Change and adaption in Sub-Saharan Africa 1880-2000. What are the shortcomings of the concept of tribe when describing the realities of African traditions?

This essay asks about the shortcomings of the word ‘tribe’ in relation to African traditions. Taking the position that African traditions are the foundation of African history, which is essentially an oral tradition of myths and legends passed on from one generation to the next, it is hard to separate the African account from the western one. One cannot doubt that Africans have their own deeply rich history, but as a discipline, Africans writing their own history is relatively new. Post-colonial scholarship is now seeking to uncover other non-dominant voices in African History.  The difficulty isolating what constitutes African traditions arises because a lot of what is documented was commissioned by colonial administrators and done so by missionaries or organizations like the Rhodes Livingstone institute, who as anthropologists didn’t question their notion of ‘tribe’ as they believed it was an inherent and pre-existing system/structure of social organization central to rural African lives. Missionaries “often reduced Africa’s innumerable dialects to fewer written languages, each language supposedly defining a ‘tribe’. Yoruba, Igbo, Ewe, Shona and many other ‘tribes’ were formed on this way” When European administrators used the services of African intellectuals, they sometimes “invented entirely new ‘tribes’ such as the Abaluyia of western Kenya”. This demarcation was used as a tool to facilitate indirect rule. “A central organizing concept in that notion of traditional African culture was of course that of the ‘tribe”. These examples demonstrate the formation of ‘tribalism’ and highlight the incongruities and questionable status of African history as we know it. Ultimately one might argue that the material this essay draws upon is fundamentally flawed.  On the other hand acknowledging these limitations provide a basis for separating what really constitutes African history and tradition. It does not limit discussion on the broader topics of descent, linguistic and political structure.

 “A conventional term for a social or political group defined in genealogical terms is ‘tribe’. In line with the dictionary definition of “claiming descent from a common ancestor”,  from a colonialist historians perspectives this is a widely upheld view, “In the history of Africa, kinship determined by ones ancestors and descent has been the most binding social institution”.However this does not correspond with the realities of African life. The stress in African groupings is on kinship. From this Eurocentric historical perspective and the specific framework that entails, for example with knowledge of western family structures; we might forgive these accounts for presuming ‘tribe’s to be a reflection of biological descent. In reality the anthropological account put forward by Schneider who states “notions of biological relatedness cannot be presumed to structure peoples social relationships in other cultural contexts”, is in fact much more accurate. ‘Tribal’ boundaries are not locked and solid but fluid and changing. People move in and out of ‘tribe’s. It may have been true in the early history of the country that “descent was the cement of African society”, but moving into the modern age of an Africa that is bombarded with the blight of modern disease and high death rates have meant that the historical custom for Polygamy has become more essential than ever. Traditional custom dictates that a husband is prohibited to have sexual intercourse with his wife for two or three years after the birth of the child, depending on the age the child is weaned. Polygamy supports the economical need for large families which guarantee the continued work force for labour intensive agricultural activities, in turn securing agrarian and pastoral lineage.  Polygamy as a form of marriage binds two groups together and illustrates how the definition of ‘tribe’ as claiming descent from a common ancestor is undermined.

“Scholars have demonstrated that the cultural diversity of Africa is best understood by the common denominator of language. Language remains the ultimate marker whose basic structure endures despite changes in culture and society”. This idea does not seem true. It underpins the idea that “The tribal map is a linguistic map”. Quite often you will find groups that in a geographical sense are proximally located. Their languages and cultural norms bear a close resemblance to one another, yet they themselves do no regard themselves as one tribe. Language is no marker of relatedness. “Communicative understanding is not associated with boundaries of territory, or political, or other social demarcation into fixed units of the ‘nation’ or tribe sort”. Many countries in the western world speak more than one language. Linguistic uniformity is not a pre requisite for citizenship to a nation, and can therefore not be used to define its peoples. In the same way, tribal affiliation cannot be decided by language, it may indicate a persons roots but it cannot be used to definitively define their association with a tribe. There is “Evidence of consistent multilingualism even within the domestic residential unit, within the family”.

Without a background in linguistics, and with the limited scope of this essay, difficulty arises when attempting a detailed analysis of the connotations the term tribe carries in languages other than English. Given however that in French and Spanish the word for ‘tribe’ is ‘tribu’ and in Portuguese ‘tribo’, one might assume that these words too carry the same pejorative misconceptions.  Some people argue that Africans themselves use the word ‘tribe’, but in essence this is not the case. The word isizwe in Zulu in an English translation means ‘tribe’ and this is the word the Zulus have come to learn that English speakers will understand, but in their own language isizwe actually means nation or people. This example highlights the way in which ‘tribe’ as a concept does not reflect the reality of African traditions, and its linguistic evolution and the meaning it carries have come into being in colonial times.

This essay has shown that Tribes are a product of colonial partitioning. They are not definable in terms of lineage, linguistic groupings or political units as a dictionary definition might suggest; which is also a widely held view of the tribal Africa held in the preconceptions of western minds. Having undermined the validity of each of these claims, this essay concludes that tribes as we assume them to be simply don’t exist. The continued use of the terms hinders access to the truth about the richness and diversity of African life and traditions. The initial reasons for the use of the word ‘tribe’ in a colonial era seem easy to understand. One might argue the innocence of the term, however misguided. The perplexing issue in light of modern understanding is its continued use. There seem to be so many alternatives: ethnic groups, nationality, community, village, chiefdom, or kin group, yet outside conscientious circles Africans are still referred to in ‘tribal’ terms. “It is an anachronism that even after independence the term is still in vogue and used in some countries in the filling in of forms for employment, marriage, passport and census, thus perpetuating the very notion of tribalism”.  For the people however identity to the term does have some uses. “In the townships and mining compounds new migrants relied on tribal affiliations to help them find work to provide a social network and to maintain their ties to their rural homelands”. 

Behind the realities of the inappropriateness of the word ‘tribe’ lie some deeply disturbing consequences for its persisting use, ones perhaps that modern governments are not willing to face. The legacy of the borders drawn by the white man in the scramble for Africa has become the black mans burden. Created units often cross political, religious and ethnic frontiers culminating in deep felt and violent crises. These divides are sometimes exacerbated by early imperialist ideology. Rwanda is a good example. In 1897 when German colonialists and missionaries arrived in Rwanda they promulgated ideas of racial superiority, heralding the superiority of the Tutsi ‘tribe’, the ruling class with their apparent Hamitic origins as more European, thus reinforcing their supposed supremacy. This accentuated ‘tribal’ difference and was ultimately the roots of the 1994 genocide where 500,000 Hutus were killed. The west saw this conflict as ‘tribalistic’. This notion perpetuates the idea that conflict in Africa and the identity of the African people is somehow more primitive that in other parts of the world, leading to further misunderstanding, and inadequate intervention. As such the term ‘tribe’ not only misrepresents the realities of African traditions, it is a hindrance to African progression.

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