Tribalism: Not Just an African Problem

I've now been home for a week and what I like to do is catch up on the political situation. I don't like doing this when I'm away because most of what I read rarely reflects what the people I know feel about it. In an attempt to appeal to the masses, it is clothed in an awkward neutrality that fails to tap into the humanity of the shared political experience. Also, perhaps rather selfishly, I believe that if I don't see it, it hasn't happened (you are now free to depict me as an infant who has yet to understand object permanence).

But, as I watch and read the news, both local and international, I'm aware of the same things I always have been; the preference and, perhaps troublingly, the deference shown by the international news sources and stories, and the condemnation of tribalism in African Politics. Now the former, I've grown used to, but the latter really bugs me.

Simply because, it's treated as a uniquely African problem; particularly by the West. Politicians, Diplomats, UN Reps, whoever else, all get up on their soapbox stands and infantilise African politics with this one term when they fail to reflect on the fact that THEY DO IT TO! It's just that their tribe is political, or religious not cultural. Nowhere is this clearer than in the States where politics is your tribe and democracy can neither overwrite nor correct this, as evinced by the recent election. I know some of y'all are going to search for "Tribe" in the Google Search Engine (while I could have said "Google Tribe", I respect their trademark and I don't want to see it devalued #IPNerd), so lemme save you the trouble.

A tribe is a social division in a traditional society consisting of communities linked by social, economic, religious, or blood ties with a common culture. For what historians would colloquially call a "long-ass time" this is how we organised ourselves, until the rise of the nation-state where tribes were replaced with decentralised, impersonal institutions. It is this movement, made first by the Western States, that allows them to claim some semblance of civility and, in turn, infer onto many, predominantly, the African States, the traitor barbarism for failing to do so (in spite of the fact that many pre-colonial African societies were incredibly complex and had similar, in the outcome, rule-based institutions). Soon every nation-state followed suit, but the tribes which bore us still supported these modern systems. They are just more apparent in African states, due to colonialism and the history of colonisers politically and socially rewarding certain tribes over the others (with Britain turning it into a science), than in the Western States. But don't get it twisted; they are still there. They just took on a new form. They evolved, as it were.

See, tribalism is hard-wired into the human psyche, so to classify it as a 'uniquely' African problem is complete and utter bullshit, pardon my French. It is everyone's problem. The Nation-State may have replaced the small tribes, but the Nation-State is a tribe! Just take a look at Brexit and the underlying xenophobia and racism which fuelled the decision to leave the EU (I recognise that while there may have been other legitimate reasons for leaving, behind closed doors, y'all know why you left). Microscopically, within the nation-state, we are further divided into tribes owing to our political allegiances, religious views, social class, race, ethnicity, sexual preference, gender identity and so on. We just don't call these classifiers tribes, because the term is saddled with so many negative connotations that it prevents a discussion from being had.

So please, while tribalism is a problem that needs to be solved in African political discourse, the new forms it has taken that deny us the opportunity to talk to people who don't share our views in the West is also a problem.

Till next time,

The AWK girl next door xx