B009THJ1WI EBOK

by Young, Crawford

  Englebert provides a more scathing indictment of the limits of African territorial nationalism: “While the paradoxical spread of nationalism in Africa is often perceived as one of the few notable achievements of African leaders, a closer look at some of its dimensions reveals a propensity for alienation that certainly rivals its unifying qualities. . . . Nationalists live a lie in Africa more than anywhere else. African elites relentlessly engineer nationalist sentiments to downplay the exogenous origins of their state, conceal the private nature of state theft, and remove exit from the politically thinkable. As such they sacralize colonial structures whose intrinsic absolutism and arbitrariness make for poor conduits for individual emancipation.”48

  One finds here the essence of the paradox of territorial nationalism in Africa; state and nation do not operate as elsewhere like interchangeable terms identifying the same entity. In a number of African states the predatory behavior of given regimes and their inability to provide elementary security or basic social provisions, as well as the marginalization of some regions, have left the legitimacy of the formal institutions of rule in tatters. But this delegitimation does not erase an attachment to the imagined community of the territorial nation, nor the hope that it may give birth to a reformed state. Some once dysfunctional failed states have recovered (for example, Ghana, Mozambique, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Uganda). Absent any evidence that the total dissolution of a failed state would improve the prospects for its populace, there is benefit in its territorial survival in the hope of better days, so long as the citizenry retains any expectation that these may come.

  THE THREE DIMENSIONS OF ETHNICITY

  The third axis of identity in Africa is ethnicity, a far more variable and complex form of self-ascription than Africanism or nationalism. Ethnicity is intimately tied to high politics at the state level; both juxtaposed to and intertwined with territoriality, it operates as a cognitive screen through which political process and state action acquire social meaning. Contemporary patterns of ethnicity are in part a product of the categorizations employed by the colonial state. Ethnicity as political variable occupies a central place in postindependence state calculus, as well as that of political actors, and thus demands close scrutiny.

  Ethnic and territorial maps of the continent do not overlap, yet the state system imposes bounded arenas within which active competition and cooperation occur. Africanism and territorial nationalism are relatively stable variables; ethnicity is a fluid and shifting identifier and signifier, producing changing patterns of affiliation and conflict. Its complexity is mirrored in the diverse modes of interpretation it has generated.

  Ethnicity may be usefully understood as based on three dimensions.49 First, it is based on a variable list of common attributes, usually including language, shared cultural practices and symbolic resources, belief in common ancestry, and historical narratives. Second, ethnicity is defined by the shared consciousness of belonging to a named group. Third, ethnicity presumes the “other”; such awareness rests on the boundary that demarcates the collective self from a visible outsider. Each of these aspects merits brief examination.50

  The roster of common properties varies with the group and does not necessarily include all the factors I have cited. Language is usually but not always a marker. The shared speech code provides the basis for instant mutual recognition and intimate communication and the means by which we think about our existence and action; these qualities reinforce an awareness of difference from those speaking incomprehensible tongues. Especially when equipped with a written form, standardized with dictionaries and grammars and endowed with published literatures, language can become the focus of intense emotional attachments. Leading sociolinguist Joshua Fishman well captures this maximal form of linguistic identity: “The beloved language represents the moral order. It functions similarly to that order in ennobling human life and, in addition, it is co-constitutive of that order. . . . It is also, for some, the heart of morality itself.”51

  But ethnic identity does not necessarily require the contrast with an other who speaks a different language. The intense ethnic polarization and violence in Rwanda and Burundi is between groups sharing the same language (as, in reality, do Serbs and Croats). The widespread multilingualism in Africa dilutes the connection between language and identity, especially with the spread of regional affiliations based on a lingua franca. In Tanzania, for example, where Swahili has received strong government promotion as national medium, some groups are giving up their maternal language in favor of Swahili.52

  Shared cultural practices include such elements as the mode of calculating kinship and descent (patrilineal, matrilineal, or bilateral), the customary prescriptions regarding marriage, and common culinary or sartorial practices. Ethnicity is subconsciously performed in the customs surrounding other aspects of everyday living. Localized understandings of the sacred and the supernatural are another bond. A shared culture gains added force when systemized in written form; the anthropologist, suggests Jean-Loup Amselle, “writes culture,” providing it with an authoritative text.53

  Historical narratives are potent foundations of identity. Myths of origin, eponymous ancestors, and chronicles of migration identify the group. The 1897 History of the Yoruba by churchman Samuel Johnson was foundational to the cultural unity of the Yoruba. At the turn of the twentieth century, the legendary Protestant Katikiro (prime minister of the Buganda kingdom), Sir Apolo Kagwa, published in Luganda a series of historical chronicles of the realm that served as a bible of identity; nearly a century later, Christopher Wrigley notes, copies of the Kagwa history of the kings of Buganda can still be found in most villages.54

  Consciousness is a second defining feature. Collective awareness is necessary for a group to operate as a social entity. Often expressed in the language of kinship, brothers and sisters, consciousness is historicized as a theory of shared ancestry. Though descent may be molded to conform to contemporary social or ideological requirements, the mythology of ancestral origin retains its hold on the social imaginary. Deng cites the example of self-identified Arab populations in northern Sudan, who originate from small numbers of Arab migrants who crossed the Red Sea more than a millennium ago.55 Intermingling with indigenous African women through marriage, Arab social dominance and patrilineal descent rules led over time to erasure of the African ancestry. Now enrooted in social consciousness is the firm belief in authentic Arab identity.

  Boundaries are the third defining element of ethnicity. Awareness of the self as situated in an identity group assumes full meaning through knowledge that beyond a social boundary there exist different identity groups. Humans, argues Henri Tafjel, are inherently disposed to categorizations of the other.56 Collective and individual consciousness is defined by who one is not, as well as who one is, an awareness reinforced by interactions at the frontier. Though the “other” may not be hostile, often they compete for the same resources or are suspected of seeking dominance. There is a tendency for stereotypical categorizations of groupings that extend beyond the social boundary to heighten the sense of otherness, often cast in negative terms.

  MODES OF UNDERSTANDING OF ETHNICITY

  In recent comparative analysis of cultural pluralism, a distinction is made between three interpretive modes: primordialism, instrumentalism, and constructivism.57 The oldest and long ascendant frame was primordialism, which postulated ethnic identity as a timeless essence. This perspective gave rise to frequent explanations in the media of violent ethnic conflicts in Rwanda or former Yugoslavia as the product “ancient tribal hatreds”; as all-purpose explanation, such a theory dissolves on close historical inspection demonstrating the essential modernity of most ethnic violence.58 For example, before World War II neither Hutu and Tutsi nor Serbs and Croats ever fought each other. But, still, the primordial dimension as an element in conceptual purchase over the ethnic phenomenon is too readily dismissed in some recent treatments. The continuing pertinence of this aspect of identity finds validation in the fa
ct that most ethnic actors are instinctive primordialists, likely to behave as if ethnic consciousness did indeed existe outside of time and to be little disposed to interrogating its origins.

  The second mode of interpretation, instrumentalism, became salient in analysis in the 1970s but acquired the name only in the 1980s.59 This approach perceives ethnicity as a political variable that assumes importance as a weapon in the competitive pursuit of material advantage and the struggle for power. The instrumentalist perspective finds expression in the representation of politics as “slicing the national cake,” a metaphorical image originating in Nigeria but now encountered elsewhere. Power in Africa, as Michael Schatzberg observes, “has much to do with ‘eating’ (and other forms of consumption.)”60 The “national cake” metaphor raises the ante of the imagery by its focus on the most delicious part of the meal. The state and its revenues, in this imaginative metamorphosis, assume the form and properties of a cake, divisible by slicing and whose consumers are ethnic groups. The relative size of the shares is clearly visible. Those groups receiving disappointingly small portions look with angry envy at their rivals whose plates are heaped with outsized, icing-laden slices. The competitive clamor for equitable slices directs attention to the hand that holds the knife; the presumption on all sides is that the ethnic preferences and affiliation of the slicer will influence the relative shares.

  Reflection on the national cake metaphor as a representation of state political process directs our attention to the competitive nature of ethnic politics, and its two key dimensions, domination and distribution. What fuels ethnic competition is the ambition to maximize group returns. The political realm is determinant, and the outcomes are shaped by the relative power position of the ethnic contenders. Dominance in state institutions guarantees the safeguard of the material interests of the ethnic community thus situated. In turn, mobilization of ethnic solidarity is a necessary strategy, both to have instrumental effect and to overcome the “free rider” problem: the disposition of some to remain aloof from group action because they anticipate sharing the benefits even if they do not participate. The visibility of ethnic group membership facilitates leadership monitoring and enforcement of the obligations of solidarity.

  Instrumentalist understandings of ethnicity are particularly applicable in settings that activate group consciousness. Competitive elections in which competing parties take on ethnic coloration are one such setting; the dramaturgy of the process is inherent to the election mechanism, with its ritualization of combat, gradual intensification of the emotional engagement of the audience, and the disposition in the late stages to elevate the perceived stakes in the outcome. The outbreak of violent conflict raises the stakes in a different way if social understanding interprets the fighting as defined by ethnic lines; acute security dilemmas then arise, driving ethnic actors into the protective shelter of communal solidarity.

  The speed with which instrumentalist perspectives dethroned primordialism invites explanation. As independence approached, one could hardly fail to hear the ethnic voices framing the emergent political competition for power and material advantage. Furthermore, the instrumentalist premise offered a bridge for ethnicity to two influential paradigms, Marxism and rational choice theory. Once removed from the domains of culture and psychology and situated in a materialist realm, currents of Marxist theory could acknowledge ethnicity as a “real” but misguided substitute for class consciousness. For the rational choice theorist, the logic of politics grounded in the choices of the self-interested, rationally calculating individual could be extended to the group. In the words of one of its leading practitioners, Russell Hardin, in ethnic competition “self-interest can often successfully be matched with group interest.”61

  A third analytical orientation that took form in the 1980s came to be known as “constructivism.” A Ugandan pastor in a 1992 Christmas address in Biguku parish gave unwitting summary to the central premise of constructivism in prosaic terms; “God,” he pointed out, “has not created all these ethnicities. God created a single person. People created ethnicity later.”

  To some extent, constructivism arose out of instrumentalism. If, as the instrumentalism suggested, ethnicity was situational and contingent on immediate circumstances for its activation and saliency, then one might benefit from seeking out its origins and sources. If ethnicity were in its essence circumstantial, some doubt would be cast on the premises of primordialism. A particularly influential work charting this analytical path is Benedict Anderson’s classic Imagined Communities. Although he addresses nationalism, his reasoning applies equally to ethnicity. In directing attention to the macrohistorical processes that produced the invention of a nation for millions who could only envisage their membership through imagining its existence, Anderson calls for the exploration of the processes of formation of ethnic consciousness. If ethnicity is indeed a collective human act of creative imagination rather than a timeless essence, then important questions concerning its origins and evolution come to the fore. Constructivism adds to the situational and circumstantial stress of instrumentalism the view of ethnicity as contingent, fluctuating, and fragmented.

  The search for the origins and historical construction of given ethnic identities quickly led to the colonial state. Its need for cost-effective modes of administrative organization gave rise to classification schemes, institutionalized through the census, that simplified the cultural landscape, making it more legible. Linguistically similar groups were amalgamated into a larger category. Missions faced with the urgency of translating the scriptures into local speech codes also needed an economy of categories. The promotion of literacy for evangelical purposes motivated the creation of a unified form for closely related dialects, producing in its wake a shared ethnonym. Administrators and anthropologists assiduously collected ethnographic information, similarly made more intelligible once it was situated in larger categories. Once an ethnic monograph was published, accessible to the schooled, its codification of custom fed back into oral libraries of self-knowledge. Academic identification of these cultural histories led to studies proclaiming the invention of ethnicity.62

  Invention, however, is a misleading term; social construction requires vibrant cultural resources for its assembly. The focus on colonial codification likewise requires modification; African agency played an important part.63 Colonial chiefs were frequently beneficiaries of enlarged ethnic domains and took part in their promotion. In emergent cities, ethnic associations helped overcome the quotidian challenges of death, marriage, employment, housing, and schooling. When political parties took form in the 1950s, they moved to take advantage of the vote banks such associations offered.

  Constructivism became for a time a dominant interpretive voice, perhaps aided by a predisposing intellectual climate. A partial explanation lies in its distant kinship with the various currents of postmodernism arising in the 1980s, especially influential in anthropology, that privileged contingency and fragmentation of meaning in human agency. Also worth noting is the parallel appearance in international relations theory of an approach bearing the same name. Although the content of constructivist international relations approaches differ from that of studies of ethnicity, many of its assumptions and vocabulary are similar.

  The momentary predominance of constructivist approaches quickly produced challengers. Their most compelling objection was that constructivism existed only in the eye of the conceptual beholder; the ethnic actor was an innate primordialist. In the words of one leading critic, Alexander Motyl, “Social constructionism is a social construction, that is, a social science concept ‘imposed’ on the non-self-consciously constructivist of people, who by and large do not believe themselves engaging in construction.”64

  Most contemporary analysis of cultural pluralism avoids exclusive allegiance to any one of these approaches. Seeking an understanding the tragic episodes of ethnic violence in Burundi and Rwanda that began in 1972 and reached a paroxysm of communal killings in 1993–94 in both
countries illustrates the need to draw on all three perspectives. In the genocidal moments, these conflicts evoked such deep fears and anxieties that members of each group could only achieve a sense of security by demonizing the other and could only feel safe when among ethnic kin; journalists reporting these events invoked the “ancient tribal hatreds” thesis partly because those they interrogated on the ground spoke in such primordialist terms. In earlier moments of postcolonial politics, Tutsi-Hutu ethnic encounters more closely fit the instrumentalist perspective as a struggle over distribution and domination defined by ethnic consciousness. And an integral grasp of the cultural dynamics requires exploration of the nineteenth-century origins of Tutsi and Hutu as social categories, which hardened into primary identities under the impact of colonial and mission policies and then degenerated into what Jowitt termed “barricaded identities,” “dogmatically and hysterically defined and defended.”65

  COMPLEXITY OF ETHNIC IDENTITY

  Conceptual capture of the ethnic phenomenon requires consideration of two further dimensions: the inherent complexity of ethnic consciousness and its variant levels of intensity. Ethnic groups are not closed corporate communities, bouncing off each other like billiard balls; rather they are permeable at the margins and entangled with “the other” in numerous ways. Ethnic consciousness can vary widely in intensity, depending on the depth of cultural resources on which it draws and its degree of mobilization.

  The enjoinder of the late Aidan Southall four decades ago bears repeating: “To hammer home the importance of interlocking, overlapping, multiple collective identities is one of the most important messages of social and cultural anthropology.”66 In the first place, ethnic consciousness is often multilayered. Somalia is an important case in point. An umbrella ethnonational identity is shared by nearly all inhabitants of Somalia and by ethnic Somalis in the neighboring states of Djibouti, Ethiopia, and Kenya, as well as by those in a swelling diaspora in the Middle East, Europe, and North America. The pan-Somali layer of identity rests upon a potent cultural ideology grounded in shared language with a recently standardized script, a rich literary heritage of oral poetry, a common religion, and legend of origin. But for most social purposes and political conflict alignments, the operative identity is located in a hierarchy of nested segments, extending downward from a half dozen clan families to clan, subclan, and lineage group through which ancestor descent is traced.