereditary.

According to this somewhat technical definition, Africa is not full of

rribes; about half of African societies would be excluded because, histori­

cally, they were organized in bands, chiefdoms, confederacies, and stares. And

many of the remaining socieries do not fit the definition of tribe for other

reasons. For example, rhe Amba of Uganda and the Dorobo of Kenya are

sometimes called tribes, but the Amba have cwo languages, while the Dorobo

live among the Nandi and Maasai and do not have their own territory. More­

over, strictly speaking, tribes cannot exist at all in modern Africa because all

African peoples live in modern states, which hold ultimate sovereignty over

their populations.

Classifying types ofsocieties is an extraordinarily difficult cask that requires

scholars to understand how each society operates and then co select a few char­

acteristics chat are equally representative of several societies so as to make up a

category. But reality is vastly more complex than classification schemes, so any

scheme will be part:ly inaccurate. In a sense, we impose our classifications on re­

ality, and some categories fie better than ochers. In Africa, tribe barely fies at all.

115 A W ord with a History

A Word with a History The word tribe has a very long history. It comes fi-om a Latin root, tribus (plu­

ral, tribi), used to describe a unit of the Roman state. Originally, Roman tribes

were based on territory- at first there were four urban and sixteen rural

tribes-and each territory-tribe was considered to have its own culture.The tribes performed administrative functions such as tax collection, conscription, and

census taking. By 241 BC there were thirty-five rural tribes, and more were

added as ch e Romans conquered new territories. Later, people could also for­

mally enroll in a tribe, indicating the loss of tribes' primarily territorial and cul ­

tural bases. Increasingly, different tribes lived among each other. The lower

classes and freed slaves tended to join urban tribes.

The L arin derivative tribe entered the English language through Old French

in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. It was often used to translate He­

brew and Greek words chat signified the organizational units of ancient Israel

and Greece, as in"the tribes of Israel:' It appeared in translations of the Bible and

occasionally in Shakespeare. Tribe was a useful word: it could summarize the

very different political organizations of Israel, Greece, Rome, and other an­

cient societies.3 S imilar developments occurred in other European languages.

The word was also useful for describing many of 1:he peoples whom the

British encountered as they began ro establish their global empire after 1600.

Thus, distinct groups of Native Americans, Africans, South Asians, and och­

ers were referred to as tribes. At this time, however, the word still had a neu­

tral meaning and was interchangeable with the words nation and people. The

terms all meant a generalized group of people who shared a culture, and they

were applied to Europeans as well as non-Europeans. These words began to diverge in meaning in the late eighteenth century.

Europeans, who increasingly thought of themselves as more advanced than

other peoples, needed words co distinguish themselves from others. The word

people retained irs general usage, but nations came co be thought of as larger

groupings with more complex: social structures and technologies. The word tribe

was reserved for groups chat were smaller and, supposedly, simpler and less

evolved. Our modern ideas about primitives and the Dark Continent emerged in

the same era. By che mid-nineteenth century, the word tribe had assumed a neg­

ative meaning that implied political organizations that were primordial, back­

ward, irrational, and static. A person didn't join a tribe, but was born into it.

People in civilized societies could actively select from among different, creative

116 Chapter 8: Africans Live in Tribes, Don't They?

courses of action, but tribal people followed tribal customs without thinking.

It was indeed fortunate for tribes that they had such customs to guide their ac­

tions, because members were so limited intellectually. Ofcourse,utribalism" was

expected of such people. In other words, to be tribal was to be genetically inca­

pable of more advanced thought or political organization.

In the twentieth century, the meaning of the word tribe as applied to Africa

developed in two directions. The first, favored by white politicians and colonial

administrators, was a variation of the nineteenth-century definition of tribes

as having dosed boundaries and unchanging customs. Administratively, this

viewpoint allowed colonialists to make sense ofand create order out of the be­

wildering variety of African political organizations. Administrators, seeking

easier ways to control Africa than by using force, opted to reorganize African

reality to fit the tribal model.

Writing of colonial rule in British Tanganyika ( today's Tanzania), historian

John Iliffe notes that in the 1920s, administrators believed chat all African so­

cial organization was ordered by the kinship principle. To chem, ''.Africa's his­

tory was a vast family tree of tribes. Small tribes were offshoots of big ones

and might therefore be reunited."4 And all tribes needed to have chiefs, theo­

retically because chiefs were more advanced than village councils, and practi­

cally because white administrators could rule Africans more easily when they could work through a clear chain of command. When the British were done,

Tanganyika h ad been fully tribalized. British administrators in the 1920s did

not consider themselves to be doing violence to African political organizations.

Rather, they intended to help Africa by putting it back in order.

Because the reordering was based on history that didn't exist, however, his­

tory had co be extensively reinvented to fit it. For chis task, the British h ad the

cool'eration of many Africans. Indeed, Africans- like all peoples-had long

been adept at reinventing their histories to suit current political needs. Since

the major integrating principle was kinship, groups chat were combined or-split

manipulated their genealogies creatively to make sense of the new arrange~ ments. In the same manner, Africans who sought power as chiefs could be

quite sure of finding historical"proof" for their claims. Likewise, because colo­

nial rule disrupted African cultures, many Africans were looking for new iden­

tities for themselves and found chem in invented historical roots.5 We now

speak of the invention of tribes in Africa. Many studies in the past several

decades have described how tribal self-consciousness developed during the

nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century.

117 T he End of the Tribe

As an administrative tool, the ideology oftribe caused a great deal ofdifficulty

for both Europeans and Africans. The emphasis on tribal consciousness had two

contradictory purposes- to change and to remain the same. Wanting docile

Africans who would produce cash crops, administrators sought to transform

Africans into orderly"tribesmen:' But tribe implied a childlike people, something

Africans were not. Whenever Africans resisted, the British could apply the ideol,

ogy ofAfrican childishness to justify the use of force: those who didn't cooperate

needed firm parental discipline. Yet the need to use force revealed the fundamen,

cal contradictions in the idea of colonialism as a progressive institution.6

The second direction in the development of the word tribe was favored by anthropologists. In the 1920s, anthropologists began to live with Africans and

to take their day,to,day lives more seriously. Their experiences revealed the

nineteenth,century definition of tribe to be deeply flawed. They found that

tribal peoples were neither unthinking nor less evolved than Westerners, and

they learned that tribes were constantly changing and adapting, just as their

own societies were. Anthropologists have sometimes been called servants of

colonialism, because they provided the information and categories necessary to

organize African peoples. Although this negative label has some validity, it is

also true that anthropologists were among the first to recognize chat African

complexity was creative and purposeful rather than irrational and chaotic.

The End of the Tribe Studies of African tribes in the 1960s took on a new urgency as most African

countries became independent and colonial definitions became clearly

irrelevant.7 Anthropologists focused on che flexibility of various African tribal

organizations, which linked or separated small groups as needed.The evidence­

already gathered in administrative reports and ethnographic studies-only

needed reinterpretation to support the new model. Colonial administrators

had used African flexibility in this area to form and re,form administrative

units. And the field anthropologists of the colonial era had recognized chat

Africans frequently used invented traditions to reconstitute their political

organizations. Morton Fried argued in the same decade that tribes did not evolve by them,

selves out ofsimpler forms, as had been thought. Most tribes, he said, form in

reaction to external pressures, not internal ones. Tribes become as cohesive as

those described by our traditional definition only when groups of people are

118 Chapter 8: Africans Live in Tribes, Don't They?

forced to unite for self-defense. And, Fried asserted, major external pressures

are applied by larger political units. He concluded that colonialism caused tribes to form.8

Also beginning in the 1960s, some scholars argued for the abandonment of

the word tribe in reference co urban Africa, where Africans live more modern

lives. The major contender co replace tribe was ethnic group. Surprisingly, the

terms ethnicity and ethnic group are not very old, having been initiated by North

American sociologists after World War IL The terms were invented to de­

scribe the kind of culru.ral consciousness chat a group might develop in a mod­

ern city. Urban ethnicity was seen as more fluid and diffuse than che group

consciousness of people in rural areas. The word tribe was, then, reserved

mainly for rural peoples.9 By 1970 ethnic group had the solid acceptance of many

Africanists. In that: year, two Nort:hwest:ern University professors published

an extensive proposed syllabus for university-level African st:udies courses t:hat

made the distinction between ethnic group for towns and tribe for rural areas.10

This distinct:ion did not last. Tribe was so widely recognized as imprecise

and tainted with primitivism chat it largely ceased to be employed by African­

iscs. By the late 1970s, anthropologists, sociologists, historians, art: historians,

erhnomusicologists, political scientists, and other scholars had switched to che

term ethnic group.

This new usage also won che support of many African intellectuals. Usu­

ally educated in Europe or America, these Africans knew of the popular West­

ern association of tribe with savage, and t:hey also knew about the complexity

of the situation in Africa. Moreover, they wanted to help defeat so-called trib­

alism in Africa. For such Africans, the concept of the clearly definable tribe­

developed as a tool of colonial domination-was a primary obstacle in

post:colonial domestic and international politics. What Africa needed was to

break down the rigid "tribes" that were not, in fact:, African. A new image of

Africa in Europe and America that downplayed tribes would help, because for­

eigners would see Africa more accurately and because they could not continue

to dominate Africa by playing one so-called tribe against anocher.11

Contemporary African Uses of Tribe For Americans, one of the confusing aspects of modern Africa is chat ordinary

Africans continue co use the word tribe. This would seem to suggest that

Africans themselves recognize that they live in tribes. To some extent they do:

119 Contemporary African Uses ofTribe

contemporary political and social systems are derivatives of earlier systems.

We should be careful, however, not to assume that Africa's idea of tribe is the

same as ours. Most Africans do not generally equate tribes with the savage or

the primitive. Their use of the word seems more like that of our phrase ethnic

group. Moreover, Africans are aware that they have various identities and loyal,

ties including kinship, language, region, religion, country, town, continent,

school, profession, and class. Tribe takes its place among these ocher factors to

form complex and changing patterns. As pointed out ac the beginning of this chapter, one of the first things an

American usually asks an African is what tribe he or she is from. We assume

that one of the most important subjects to Africans is their tribe and that this

topic will help us connect. The question can reveal our ignorance and can be

insulting. Most Africans in fact do not think of themselves as part of a tribe so

much as part of a lineage. The tribe is large and diffuse, whereas the lineage is

small, cohesive, and immediate. In addition, because most Africans have layers

of identity, asking about t heir tribe may be puzzling to them. Why would you

want to know immediately about tribe and not, say, about family, region, reli,

gion, or profession:'

The question can be insulting because many Western,educated Africans

know chat the word tribe is frequently American code for primitive. Moreover,

in the African political context, the bold question "What is your tribe?'' can

create tension. It would be like asking a new acquaintance in the United States,

"What is your socioeconomic class:'" instead of "What do you do for a living?''

Likewise, if we saw someone whose race was not clearly evident, we would not

immediately ask,"What is your race?'' At least for public purposes, we strive to

act out our belief that"all persons are created equalH because we know it is es,

sential for public order.

Ofcourse some Africans, like some Americans, broadcast their ethnic iden,

tity. It is still possible to find Africans who are creating tribes for many of the

sam e reasons they were created during the colonial period. This brings up a

thorny problem. To see Africans demand to be identified fi rst by their tribe

tends to confirm the American cultural suspicion chat, in Africa, we are facing

a primal force that is uncivilized, undemocratic, and unmodern. We react sim,

ilarly to anyone who demands to be identified first by her or his race, sex, or

class. But, once again, there is more to consider.

Mainstream Western white culture has long used the concept of the prim,

irive, in reference to tribe, race, sex, disability, abnormality, and so forth, as a way

120 Chapter 8: Africans Live in Tribes, Don't They:'

to maintain power over ochers. Those who strike back by wearing their differ­

ence as a weapon seem threatening. On college and university campuses in

the United States, for example, white students sometimes complain about

African Americans or Hispanics who have their own organizations or who sit

together at lunch. Yet if whites have similar, whites-only organizations, they

are labeled racist. It may be regrettable chat we live in a society char fosters

such self-segregation, but the face is that chis behavior is thoroughly modern

and not a throwback to so-called tribal times. In the United Scates, being self­

consciously ethnic has provided many minorities with psychic and even phys­

ical protection against the frequently hostile larger society.

Some modern Africans have also felt it useful to be self-consciously ethnic.

The writer Ken Saro-Wiwa, for instance, long identified himself as a Nigerian

and participated in the wider Nigerian culture. But in the 1990s, he felt it nec­

essary co publicly declare himselfOgoni in order to defend Ogoni people against

exploitation by the Nigerian government and S hell Oil. He protested the loss

without compensation of Ogoni oil and the pollution ofOgoni land. The gov­

ernment responded chat it was acting on behalf of all Nigerians, who should

share t:he oil. It branded Saro-Wiwa a cribalist, traitor, and instigator of vio­

lence, and, to the world's horror, he was executed in 1995. It is clear now that the

oppressive military government framed Saro-Wiwa so it could be rid of him.

A question we might ask in the context ofSaro-Wiwas execution is what re­

semblance, if any, his version oftribalism bears to what Americans currently con­

ceive of as African tribalism. The answer is, very little. The Western definitions

of tribe recall precolonial African political structures, and do that badly. But our

inaccuracies in describing the pa:st are mild compared to our inability to describe

the present. Today's worst "tribal" conflicts have taken radically new, modern

forms. Saro-Wiwa acted in a modern arena defined by cities; by state bureaucra­

cies and armies; by newspapers, books, radio, and television; by automobiles, air­

planes, telephones, video cameras, fax machines, and computers; by foreign

corporations and foreign governmencs; and by Western-educated Nigerians.

Africa's contemporary tribes and tribal conflic ts are simply not captured by

the American understanding of these words.

Other Tribes You may note that we continue to use the word tribe for Native Americans and

that there is little protest. There is a difference, however, because our concept

121 African Tribes in America

of a Native American tribe is not the same as our concept of an African t:ribe.

In the nineteenth century, Native Americans were consideredjust as primitive

as Africans, and they were herded onto reservations or killed. Bue in modern

times, Native Americans have become more mainstream in American culture,

or they have become almost sacred co many Americans as shamans, ecologists,

artisans, and artists. Interestingly, under different circumstances most Native Americans would

probably not use the word tribe. Unked Scates history has made the term po,

litically useful, however, so Native Americans have embraced it publicly. A 1946

decision of the US Supreme Court obligates the federal government to com­

pensate those Native Americans who can claim exclusive occupation and use

of their land since time immemorial. Such compensation is legally due only to

bureaucratically defined tribes."Under these circumstances," says Morton Fried,

Native Americans"have vested interests in the concept of tribe and are obliged

to provide the deepest history for ic:'12 Providing such deep history is easier if people consider themselves tribal today. Thus, the terms tribe, tribal council, and

tribal elder are common in public discourse, even though other terms might be

more accurate or preferable.13

Tribe is also used to designate minority groups in Latin America and across

Asia. In some cases it is applied technically, as a description of social organi­

zation, and is not meant to connote primitiveness. This is how anthropolo­

gists might apply it. But more frequently, tribe is employed by a majority to

imply that a minority is primitive. In the latter case, the term seems similar to

our application of it in Africa. The continued use of the word tribe around the world, varied as its mean­

ings are, m ay help us understand why we .find the word acceptable for Africa.

Because most so-called tribes do not complain, why should we change? We

have to remember, however, chat the peoples labeled as tribes usually cannot

complain, because they lack the tools and opporcunities to make their voices

heard.

African Tribes in America In the 1970s, American use of the word tribe in reference to Africa dropped

dramatically. Apparently, the media were listening to Africanisc scholars and

Africans themselves. Yee the word still appears here and there, even in such

prestigious publications as the New York Times.14 Likewise, when television

122 Chapter 8: Africans Live in Tribes, Don't They?

news comments on events such as those in Sudan, Liberia, or South Africa, the

word is sometimes considered an appropriate tool of both description and

analysis. It also tends to appear in other places where the intended audience is

the general public and the author is not a scholar of Africa, such as museum

exhibit labels, documentaries, movies, and music recordings.Judging from first­

year college students, I would guess that it is in frequent use in high school so­

cial studies classes.

The persistence of the word tribe has at least two roots. One is our lack of

awareness chat the word does not fit African reality. Many Americans are well­

meaning but ignorant. Even if not always well-meaning, Americans have shown

themselves willing to drop derogatory terms for the sake of political correct­

ness. We no longer find it acceptable to use certain racial, ethnic, or gender

labels in public, even though prejudice is still very much a part of our society.

Ifwe knew that so-called tribal peoples around the world objected to being re­

ferred to as such, many of us would change our words in order to avoid being

publicly offensive.

But there is a second, deeper reason for our failure to change: Americans still

equate tribe with savage and believe that modern African problems can be ex­

plained by African primitiveness. In this sense, the word we use is irrelevant. If we substitute ethnic group for tribe but continue to apply it in the same way, there

is no gain. In fact, some reporters who have abandoned the word tribe out of

political correctness continue to analyze African situations from a nineteenth­

century point of view.

For example, early press reports on the 1994- 1995 civil war in Rwanda fre­

quently called it a tribal war or, if the journalist was more aware, an ethnic con­

flict. Much was made of the facr that Tutsi and Hutu slaughtered each ocher

in brutal ways that were incomprehensible co civilized Westerners. The conflict

was portrayed as having origins in ancient tribal animosities. In reality, the war

was vastly more complex. This is nor the place co fully analyze the situation in

Rwanda, but such "tribal analysis" grossly distorts Rwandan facts. Reporters should have situated the war within the contexts of European colonialism, the

Cold War, neoimperialism, class structure, personal power struggles, global

markers for raw materials, arms merchants, and a number ofother factors. The

most important factors include the following: (1) Belgian colonialism created

Rwandan "tribal" problems and dependence on foreigners; (2) the manner of

the Belgian exit provoked a 1960s civil war and massacre; (3) Cold War sup­

port for military dictators deepened these problems; (4) dependence on the

123 African T ribes in America

global coffee market impoverished local farmers, pushing them to the economic

edge; (5) competition between the United States and France led France to se­

cretly arm and encourage Hutu extremists in the 1990s; and (6) international

pressure to hold multiparty elections terrified urban Hutu politicians, who

feared losing their grip on the privileges ofpower. Ethnic consciousness played a large role, but not "age-old" ethnicity. This

ethnicity was created and maintained in modern times. And it was not the

kind of ethnicity that Americans think of when they use the terms tribal war or ethnic war. Not only do Hucus and Tutsis share the same language and cul­

ture, but their relationships are mediated by modern institutions such as states

with armies, identity cards, state-run newspapers and radio, cash-crop mar­

kets, and for the Hutus, a secret hate-radio station. Moreover, there has been

considerable regional and urban-rural tension among the Hutus.

To mistake the Rwandan civil war for a stereotypical "tribal" war reflects a

dangerous misperception ofwhat really happened. The United Nations, along

with the United States and ocher governments, now admits that no one acted

quickly or decisively enough to stop the slide toward genocide. Last-minute

efforts were coo little and too late. But considering that Western governments

did not really understand the problems in Rwanda to begin with, this is not

surprising. Perhaps a major reason that tribalism colors our first analysis of an African

political problem is that we do not adequately prepare our news reporters. Re­

porters who do not know much about Africa, let alone individual countries

such as Rwanda, are likely to fall back on stereotypes and other simple ways to

convey complex events. Surely they are not unsympathetic to Rwandans as

people. They are just unprepared and in a hurry, and so is their audience. In

Rwanda, it was as though the news teams had just arrived on the scene of an

accident and were trying to make quick sense of what had happened.

In a deeper sense, however, we quickly resorted to portraying the Rwandan

conB.ict as primordial, because such a response reinforces our American view

of the world. Specifically, by portraying African conflicts as age-old, we West­

erners do not have to take responsibility for our share of the causes of modern

African history. Moreover, if the causes of a conflict are so basic as to be

tribal- meaning savage- then we can imagine that solutions will be almost im­

possible to find. Thus we can congratulate ourselves for relief efforts for victims,

but not feel responsible for addressing even the African causes, let alone the

Western ones. Some problems are just too deep to resolve, we can rationalize.

124 Chapter 8: Africans L ive in Tribes, Don't They?

Tribal analysis walls off African crises from modern history, making it appear

as if Africans do not participate in the same world in which all the rest of us

participate. During the Rwandan crisis a congressman asked me to brief him on whac

was going on. I prepared a t:en-minute presentation on background causes and

akernat:ive analyses of current events. My presencacion was basic because I

could tell he knew little about the siruarion in Rwanda. When I arrived, I found

that he did not really want to know what was going on. His only concern was

whet.her che brewing"tribal" trouble becween the Hucus and Tucsis in neigh­

boring Burundi might in some way spill over into his world and necessitace in­

volving US troops. I can sympathize with Anthony Appiah, a Ghanaian scholar living in che

United Stares, who suggests that the way we use the word tribe facilitates ex­

ploitation of Africans. He writes chat "race in Europe and tribe in Africa are

central co the way in which the objective interests of the worst-off are dis­

tort:ed:'15 What he means is chat we have an interest in actually promoting trib­

alism and the myths of che tribe in Africa. This effort may be conscious or

unconscious, but by keeping ourselves thinking that tribe mat:ters, Africans

will be easier to ignore or exploit. Wole Soyinka, a Nigerian and winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, has

applied the same logic to Western considerations of African governments. He

criticizes scholars who say chat Africa's ethnic divisions require dictators in

order to keep che peace. The supposed African tribal mind becomes an excuse

for the West not to hold African leaders to international standards.

Alternatives to Tribe Soyinka recognizes that our word tribe is a problem for Africa, but racher than

criticize us, he throws the word back at us. He has starred calling white and

black Americans the white tribe and r:he black r:ribe. Soyinka knows r:hat we

will immediately recognize chat identifying Americans as living in tribes, at

least the kind we think of, is threatening to our social order. It oversimplifies,

promotes division, and hinders our ability to solve our many kinds of prob­

lems. Africans respond in the same way to our use of the term for them.

Soyinka's counterattack will not make the word disappear, however. It is

coo ingrained in our consciousness and too widely used around the world.

What we can hope for is that Americans become aware of the word's various

125 Alternatives to Tribe

meanings. Yet we should not use che word in reference co Africa, because

African reality, both past and present, is not accurately described by any of the

word's meanings. Tribe distorts African reality and therefore makes it impos,

sible to understand the continent.

As mentioned above, the principal contender to replace tribe is ethnic group.

But ifwe elect to substitute ethnic group, will chis new term serve us well:' Its pri,

mary advantages are its lesser negativity compared to tribe, its applicability to

groups all over the world (making Africans seem more Like people elsewhere),

and the purpose for which it was invented, co describe people's group con,

sciousness in modern societies.

The main drawback to ethnic group is that the term is just as ambiguous as

tribe. How can a single phrase apply both to a European American's mild sense

of attachment t o the"Old Country" and to the intense feelings of hatred that

have arisen between warring factions in the former Yugoslavia:' The only real

connection amo ng the many different uses of ethnicity is that the term describes

a feeling ofcloseness to one's own group that arises in the face of contacts with

other groups. It does not, however, describe rhe intensity of the feeling or even

its precise nature. And it does not adequately describe the nature of the group

itself. Moreover, ifwe use ethnic group in Africa in the same ways we have used

tribe, we accomplish lia:le. Ethnic group mayjust hide the fact that we still chink

that African groups, whatever our name for chem, are composed ofprimitives.

Are there ocher options:' A genuinely useful word would help us distinguish

different kinds of situations and different kinds of groups. It wo uld help us

understand the negotiations and conflicts between groups and also che nego,

tiations and conflicts between individuals and their groups. Regrettably, no

such word has appeared yet. le is for this reason chat we must be especially

careful. To pick one word and let it s tand for many different situations is to

mistake Africa.

A variety of words are now used by those aware of the problems with tribe.

Ethnic group is just one. Other possibilities include people (as in, the Zulu are an

African people who live in southern Africa); group (the Ogoni are a group in

Nigeria); or simply the name of the group (the Tiv ofNige ria live near the con,

8uence of the Niger and Benue Rivers).

W ith any of these alternatives, you still must be careful. People and group

are emotionally neutral words with sufficiently vague definitions that they

can serve in most contexts, but they are not precise enough for careful analy,

sis. If you identify a person by the name of a specific group, char person might

126 Chapter 8: Africans L ive in Tr ibes, Don't They?

be offended that you picked out this characteristic as important: rather than

some other. A Tiv might prefer co be called a Nigerian first, or an author, or a

mother, or by a clan name. Moreover, by using Tiv you might be implying that:

che Tiv are all uniform, with one set of customs, one attitude, and so fort:h.

The Tiv, like other African peoples, are quite diverse. Sometimes you might: not want as inclusive a word as you at first chink. For

example, consider using some of these words and phrases, which have more

specific meanings: community, society, village, farmer, herdsman, rural people, rurat dweller, urbanite, citizen, local people, kin group, clan, lineage, family. And when dis­

cussing precolonial Africa, words such as band, chiefdom, kingdom, empire, state,

ministate, and city-state might convey a more exact meaning.

You mighc be tempted to use the word nation, because in the United Scares

and Canada, First Nations is frequently employed co dignify Native American groups. In che modern African context this would not be a good idea, how­

ever. Throughout: the world, most people chink char nations ought to have

their own sovereign countries and that countries ought co be composed of

only one nation. By chis logic, if you identified the Tiv as a nation, you would

imply chat the Tiv should form their own country with their own state gov­

ernment. I f you were Tiv and held such beliefs, you would be considered trea­

sonous by the Nigerian government, which is crying to foster a feeling of

Nigerian nationality. The basic problem is that we need labels but almost all labels are inaccu­

rate and easily contested. There really is no satisfactory way to solve the label­

ing problem. We can, however, make a reasonable attempt to be fair to Africa

if we remind ourselves of two principles. First, beware of analyses chat empha­

size only one or two factors. Tribalism is much coo general a category with

which co explain modern Africa. As we learn more about specific situations in

Africa, we see that many factors are likely to be relevant. Second, strive for pre­

cision. Learn the meanings of words and try to use chem appropriately. Many

terms are more accurate than tribe, even if they are not themselves entirely

satisfactory. One 6nal note: you may be curious about how Africans you meet orient

themselves in the world they live in. Do they consider themselves part of a

tribe:> Should you ever ask:' That would depend on che context. You probably

should not go directly to t:he T-word. You can ask about country, region of the

counrry, and hometown first. Since most Africans you meet in America will be city

or town dwellers, you might ask what part of their country their family comes

127 Alternatives to Tribe

from originally. This is a relatively neutral question, and they can answer by re­

vealing as much as they want about themselves. Such answers can help you

discover a great deal about ways that people conceive of themselves. Ifyou feel

you must ask about tribe, you might get a small lecture on why ethnicity should

not be important, why som e people think it is important but they do not, or

why Americans ought to stop thinking ofAfricans as primitives. On the other

hand, most Africans will take your question kindly. For them, ethnic diversity

is a fact of life, and tribe does not h ave the same adverse connotation as it does

for us. Many people will be thankful that you have simply taken the cirne to show interest.