Abstract: This paper examines the validity of notions like, ethnicity, tribe, nation and state. The paper relates these to shifting or changing indentities in Africa from the pre-colonial to post-colonial period. The author shows how economic and social factors affect the construction and evolution of identities in Africa. The post-colonial elite comes under significant scrutiny in the text. Its origins and cultural moorings are seen as important in any serious consideration of the development process in Africa. The author suggests that, for democracy and development in Africa, room would need to be provided for identities which are primeval and predate the colonial experience. Such identities cannot be obliterated by decree. The answer, lies in an approach which provides cultural space for diversity, which gives democratic form and institutions to culturally diverse groups and ethnicities, but which subsumes all under a wide pan-African umbrella of institutional unity transcending the inherited colonial borders. Under such conditions 'tribalism' as localist atavism would lose its significance and impact.
The globally projected and televised image of Africa in the contemporary world is one of a section of humanity caught up in paroxysms of savage violence and civil wars, famine and hunger, a playground of the world's worst epidemics, underdevelopment and generalized backwardness. Of the world's 20 million refugees 6 million live in Africa. Some 15 million Africans are internally displaced in their countries of origin. All news in Africa is bad news, and we are reminded increasingly often that the rest of the world is getting tired of Africa's everlasting beggary. This latter phenomenon is described in the language of the aid business as 'donor fatigue'. More recently, another new concept 'Afro-pessimism' is doing the rounds among students of African society. It emphasises the bleakness and comfortlessness of the prospects for a developing Africa. Africa's natural endowments in mineral wealth and other resources are virtually unrivalled in the world, and yet still today, the countries of Africa exist through hand-outs called aid from the developed world. The language of 'aid', 'grants', and 'economic support' from the economic metropoles of the contemporary world reveal only a distorted meaning to a reality in which, "... Despite protestations about the flow of 'aid' and talk about 'poverty alleviation', the bare fact is that Third World debtors are paying their northern creditors an average of about 30 billion dollars more than they receive in lending each year..." (Turok, 1993:155-156)1.
Estimates suggest that the accumulation of arrears by debtor countries were about 61 percent worse in 1990 as compared to 1982. For sub-Saharan Africa, during this eight-year period, the accumulated debt increased by 113 percent. In the period 1983-94, Africa repaid far more than was originally contracted (Turok, p. 156). Turok points out;
Most damning is the record of the IMF. There has been a net transfer from Africa to the IMF of 12.7 billion rands between 1983-1990, the very time that many African countries were under 'structural adjustment programmes' imposed by the IMF, which were supposed to lead to recovery... the collective gross national product for Africa fell from 1000 billion rands in 1980 to 700 billion rands in 1990. Per capita incomes have fallen by 2.2 percent annually over the decade, making a total decline of 30 percent. There are now 335 million people living in absolute poverty in countries where health and education expenditures have been slashed (p. 156-157).
There is a sense in which Africa's problems constitute a vicious circle in which one drawback reinforces and begets the other. Without economic growth, social and political stability cannot be assured. Without peace, development is unrealisable; war and a democratic order are circumstantially irreconcilable, hunger and famine exist in tandem with endemic or epidemic diseases. Environmental despoilation weakens the capacity of the environment to sustain life. Uncontrolled and runaway population growth renders economic planning impossible2. Military dictatorship and one-party rule have never adequately addressed the acknowledged socio-economic requirements of African development, human rights or democratic practice. African independence, three decades old, has unfolded as largely a tragedy of state and anti-state terror in many countries. Regimes like Marcias Nguema's in Equatorial Guinea, Idi Amin Dada's in Uganda, Samuel Doe's in Liberia or Jean Bedel Bokassa's in the erstwhile Central African Empire have caricatured, but only too factually, the barbaric excesses of neo-colonial states in Africa. In eight weeks in 1994 (mid-April to June), Africans in Rwanda could in a cruel internecine conflict butcher almost half a million of their compatriots3. In Somalia, clanship has become a focus of relentless carnage. After three decades of brutal rule matched by kleptocracy, Mobutu Sese Seko had to be chased out through a civil war. In the Sudan ethnic rivalries have, since the onset of the civil war in August 1955, affected the ability of the African nationalist movement to resist Arabization policies. In Liberia, the demise of the Doe regime took the lid off the long-simmering ethnic divisions in the society. In Nigeria, North-South and East-West rivalries and tensions have been part of politics from the late 1950s to the present period, and were key factors in the creation of the scenario for the Nigerian civil war. The civil war in Uganda has for years displayed strong ethnic and regionalist tendencies. Ethnic factors have been crucial to the persistence of the Angolan civil war. Ethiopia has, since the fall of Haile Sellasie, known no real peace as regionalist and ethnically mobilized interests compete for control of the state. The Casamance in Senegal is at intermittent war with the state. North-South rivalries are fuelling conflict in Togo. Akan-Ewe rivalry simmers below the surface of Ghanaian politics. In Kenya, popular perceptions of Kalenjin dominance has replaced the old Luo-Gikuyu divide. Indeed, there is hardly a country in Africa today which is not under various degrees of ethnic pressure and latent or manifest conflict4.
The causes of Africa's crisis are a human creation. They are socio-structural, and their ramifications span all areas of the cultural, economic and political dimensions of social life. They are a result of historically constructed conditions which distort the developmental and emancipatory processes required for the working of modern society5.
If Africa's crisis of development is historical and of human fabrication, what are the roots of this problem? The essential ingredients of the problem have for over a quarter of a century been described and scrutinized by various analysts. Nkrumah, Rodeny, Dumont are good points of reference in this respect (Nukrumah, 1965; Rodney, 1972; Dumont, 1966). The globalization of the economy of the world as a maturing capitalist process which has been underway for the past 500 years, arrested autonomous socio-structural processes in African societies and appendaged them to the global processes based in the Western world. This created a condition of induced socio-structural development which, in its evolution, was steadily accentuated as a relationship of dependency, in which the colonised were, as active actors and originators, 'removed from history' (Memmi, 1965). If, as suggested earlier, the interests and policies of the metropolitan powers through agencies like the IMF and World Bank have buttressed the dependency relationship in which Africa finds itself today, it needs also to be indicated that the prominent and leading local classes in the relationship have tended to operate in ways which reinforce the processes of underdevelopment and stagnation. Corruption, graft, mismanagement and inept economic policies have contributed to the quagmire of problems facing African societies. Hyden has noted that owing to the fact that the African bourgeoisie is in development rudimentary, but on the ascendancy, it has tended to draw opposition from vested pre-capitalist interests and not, as much of the popular rhetoric would have it, from the proletariat (Hyden, 1985). What is important here is not to press the point too absolutely. The ascendant class or classes in contemporary Africa are not essentially bourgeois in the sense of having independent means of attracting and employing labour and capital. They are on the whole, much more of the type one could more appropriately designate as petty bourgeois. More often than not capital accumulation eludes them. They tend to want to have a bit of both worlds, by courting traditionalist pre-capitalist anti-capitalism while opposing free-market capitalism, and also supporting state capitalism and bureaucratism as 'socialism' (or varieties of "African socialism') in the name of the growing proletariat. The ideological framework for this can be gleaned from the populism which such dominant groups in Africa have espoused since the closing stages of the colonial experience. The ambivalence of policy in this respect is a reflection of the attempt under populist leadership to unite historically contradictory classes.
While the process was primarily economic in character and import, it also affected, as a 'westernization' or, as colonial anthropology would have it, 'acculturation' process, all areas of the cultural lives of African societies. With respect to the concerns of this paper, its changing effects on religious, educational and other types of social institutions impinging on the identity of African people as a focus of development are the issues to be addressed.
The question of development has become one of the main preoccupations of African society. In each instance both the state and the structures of civil society see development as a central objective. Programmatic and organized change of the social structure is a characteristic restricted to the human species. Humans constantly and purposefully alter the reality in which they live. In this sense they differ radically from the rest of the animal world. Animal societies do not sociologically transform, they do not create culture. When social changes take place in their organization, they are largely through the agency of biological mutations. It is important to be reminded of the fact that the cultural transformations which define human nature are neither unilinear nor determined (Giner, 1972:266). But equally, it is useful to point out, that in the development of the forces and relations of production certain common patterns are discernible in a general human societal sense, but these are closely moulded by the cultural and historical specificities of the society in question. In as far as the relationship between social change and the development idea is concerned, Giner sums up what has become sociological wisdom rather aptly,
... social change is not synonymous with development, much less with progress. The latter is merely a sub-class of the former. Development is a growth in complexity, progress is development plus an improvement in the moral and aesthetic and cognitive dimensions of society, in a word, an improvement in the quality of life. Thus we may have development without progress. A country may develop economically with the help of great camps of forced labour. Another may make 'progress' in the field of knowledge... without improving the trends towards peace or gaining greater freedom of artistic and political expression. The concept of regression... points to the converse phenomenon of development; it is not exactly a return to past, historically unrepeatable, societies, but it is a loss in complexity (Giner, 1972:266).
The idea of progress in the discussion of African development has increasingly come to subsume the notion of democracy. Until recently the avowedly racist regime in South Africa showed unrivalled economic growth and development with no respect for the bourgeois democratic rights of the overwhelming masses of its people. Other African states have maintained, under very limited conditions of economic development, some progress in education and health. This has invariably happened under conditions of ruthless military dictatorships or socio-politically inhibitive one-party rule. Democracy as an enabling condition has moved close to the top of the African developmental agenda. While obviously a great deal of the pressure for this has come from the metropoles of the emergent unipolar world led by the United States of America, internally generated pressures for democratic institutions have increased, as capitalism and the cash nexus penetrate African societies more completely and assert the need for the requisite bourgeois democratic culture which dialectically relates to capitalist development. The ballot box and multi-party democracy have become the symbols for the ascendancy of the new classes of capitalist democracy in contemporary Africa.
In the abstract, identity is a classificatory term. It is the summarized definition or conceptualization of a selected unit or set of units in contrast to others on the basis of definable or agreed criteria. When used in the context of human groups its meaning narrows down considerably, especially where such usage refers to historico-cultural units.
Humans have identity in terms of groups to which they belong. Such groups are numerous. In social life humans move continuously from one group situation to the next. Some of these groups overlap: a family may in part overlap with lineage and clanship. But there can also be an overlap in families between nationality and multiple citizenship. The role sets in each group situation differ and some identities as conferred by their respective group contexts are more significant than others. Socialization assures legitimate role articulation in the group, and social control maintains and sanctions its collective being and cohesion. As societies become more complex, identities become increasingly based on achieved, as opposed to ascriptive criteria. Such changes are primarily caused by transformations in the forces and relations of production.
Pre-capitalist Africa before the colonial era was characterised by unevenness in the political economy. While some societies had by and before the 19th century evolved elaborate state structures, others were only weakly stratified, while still others showed only segmentary lineage and clan formations of a tribal nature. In many instances, interpenetrative institutional relations existed between proximate and cognate ethnic groups. Some societies were oriented towards extensive long-distance trade, while others were more inward looking and localist in their political economies. Identities, allegiances and loyalties revolved around the lineage, the clan, the chief, and cultural practices related to these institutions, and not to ethnicity per se, in the exclusivist sense that it is often understood today. Ethnicity in Africa was not caste-like or closed. Moshoeshoe's Basotho kingdom was an amalgamation of elements from all over the area. The Zulu constantly absorbed conquered or tributary states. The same is true of Ashanti, Benin, Sokoto, the interlacustrine Bantu or the Tswana groups. The Ila in Central Africa, the Karamojong, Suk, Turkhana, Muerle, Didinga in Eastern Africa institutionalised the absorption of war captives and foreigners. The list is hardly exhaustive. Pre-colonial ethnic formations in Africa were in this sense largely open societies6.
A few remarks need to be made regarding the concept of tribe. Classically, it is a social group which is economically organized towards self-sufficiency, a 'whole society' producing at subsistence or near subsistence levels, and with hardly any stratification along socio-economic principles. Influence is socially expressed through gerontocratic institutions, principally age-sets and age-grades. Tribes have simple technology, no writing and consequently literature, but may have extensive oral literature. Political autonomy with clan and lineage dynamics, language or dialect, a unifying religious and belief system, a binding ritual, shared myths of origin and value systems, and other shared cultural attributes provide such groups with a strong sense of collective identity and a feeling of ethnic distinction from other similar groups. Tribes as 'whole societies', differ from 'part societies' that is, peasant societies. 'Part societies' with 'part cultures' are socio-economically stratified. They are partly oriented towards the wider world and urban society. Whilst in peasant societies the household and local community are the primary units of social organisation, in modern industrial or industrializing societies occupational and professional structures located outside and dissociated from households and cutting across local community units and affiliations, become important centres or foci of cultural and structural differentiation (see Fallers, 1973:81).
Tribal societies, in a strict scientific sense of the word, no longer exist anywhere in Africa, and as Shorter, years ago, made the point, tribes organized along the above lines definitionally, 'no longer holds good today; and probably, even in pre-colonial times, was not absolutely verified' (Shorter, 1974:2). The point cannot be over-emphasized. Inward-looking, self-sufficient, technologically rudimentary, unstratified and culturally demarcated entities have been very few and far between even in the late pre-colonial period. Throughout the colonial period tribal organizational structures were on the retreat, and although they were largely eroded as pre-capitalist economic forms, the superstructural hold at the non-material level of cultural life has to a great extent remained. Some of this has been adapted to the conditions and values of modern African society. For social elements threatened with the prospects of encroaching capitalism and industrial society, such solidarities serve as refuge from the unknown and the uncertainties of life in conditions of rapid social change. Such loyalties also become easily enlisted constituencies by rival populist political groups. During the colonial period political formations drawing on limited tribal or localist sentiments were often the first political parties or factions to appear in the movement towards colonial freedom. But whilst in no instance did an ethnically constructed political party successfully lead into independence, in many instances they were crucial for the outcome and constitutional from which emerged.
One of the key lessons of the post-colonial experience is that with hindsight, in the process towards independence, it was in those states where highly stratified pre-colonial formations had existed that the resistance to unitary state structures was strongest, both before and after independence. They were sometimes constructed around monarchism, chieftaincy, sultanism and ethnicism. Examples could include the Mati Miho of the National Liberation Movement based in Ashanti, the Kabaka Yekka Movement of the Baganda, the Northern Peoples Congress of the Hausa-speaking people of north Nigeria, and the Inkatha Freedom Party in contemporary South Africa. Such groups have been much less successful compared to the multi-ethnic Convention Peoples Party in Ghana, the United African Independence Party in Zambia, or the Kenya African National Union. One remarkable feature of the politics of anti-colonialism in terms of the identifications the movements invoked, is the fact that, while in all instances of independence the political parties were restricted in their activities to their specific colonial territory, it is important to recall that during most of the early part of the colonial period formations like the National Congress of British West Africa and the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain operated in areas covering the whole of West Africa. In this sense, African political parties are responses set within the respective colonially bequeathed borders. In Francophone West Africa, organized labour was regionally constituted (Berg, 1975:175). It is noticeable that during the colonial period, pan-African organizations and movements enjoyed a popularity which is not matched by present interests. The framework for such loyalities was in a sense provided by the colonial system as it then operated. French West Africa, was one large 'unified' area. The CFA currency, was common throughout the region. With modification under French aegis this has remained to the present day. Movement of labour and capital was in many instances freer than is the case now. In the British East African territories of Kenya, Uganda and Tanganyika currency was unified, labour moved with considerable ease, the educational system was unified and so were sections of the civil service. In the erstwhile Central African Federation, during the 1950s, in order to stabilize workers at their place of employment the three territorial governments agreed in their Inter-Territorial Agreement on Migrant Labour, that workers, after ten years' uninterrupted residence, should be permitted, together with their families, to remain in the country where they work7. These conditions provided scope for a feeling of being African in a way which transcended parochial loyalities, and which has not survived in essence to the present period. Widely pan-Afrrican solidarities tended to undermine even more radically localist and ethnic feelings.
The term 'ethnic group' as a conceptual usage, tends to emphasize cultural distinction. Although it is often used as a substitute for the notion of tribe, its meaning covers cultural systems in all societies, from pre-industrial to industrial societies, from pre-industrial to industrial social systems. The term 'tribe' as currently used in Africa has, by and large, lost all scientific usage. In South Africa, during the last decade, the term 'ethnic' has come to be used as a polite form for what would previously have been described as 'Bantu' or 'Native'. In Ethiopia and Eritrea, in recent decades, the notion of 'nationality' is preferred to the tribal concept, since it is meant to stress the stratified and complex structural nature of such groups. In Africa as a whole, the term 'nationality' is coming increasingly into vogue as an alternative to the term 'tribe'. 'Nationalities' are seen to be ethnic groups in change under conditions of neo-colonialism.
The independence movement laid claim to the status of nation-state for the post-colonial African state. Most of the new nations in West Africa were hurriedly carved out by the Gaullist regime during the late 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s. The African 'nation' or 'nation-state' emerged as the most advanced new political unit and focus of collective political and cultural identity. The symbols of common national, social and cultural identity were no longer chiefly traditional, defined in terms of restricted ethnic, tribal, or local attachments. As Gellner (1969) has put it, 'the paradigm of a founder of a state, of a Father of the nation, is no longer the ancestor, or conqueror, divine visitor, hero or lawgiver: it is the liberator-developer, the Ataturk figure'. The increasing participation of wider sections of the population in the structures of decision-making which slowly evolved during the later stages of the colonial enterprise, bore fruit as new states were inaugurated through the instrumentation of universal franchise. All except Somalia, Lesotho, and Swaziland have been multi-ethnic states. African states were claiming a nomenclature which assumed that these states were structures to reproduce the development which European states from the 19th century onwards had unravelled (Emerson, 1964:11; see also Gellner, 1969:36). It is possible now, three decades after the fact, to recognize that the 'nation' or 'nation-state' or nation-building in Africa has not been as successful as the leaders of independence or former colonial powers had envisaged. In one country after the other fissiparous tendencies are ripping the polities apart. There are in countries like, Sudan, Uganda, Ethiopia, Senegal, Kenya, Malawi, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Togo, Somalia, Zaire, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Cameroon (the list is hardly exhaustive) powerful forces for regionalism and even secession.
In the literature, various tendencies are recognizable in discussions about nationalism. There are those, like Lord Acton and Elie Kedourie, who regard the phenomenon with a great deal of suspicion8. Others have reduced its sociological import to a psychological syndrome (see Adorno, et al., 1950)9. A good deal of the reaction against nationalism has been influenced by the experience of 20th century nationalism in Europe. Another tendency has been more associated with the 20th century Afro-Asian experience, in which nationalism has been influenced by the experience of 20th century nationalism in Europe. Another tendency has been more associated with the 20th century Afro-Asian experience, for which nationalism has been closely identified with anti-colonialism and emancipation. In this instance both nationalist practitioners and social scientists, who have regarded it as a positive force for change, can be summoned into evidence. The activists would include, among many others, Sun Yat Sen, Sukarno, Nasser, Nkrumah, Kenyatta, and Mandela. Hodgkin and Emerson are prime examples of social scientists of this orientation (see Hodgkin, 1960). What is, however, important to point out is that, in the usage of Hodgkin and Emerson, nationalism is a response to changing socio-structural and material conditions. The Marxian paradigm relates nationalism to the rise of capital and the need of the bourgeoisie to operate in wider 'post-feudal' or 'post-tribal markets'. In Africa, ideologically, nationalism as an anti-colonial project has been a populist idiom, uniting all classes opposed to colonialism. For as long as colonial power needed to be superseded, populist nationalism has been able to unite classes and ethnicities sharing common colonial borders. Ethnic feelings recede under the impact of colonial capitalism and anti-colonial populism. Its consensual basis however begins to break down as soon as the post-colonial state is inaugurated. In the post-colonial or neo-colonial state, ethnic identification and mobilization appears to be insignificant, for as long as resources tend to meet the expectations of the emergent middle classes. Where and when resources become scarce, and inter-elitist rivalries move to the fore, ethnic sentiments become hunting grounds for political mobilization by the contending elites.
The historical interaction between the West and Africa defined both entities in relation to each other. Levi-Strauss's view was that; '... we are not dealing with the contact between two processes each pursued in isolation. The relationship of estrangement between them consists mainly in the fact that this mechanized civilization finds in them its own creation; or, more precisely, the counterpart of those destructions it committed upon them in order to find its own reality' (Levi-Strauss, 1963). In this respect, if we want to read into the symbolism of Shakespeare, Caliban is the creation of Prospero and exists in the existential realities and conditions of his being a creature of the peculiarities of their relationship. Levi-Strauss rightly took to task the acculturationist idea of Malinowski, advanced in his 1945 publication, 'The Dynamics of Culture Change', for regarding the essence of the colonial encounter as 'the result of an impact of a higher and more active culture on a simpler and more passive one' (p.316)10. The gravamen of Levi-Strauss' strictures against Malinowski and Lucy Mair in this context is that the making of 'the native', 'the other', by the westerner is relationally constructed through 'a situation created by brutality, pillage, and violence, without which the historical conditions of this very development would not have been brought together' (p. 316). Indeed, it is a position which possibly most African social scientists and historians today would share. However, where I part ways with him is in his consideration of the three sources of the resistance to development in underdeveloped societies. For him, firstly, there is 'a tendency on the part of most of the societies called primitive to prefer unity to change; in the second place, a deep respect for the forces of nature; and finally, their reluctance to becoming involved in a historical development' (p. 316). The real reasons are tied to precisely the same relationship which has defined the being of 'natives' to the metropoles from the earliest stages of the evaluation of this connection, both at the substructural and superstructural levels. It is this dimension of the phenomenology of being under conditions of colonialism and neo-colonialism which also post-structuralists and post-modernists like Bourdieu, Baudrilliard and Maffesoli have failed to identify and accentuate with the emphasis it deserves (see Bourdieu, 1993; Maffesoil, 1994; Baudrillard, 1993; Friedman, 1994). The inherent philosophical iconoclasm of post-modernism, its rejection and suspicion of ideographic, as opposed to nomothetic, analytical approaches, are refreshing in an era which has seen the collapse of avowed state-sponsored ideology and the establishment of a unipolar world. I am inclined to suspect that its disavowal of 'essentialism', its subjectivism and the opening of the door to the epistemological and ontological exclusivism which Kwame Appiah has referred to, is an indication of the need for a theoretical return to the drawing board: a darkness before dawn (Appiah, 1992:231). More emphatically for some of us who attempt to find grounds for our discourse in an emergent African tradition, a tradition in definition of, or contribution to, the universal fund, the history of post-structuralism and post-modernism has been unfortunately Eurocentric. The idea of 'post' modern or after modern, 'after' industrial, to people who are hardly industrial is suspect. Appiah suggests that, 'there is certainly no doubt that Western modernity now has a universal geographical significance', and then proceeds a little further down the road of his argument that;
... the Empire of Signs strikes back, Weber's 'as we like to think' reflects his doubts about whether the western imperium world was as clearly of universal value as it was certainly of universal significance; and postmodernism surely fully endorses his resistance to this claim... the trade is two-way (Appiah, 1992:233).
I would argue that ultimately the trade would become a fully fledged two-way process, but we are still very far from this condition. As of now, the intellectual and cultural hegemony of the West over the rest of us allows only an appendage and unequal status within which African scholarship consumes, rather than creatively contributes to, the universal fund11.
Development under conditions of economic neo-colonialism is as dead an end as it is culturally inhibited, if it is not premised on the re-establishment of continuity with the native's history and cultural roots. Whilst development implies the optimization of local economic control over resources and their employment, it also assumes the appropriation of indigenous history and culture as a basis of economic and social growth. One can only endorse Oldham's remarks, made some almost 50 years ago, that 'rootlessness results inevitably in stunted growth. Education for future leadership cannot afford to lose its links with traditional custom, folklore, music, dance, painting, sculpture and other cultural elements' (Oldham, 1955:275). Implicit in Oldham's argument, and a point to be highlighted, is the fact that the African encounter with the West perhaps most dramatically affected African leadership. The elite is affected in terms of the fact that, on the one hand, it is historically entrusted with the piloting of the development objective, on the other hand, it is a historically mutilated class, alienated and estranged from the culture of the masses. Thus the elite leads in the direction of total integration into the western world, while the African masses, largely situated in the rural areas, display greater faithfulness and reliance on the indigenous cultures and history, in short, the roots of African society.
Discussions about an African identity often draws out two poles of thought. There are those who quickly fall back on the myth of the Tower of Babel. For them, Africa is inhabited by hundreds of 'tribes', each distinct from the next. From there it is a short step to saying that colonialism has amalgamated Africa into 'nation-states', which is progress. Africans differ so profoundly that it is impossible to talk in any serious way about African identity. The other pole easily argues the historical and cultural unity of Africans. Sometimes in its bald and facile presentation, it translates and raises the status of myths to facts. It is this sort of position which is described by Hountondji, as 'unanimism'. But when these points have been made, clarification is needed further. Physical ascriptive attributes which are used to classify people offer us no possibility of understanding homo sapiens as a culture-creating animal. Sociologically the race concept today has no scientific usage. Thus the answer to the identity question can only be sought in historical and cultural criteria. Appiah writes that 'Whatever Africans share, we do not have a common traditional culture, common languages, a common religious or conceptual vocabulary... ' (Appiah, 1992:41). One must be careful not to overstate the case. There is, in spite of differences, a great deal of uniformity and structural affinity between African cultural formations as one moves from one part of the continent to another. Historical and cultural ties link widely-flung African cultural groups.
In the preparations towards, and at, the recent 7th Pan-Afircan Congress (Kampala, Uganda, April 1994), I had suggested that, at an earlier pre-congress meeting in Harare:
... My observations on 'Who is an African' were subject to discussion. Pandi Mutoma had, I believe, done the groundwork for this meeting. In my view, that question is one of the crucial issues to be resolved, or rather laid to rest, before the Congress. It is one of the most immediate issues facing our congregation. It is difficult to conceive of a Pan-African Congress for the unity and nationhood of Africans, I emphasise nationhood of Africans, if the participants are not agreed on who is an African; who belongs to the African nation, who should participate. While the question is frightfully relevant to the discussion of African unity, it is at the same time an issue or question many find too sensitive for discussion. It is often casually brushed aside and hoped that it would disappear. But its centrality to the whole issue of African unity cannot be wished away or avoided. It needs to be addressed with the seriousness and urgency that it deserves. It needs to be treated with frankness and forthrightness. In too many parts of Africa people who do not regard themselves as Africans are regarded as such by Africans. Being African is virtually equated with citizenship. I think this is often deliberate and wicked. As I have often insisted, if everybody is an African, then nobody is an African (Prah, 1994).
The question of identity in contemporary Africa constitutes one of the most challenging subjective preconditions to social development, if such development needs to respect, as of necessity, in order to be viable, the heritage of African culture and history as the premise of development. The confusion, or obfuscation, arises out of the fact that, in much the same way that African economies have been forged on the anvil of colonialism, the identity of Africans has been handed down by the colonial experience. Indigenous and historical points of reference have been marginalised, and in substitution, new and novel ones, deriving from the 1885 partition and its aftermath inter-European agreements, have formed the basis of new identities which, with some modifications in the last thirty years, have come to represent the universally accepted identities of Africans. While some are, or have been, Kaffirs, Baushmen, Coloureds and Basters, others are, or have been, Nigerians, Gold Coasters, Ivorians, Upper Voltarians, Northern and Southern Rhodesians. In each of these instances, the identities invoked by these terms deny culture, history and existence before colonialism. In the ostensible attempt to reach back into history and provide identities which give a stronger measure of 'pride' to the African, 'authenticity' 'negritude' or 'African personality' some post-conlonial regimes have altered identities from for example, Southern Rhodesian to Zimbabwe-Rhodesian to Zimbabwean, Gold Coaster to Ghanaian, Congolese to Zairean, Upper Voltarian to Burkinabe, Abyssinian to Ethiopian. What these revised identities do not do, however, is that they do not alter the territorial or geographical basis of these so-called national identities from the borders bequeathed by the colonial partition a century ago. Thus, they continue to legitimise the consequences of the partition while denying this.
Another important point which needs to be made is that the social evolution from pre-colonial times through colonialism to post-colonialism or neocolonialism, has seen the alteration of the hierarchy of identities which orient the lives of Africans. Each stage of this evolution has seen a rearrangement in the order of hierarchy of social solidarities. If, during the era of pre-colonialism, ethnic identities were structured in realities we would today describe as, Zulu, Muganda, Ashanti, or Ibo, and enjoyed centrality in the ordering of the economic and social lives of Africans, the foundations of the dominance of present state identities were laid during the colonial period and largely inherited into the post-colonial era. The anti-colonial struggle downgraded the more primeval localist and more exclusivist ethnic values. It was left and acted upon as an article of faith in the ideology of the 'African nation-state' that all manifest societal expressions of 'tribal' or ethnic interest articulation was pernicious. Indeed, in the post-colonial situation ethnic loyalties have become anathema to the prevailing system, and are regarded as narrow, divisive, and atavistic expressions of 'tribalism' which undermine, rather than provide, historically legitimate building blocks for the modern African state. This is not surprising, since the post-colonial state in a fundamental way would implicitly deny its legitimacy if it accepts the relevance of ethnicity as a structural principle for social organization in a dispensation which arbitrarily has chopped up the territorial and cultural basis of these identities.
Some analysts, such as Alexander (1985), have questioned the viability of the 'ethnic' concept. To deny the existence of ethnicities is virtually a denial of the raison d'être of anthropology as a scientific discipline. Others, such as Ranger (1983), have shown that under colonialism, various factors helped in the 'invention' of 'tribes' where they did not exist. Dialects were raised to the level of separate languages. This has resulted in 'identities' being foisted on groups which did not previously exist. Asiwaju has also demonstrated how under colonialism, borders divided groups which were then given different names across the borders in the different colonial territories12.
The primary cause for the shift in the hierarchy of identities can be found in the economic and political effects of the colonial process. Capitalism under colonial tutelage advanced the process of the dissolution of limited and localised markets and exchange networks. It kicked into being in all corners of the African continent, the migrant labour system, tied to either mining or primary agricultural produce. Various forms of taxation, particularly poll and hut taxes assisted in the uprooting of Africans from the land driving them into various types of wage labour. Social melting-pot conditions were created by these transformations, and they provided all involved parties a stake in the emergent system, however unequal these parties ultimately were within the colonial capitalist economy. Removed from their ancestral areas, people tended to lose some of their original loyalties, whilst developing new ones, tied more closely to the colonial political economy. In the urban centres of colonial Africa, clanship had little relevance, lineage a little more. Writing about Leopoldville in 1962-1963, La Fontaine observes that, 'one's neighbour is not always a kinsman, nor one's workmate a neighbour' (La Fontaine, 1970:133). Powdermaker's remarks regarding life in the Copperbelt in Northern Rhodesia at about the same time was that; at the individual level, tribal origin was an important point of reference, but 'had little political significance; the tendency was toward the expansion of a group identity beyond the tribe' (Powdermaker, 1962:310). In short, it integrated wider areas beyond pre-capitalist and pre-colonial polities into a homogenizing process. In his essay on 'Race and Resistance in South Africa', J. Congress Mbata points out that industrialisation was an important and crucial factor in the realignment of solidarities among African tribesmen, and the development of a sense of commonality of interests among workers. 'The men who assembled in the diamond fields of Kimberley and in the gold mines of the Witwatersrand began to think of themselves not only as Basuto, Xhosa, or Zulu, but also as Africans'. From about 1870, when the first diamond mines were opened, a core of urban Africans emerged, which eventually became the seed population of the so-called native locations (Mbata, 1970:223). James Graham in his study of the Njombe District in Tanzania, demonstrated that the penetration of the cash nexus produced strains on traditional solidarities and provided leverage for the promotion of nascent class oriented reaction (Graham, 1968). Barnett and Njama have argued that the migrant labour system created a situation in which large numbers of former peasants were thrown into an urban melting-pot, where they were often inclined to join men of other regions, districts and tribes in the formation of trade unions, mutual aid associations, political associations and other urban formations. In Kenya, as elsewhere in colonial Africa, such new associations and groupings 'tended to cross-link various tribes and local communities engendering new loyalties to larger groupings and an African national element of consciousness' (Barnett and Njama, 1966:35). Onwuka Dike, referring to West Africa, has this to say: 'It is, of course, a truism that up to a point a profound change in the economy of any given community tends to bring about an unsettlement of and a readjustment in the social organization. Such a change did occur in 19th century West Africa; in comparison with the three centuries that preceded them... The buying and selling of commodities is almost always accompanied by the contact of cultures, the exchange of ideas, the mingling of peoples...' (Dike, 1956:425).
The framework of demographic mix and amalgam which colonial society produced set the scene for the development of modern political activity which transcended the tribal or traditional framework of political life. New avenues emerged for the expression of economic and political interests, which superseded, in many instances, the basis on which previously, collective interest articulation and expression had been institutionalized. While some of these new political groupings were ethnically based, as the nationalist and independence movements in Africa developed during the colonial era, it was those groups which were multi-ehtnic in composition and basis which proved most successful. In his study of mobilization and political control on the Zambian Copperbelt, Peter Harries-Jones (1975) draws attention to the fact that in colonial Zambia (Northern Rhodesia), tribal identification continued, until 1962, to be basic to the process of dispute settlement and adjudication, with tribal elders serving as mediators in conflicts between wives and husbands or neighbours. He makes the interesting point, which illustrates the pattern of shifting solidarities, that the
...onset of political mobilization and the constant urging of public speakers at all levels of UNIP (United National Independence Party) organization... to do away with 'tribalism did not bring an end to 'tribal' identification. Residents in the township still grumbled about the Bemba presence in political organization; they joked about the sexual prowess of Lamba women; commented on the polygyny of Ngoni and Nyakyusa... feared the reputed magical powers of the Chawa or Yao... Yet in day-to-day activity, 'tribal' background was a less significant feature of social interaction than recognition of a more local tie of uwakumwesu, a home mate (Harries-Jones, 1975:71-72)13.
In a comparative appraisal of changing functions of the community in underdeveloped counties, Stavenhagen observes that in some parts of Asia and Latin America, wage labour and cash crops have engendered clear-cut class relationships, where previously only ethnic relations prevailed. In Africa, however, the money economy 'has added ethnic conflicts to class relations for example in West Africa or has contributed to a modification of traditional ethnic-economic relations of a feudal type for example in Rwanda (Stavenhagen, 1964). While this point is in many respects indisputable, what is more important is, why this is the case. The explanation lies in the fact that colonial capitalism affected unevenly different areas in the colonial territories. Some areas with specific ethnicities became labour reserves, exporting migrant labour, while others became cash crop producing areas, attracting such migrant labour. This meant that in the emergent class structure, ethnicities tended sometimes to occupy class positions. This is true for example for migrant labour from the Sahel in West Africa which moved into the cocoa-producing areas in the south, or the northern migrants who came into the coffee plantations of the south in Uganda. In other instances like Rwanda and Burundi, the pre-colonial social formations of the principal ethnicities differed in form and content quite distinctively. Therefore their mode of incorporation into the colonial economy also varied, with consequences for their configuration within the emergent colonial and post-colonial class structures.
Another social institutional area whose alteration during the colonial era affected traditional African solidarities was religion. The religious customs and practices of an ethnic group serve as a principal integrative force in the social lives of the people. The Durkheimian argument that religion has been a crucial factor in the maintenance of social cohesion, stability and social constraint remains persuasive. With due recognition for variety and variation, it is possible to identify two principal features of traditional African religious life which promoted ethnic integration. Firstly, the series or catalogue of seasonal production and social reproduction, and secondly, traditions of ancestor veneration so common amongst African people. Christianity removed the centrality of African religious practices from a steadily increasing proportion of the people throughout the colonial period. Adherence to traditional religious lore lost prestige and brought no economic benefits. Indeed, western education, and the adoption of Christianity, became some of the crucial factors in vertical social mobility. Peter Becker writes that:
... right from the start the Black man was made to understand that his acceptance into the Christian fold depended largely on the extent to which he succeeded in disentangling himself from the several embracing arms of tribalism. As the years passed, almost everything tribal bore the stigma of inferiority in the eyes of the converts (Becker, 1974:167-168).
In an earlier study of urbanites in Mulago, Kampala, Southall and Gutkind with respect to Christian marriages and their perceived relationship to upward social mobility remark that:
Christian marriages in Mulago are confined almost completely to the 'upper class' of Ganda shopkeepers, traders and artisans. Christian marriages are the ideal: not because they are considered to be better marriages but because they are considered to be better marriages because they signify that a person has reached a certain rung on the ladder of growing identification with European customs. Furthermore, it identifies a person as belonging to certain social strata of society: the strata of the old-established families, of the well-to-do, the politicians, the better paid clerks and the increasing number of well-to-do farmers. Christian marriage is associated not only with a wealthier group of people, but also with an educational standard (Southall and Gutkind, 1957:156).
Changes in the structure of kinship relations also affected social identity formation during the colonial period. Our attention has been drawn to the fact that, 'unilineal descent groups break down when a modern economic framework with occupational differentiation linked to a wide range of specialized skills, to productive capital and to monetary media of exchange, is introduced' (Fortes, 1953:17-41). Under such conditions, it is observable that unilineal descent groups re-form into nuclear sets operating bilaterally. My personal observations of this phenomenon among the Akan groups of the West African littoral throughout the 1950s and 1960s confirm this14. During the colonial period, as Mitchell has rightly noted, in the mushrooming urban centres of Africa, the emphasis was on heterogeneity and on unilineal kinsmen in daily or routinised activities.
There are no cattle, there is no land to focus the activities of say a patrilineage, and the working hours and conditions preclude their participating in joint ritual and ceremonies for protracted periods. The emphasis in town is on individual success in a competitive enthronement and this emphasis cuts across the ideology of corporate descent groups (Mitchell, 1971:256)15.
Among the traditionally acephalous societies of Eastern Nigeria with relatively pronounced segmentary lineage structures, Ntieyong Akpan, some forty years ago, noted that, age-sets and age-grades were important institutions for the ordering of society. They were 'the real local authorities' in the villages. The influence of Christian missionary schools and the emergent elite towards such institutions was one of denigration and condemnation. They were considered to be incompatible with modern education. Many of such institutions were driven underground during the early years of colonial tutelage (Akpan, 1956:37-38). Indeed, it was such institutions and other structures of traditional social solidarities which often served as the basis for the organization and growth of messianic and millenarian movements associated with anti-colonial resistance and proto-nationalism.
As earlier indicated, the overwhelming majority of African states are multi-ethnic in character. In all instances, the borders handed down by the colonial powers cut through ethnic boundaries. This has had profound implication in the creation of identities which are essentially restricted to the states captured between specific borders. One of the most important studies undertaken in examination of this question is Asiwagju's Partitioned Africans: Ethnic Relations Across Africa's International Boundaries 1884-1984. Asiwaju writes:
In these specifically divided African culture areas, the boundaries have been drawn across well-established lines of communication including, in every case, a dormant or active sense of community based on traditions concerning common ancestry, usually very strong kinship ties, shared socio-political institutions and economic resources, common customs and practices, and sometimes acceptance for a common political control. In many instances, such as the Uganda-Sudan frontier communities of worshippers form age-old sacred groves and shrines. In other instances, well exemplified by the Somali, the water resources in a predominantly pastoral and nomadic culture area were located in one state while the pastures were in another (Asiwaju, 1985:324; see also Asiwaju, 1992).
One of the most glaring examples of the results of these borders is the Ghana-Togo border at Aflao. The traditional Chief of Aflao has subjects and kinsmen immediately across the border in Togo. Circumstances therefore require that he crosses the border very often. However, under existing conditions, he needs a passport to cross the border. Actually the border runs through people's backyards.
Asiwaju further points out that:
Apart from the division which arises routinely from the mere location of boundaries, partitioned groups were further pulled apart in consequence of the opposing integrative processes set in motion by the different states. Such processes have intended to make the divided group look different in different political, economic and social directions. This has generally been the effect on the partitioned culture areas of the distinct policies which the various states pursue in matters of trade and currency, transport and communication, politics and administration, ideology and education. Different symbols of formal status, above all citizenship, are imposed on the same people (Asiwaju,1985:324).
These circumstances have created conditions for the persistence of divided loyalties. What is noticeable in, for example, the cases of the Masai of the Kenya-Tanzania border area, the Tswana of Botswana and South Africa, the Basotho of Lesotho and South Africa, or the Ewe of the Ghana-Togo border region is that, for as long as economic and social conditions are sustainable, tensions and competing loyalties are in abeyance. But as conditions become problematic tensions flare up and loyalties come under increasing suspicion by the state authorities. Asiwaju (1985:324) adds that:
At local level, a manifestation of the effort to emphasise separation has been the systematic application of different cover-names for the same peoples to distinguish between those on different sides of particular inter-state boundaries. This phenomenon often dates back to the establishment of the boundaries themselves. It is especially manifest in regions like West Africa where the two sides of a boundary might fall respectively under the control of different colonial powers, each imposing its own metropolitan culture and particularly its language and orthographic tradition.
The symbols of the post-colonial state are propagandized on regular and routinized bases in order to develop and maintain loyalty, identification and commitment to such states. The language of 'nation-building', 'nation state' and 'patriotism' is cultivated with flags and national anthems. Ethnic identities are loudly decried as anti-national. This has also the effect of undervaluing cultural usages and practices which ultimately constitute 'Africaness'.
The pervasiveness of civil wars and ethnic conflicts in Africa would suggest that the dynamics of identity would need to be linked with the search for democracy and development. Clearly, room would need to be provided for identities which are primeval and predate the colonial experience. Such identities cannot be obliterated by decree. The answer, we would argue, lies in an approach which provides cultural space for diversity, which gives democratic form and institutions to culturally diverse groups and ethnicities, but which subsumes all under a wide pan-African umbrella of institutional unity, transcending the inherited colonial borders. Under such conditions 'tribalism' as localist atavism would lose its significance and impact.
1. Elsewhere Hayter (1971) explains that the IMF and World Bank; 'are currently being used for one major purpose: the extraction of debt-servicing from the Third World. Whatever the euphemisms about 'helping the developing countries to adjust to the oil shocks of the seventies', the exercise they are currently engaged in is protecting Northern taxpayers from the necessity of bailing out the banks... The complacency of the IMF/World Bank is nevertheless staggering. Perhaps, learning the lessons of the thirties, they have secretly decided that the best way to avert default is to ensure that the debtor counties do not recover. Otherwise their endorsement of the self-destructive greed of the banks is hard to explain. While the banks pile up profits, the austerity programmes being imposed by the IMF with the assistance of the World Bank are ensuring that the debtor countries do not grow, do not invest, and cannot import enough to keep their existing industries going. Quite apart from the fact that the living standards of the poor have already declined further and for a longer period than they did in the thirties'. Financial Times; London. 27th January 1984. Quoted here from Ayrton, Engelhardt and Ware (1985:134-135).
2. For informative discussions on the African environment and related variables discussed above, see a recent issue of the Eastern Africa Social Science Research Review, Vol. 9, No. 2, 1993. More specifically the articles by Sadig Rasheed, "The Challenge of Sustainable Development in Africa in the 1990s and Beyond"; Wilfred Mlay, "Population Dynamics and the Environment", Ali Abdel Gadir Ali, "Adjustment Programmes and the Environment in Sub-Saharan Africa: Some Exploratory Results"; and Severine M. Rugumamu, "External Debt Servicing and Environmental Degradation: The Case of Tanzania".
3. As the Ethiopian, Prof. Asmelash Beyene recently suggested very poignantly in a private discussion, 'if we do not care about the value of the lives of our own compatriots and fellow Africans, how can we expect others to care?' The absence and weaknesses of modern liberal or bourgeois democratic institutions which recognize and protect civil and people's rights have become areas of profound need in attempts to establish 'good and clean' government.
4. The New York Times correspondent, Alan Cowell, evokes, in a book published in 1992, the aura of worthlessness of African lives, which Africans have created. The setting is Zaire during the 1970s, in the middle of the chain of crises and bloodletting which have beset the country since its independence in 1960. 'When at the height of a crisis, Uganda's Idi Amin flew in to offer moral support, the two dictators dined under a thatched pagoda overlooking the Congo River. Beside them, sleek leopards prowled in a cage, the very symbols of Mobutu's power. The tables were set with solid gold cutlery - the trappings of wealth and power exercised without mercy. Only a few months before the show trial in March 1978, men from Mobutu's elite personal guard had gone to the Bundundu region to confront members of an obscure religious sect who had turned against the authorities. The president's men flew there in American-supplied C-130 transport planes and carried American M-16 rifles. But the result would have been the same if they had flown in Russian Antonovs and fired Soviet AK-47s. At least 800 people were slaughtered - some said 2000 was closer to the mark - as the president's men displayed loyalty to their leader by mowing down their countrymen. The event - so remote, so typical - went largely unreported outside Zaire. It was insignificant. Who cared? It was the Congo. After all, it was only blacks killing blacks' (Cowell, 1992:40).
5. Science, history and common-sense indicate that no group or community is from Adam condemned to dehumanization. The myth of the descendants of Ham destined to be 'hewers of wood, and drawers of water' which enjoyed official ideological blessing under Apartheid in South Africa has, like the rest of that system, been relegated to the scrapheap of history. We therefore know too well that Africa's economic, social and cultural stagnation and retrogression can and would need to be turned around. Africa is obviously part of humanity in its historical process of human emancipation and development.
6. Among the Ashanti there is the proverb that: 'Obi enchre obi echi' (One does not dig into the genealogy of others), meaning that the community consists of people from diverse historical origins.
7. See Advisory Commission on the Review of the Constitution of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, Report; Appendix VI. Survey of Developments Since 1953. (1960) London. p. 333.
8. In his paper on Nationality produced in 1862, long before the various types of 20th century nationalism, Lord Acton argued that; 'Nationality does not aim at either liberty or prosperity, both of which it sacrifices to the imperative necessity of making the nation the mould and measure of the State. Its course will be marked with material as well as moral ruin, in order that a new invention may prevail...' Quoted here from Smith (1971:10). For Elie Kedourie, nationalism, 'has created new conflicts, exacerbated tensions, and brought catastrophe to numberless people innocent of all politics, Kedourie (1960:18) quoted here from Smith (1971).
9. See also the critique of this text by Forbes (1995).
10. Lévi-Strauss equally rejects the allied acculturationist implication in Lucy Mair's discussion of social change (Mair, 1969) when she suggests the genesis of change as linked to the colonial encounter. Lévi-Strauss remarks that: 'There is not, there cannot be, a 'point zero of change' unless we could agree to place it at the only moment when it really existed: in 1492, on the eve of the discovery of the New World...'. (Levi-Strauss 1993:316).
11. In an earlier paper, reviewing V.Y. Mudimbe's; The Invention of Africa, I make the point that; I would go as far as saying that, the western epistemological genesis and link will remain. It cannot be denied or wished away. Mankind can only be thankful for it, whatever its shortcomings may be. It is part, but only part of the raw material for a future universal epistemological fund and subject to radical reinterpretation. What is more important is what African scholars, or for that matter non-western scholars do with it. In as far as western epistemology autonomously defines 'the other' from its own Eurocentric crucible, 'the other' remains a caricature, a Caliban of the western mind. As Bhabha would have it, 'a reformed recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite' (Homi Bhabha. "Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse". October. Cambridge, Mass. No. 28. Spring 1984. pp. 125-133). It is only through the scholastic counter-penetration of the existent epistemological field that the dialectical process towards universalism is completed. No amount of facile, faithful or clever mimicry would resolve this contradiction.
12. See Alexander (1985:46), Neocosmos (1991) and also Ranger (1983).
13. Harries-Jones questions the validity of Mitchell, Epstein, Gluckman and others who had suggested that in the urban areas tribal identification remained the most significant feature of customary behaviour. He writes that; 'in retrospect, it is evident that the emphasis they placed on tribal origins was in part due to the legal validity the Northern Rhodesian government had given to the administration of 'tribes', and the presumption by urban administrators that tribal origins were a significant aspect of social relationships in town' (Harries-Jones, 1975:71).
14. Kwame Appiah's excellent description of the tensions between his father's matriclan and his immediate family after his father's death illustrates the forces of evolution in the transformation from unilineal descent to nuclear groups via bilateralism. (Appiah, 1992, "Epilogue").
15. Mitchell goes on to say that 'Kinship instead remains important in the form of filiation - as an ever-ramifying network of personal relationship which links any given person to others in haphazard fashion across the township. Kinsmen, who in tribal conditions played an unimportant part in the life of a person, assume a new importance in town where the overwhelming majority of contacts are with strangers. A person may call on distant kinsmen for help in town whom he would not consider approaching in his tribal home... Though kinship is still important in the new industrial towns it possesses qualities different from kinship in tribal areas'. My observations situate the phenomenon more importantly away from the tribal network per se. This may in part be due to the wider context in which my observations have been made in more recent times. What I have noticed in travels and sojourn throughout Africa suggests that, for example, Ghanaians or Nigerians or Ugandans or Kenyans would tend in Southern Africa to associate with each other, preferably with their own countryfolk, or with other foreign natives. Southern Africans would do the same in East or West Africa. This would seem to be a resort to the felt need, not necessarily justified, to associate with foreign natives whose experience of being foreign is seen or appreciated as reinforcing mechanisms for feelings of strangeness, foreignness and to some extent the alienation they feel in a foreign setting. In such circumstances kinship and common ethnicity, even when these links exist, are not necessarily the first recourse for contact. However as numbers increase, in some instances, it is not unusual to see ethnic affiliation and factors assuming significance in such linkages. The attitudes are however not restricted to Africans. Dutchmen in Nairobi, Englishmen in Juba, Indians in Gaborone and Chinese in Lusaka, in my experience exhibit similar behavioural patterns.
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