B009THJ1WI EBOK

by Young, Crawford

  Another illuminating example is found in the Yoruba in Nigeria. Since the 1930s Yoruba cultural mobilization has weighed on Nigerian social dynamics and political process. Yoruba consciousness became salient in the nineteenth century when churchman Samuel Crowther used the Oyo regional dialect to unify the language, which was then diffused through the mission schools.67 The mythology of an eponymous ancestor, Oduduwa, and a narrative of a primeval creation complete the cultural foundations. In recent times, Yoruba cultural organizations such as the Egbe Omo Oduduwa in the terminal colonial years and more recently Afiniferi and the more militant cultural organization Oodua People’s Congress have fostered pan-Yoruba identity. Yoruba consciousness in the numerous diaspora is sustained by such religious cults as Candomble in Brazil and Santeria in Cuba. Yet within Nigeria the pan-Yoruba identity often comes second to ancestral town attachments, which frequently defines rivalries and competition.68

  Another variant in the multilayering phenomenon arises in instances in which colonial ethnic classification schemes grouped together a number of related small groups under a new category. The label “Bantu Kavirondo” in Kenya was applied to a congeries of similar decentralized communities, later relabeled as Luhya. The larger label became naturalized, especially in the towns and national politics, though the smaller constituent identities remained the major identifiers in localized settings. A similar pattern is found among Kalenjin in Kenya and Mongo in Congo-Kinshasa. Among many other examples are Bamileke, a pivotal element in Cameroon politico-ethnic geography; Bayart captures their identity complexity: they are “a composite group from the point of view of their modes of political organization and language. They have diverse origins and offer a now classic example of ethnogenesis: Bamil eke is a ‘frontier’ society . . . constructed by emigrants, or pioneers who came from various places.”69

  In urban areas, groups of closely related ethnic origin may amalgamate under a broader, even novel ethnonym. In Kinshasa, those migrating from the upper river and using Lingala as lingua franca became known as “Bangala,” and over time internalized the ethnonym.70 Across the river in Brazzaville, “Mbochi” is a comparable constructed entity, drawing together culturally similar migrants from the north around an ethnic category that in its rural homeland is very small.71

  For many everyday social purposes, instrumentalization of identity requires a proximity more intimate than an ethnic category of millions. Membership in a more immediate kinship group or village community is more likely to facilitate access to administrative favor or material succor in moments of need than ethnic solidarity of the maximal group. In urban settings, innumerable hometown associations, burial groups, rotating credit clubs, or other such shared endeavors are based on a narrower affinity than the entire ethnic community. The lower layers of identity do not always compete with the summit ethnicity, and much less do they erase it. But they are frequently the bottom echelon of clientelistic networks, and they often form the basis for factional struggle.

  Another form of identity layering occurs, especially in national political competition, in the alliances that form around a major lingua franca. CongoKinshasa has four such vehicular languages that have provided in large urban or national contexts an orienting identity: Kongo, Lingala, Luba, and Swahili. In the 2005 national elections, a clear pattern emerged in the outcome, with voting alignments largely shaped by the Lingala (west) versus Swahili (east) axis. Daniel Posner elegantly shows the impact of regional language-based political coalition building in the context of national politics in Zambia. Census orthodoxy dating from colonial state codifications lists seventy-three ethnic groups in Zambia. However, there are only four major languages (Bemba, Nyanja, Lozi and Tonga), each based in an identifiable ethnic community, but of regional currency for urban and other inter-ethnic utilization. The lingua franca serves as orienting frame for the indispensable ethnic coalition-building required by national level politics. However, in the contest for constituency choice of candidate, the seventy-three groups come back into play as fulcrum of competition.72

  Significantly, the importance of territorial nationalism finds further illustration in the rareness of cross-border mobilization of identity. Transnational Arab identity and Somali irredentism are the most important exceptions. Transterritorial Kongo ethnic identity at first glance might appear another exception, but more striking is the subordination to territoriality of an identity narrative tracing its origin to a major fifteenth-century kingdom spanning contemporary Angola and the two Congos; its legendary conversion to Christianity, formal ties to the Vatican, and high stature in the early phases of Portuguese colonial expansion gave it unique prestige in Europe at the time. Although at the moment of decolonization there were some murmurs of revival of the old kingdom (as the first Congo-Brazzaville president Fulbert Youlou notably put it, “Tous ceux qui se ressemblent, se rassemblent” (“Those who resemble each other regroup together”), yet these nostalgic longings were swiftly submerged by the territorial politics of the two Congos and Angola. Another example is the separate political paths taken by Ewe, divided between Ghana and Togo; though at the time of decolonization, some voices called for group unification under a single sovereignty, Paul Nugent found that by the 1980s “informants strenuously identified with something called Ghana.”73

  William Miles persuasively shows the decisive impact of the international border dividing Hausaland between Niger and Nigeria, placing a large community sharing a common language and well-rooted historical consciousness into distinct sovereign jurisdictions. Differing colonial traditions and contrasting postcolonial experiences do not erase shared consciousness, but they do suppress any disposition to joint action. Even in the religious domain, Islamic theology has evolved along different paths. Though the border is porous and merely a line on the map often little visible on the ground, its effect is profound. Miles gives engaging summary of the paradox symbolized by the lonely boundary marker: “Incongruously, provocatively, it towers on high: a fifteen-foot metal pole, springing out of the dirty brown Sahelian sand. No other human artifact is to be seen in this vast, barren, flat savanna; only an occasional bush, a tenacious shrub, a spindly tree break upon the monotonous, infinite landscape. . . . But there it stands: a marker of an international boundary, a monument to the splitting of a people, a symbol of colonialism, an idol of ‘national sovereignty.’”74

  Indeed, boundaries at times create different ethnonyms for virtually identical groups. Konjo in Uganda are the same group as Nande in Congo-Kinshasa. Kiga in southwest Uganda are similar to those who became classified as Hutu in northern Rwanda.

  Beyond national politics, the phenomenal growth of urban centers since World War II created critical arenas for social competition and identity construction; before 1940, few African towns exceeded one hundred thousand, but today such megacities as Kinshasa, Lagos, Abidjan, or Nairobi have many millions, and in many countries a third or more of the population is urban. The difficult struggle for livelihood is intensely competitive, creative of social solidarity needs and newly negotiated affinities with similar others within the kinship metaphor. In the recent years of deep economic crisis, those unemployed workers forced to retreat to the countryside face a different challenge: renegotiating their identities and relationships with their home communities. The difficulties of this task are well demonstrated by James Ferguson in the Zambia case.75

  Communal identity is thus situational and multilayered. Many everyday social encounters are devoid of ethnic content, such as sharing a public conveyance or engaging in a marketplace transaction. The activation of ethnic consciousness requires a context in which an outcome is perceived as determined by communal motivations. Although this occurs with special visibility in electoral competition or appointments to high office, everyday experience provides other cues for ethnic response: for example, in selecting a local authority, in trying to gain access to school or employment, or in attempting to assert control over land.

  VARIATIONS IN INTENSITY


  Ethnicity varies widely in intensity. Some groups have sharply delineated cultural profiles; others have more diffuse identities that are less readily mobilized. To my mind, the most decisive factor differentiating levels of intensity of ethnic attachments relates to the bonding power of the cultural ideology defining the group. In turn, the living force of the ideology depends on the same constituent elements that define nationalism: above all language, shared culture, historical narrative.

  The valence of language as ideological foundation depends heavily on its acquisition of a written form. In the contemporary world, purely oral languages risk eclipse and even erasure in the face of the spread of the lingua franca. The transcription of a language standardizes its usage and widens its currency, enabling its use in the school system. The compilation of dictionaries enriches its vocabulary and connects it to the broader linguistic universe by facilitating translation. The print medium opens the path for a published literature to become a cultural endowment that confers prestige on the group. Oral literatures can provide an important expressive role, illustrated by the legendary place of oral poetry in Somali culture, which until the 1970s lacked an agreedon written form. But print literature takes cultural ideology a step further.

  The shared culture also gains stature through its formal codification. Ethnography was long the primary domain of the anthropologist. Though its colonial phase was scorned by some as mere instrument of subjugation, the classic ethnic monographs were major sources of self-learning for the young generations of schooled Africans. Few of them were derogatory in tone; in translating the cultures they studied to the conceptual categories of the discipline, most anthropologists were engaging in a project of validating “their” people. Thus the ethnic monograph could serve as important source for construction of an ideology of collective self-worth. In urban settings, cultural associations proliferate, providing a forum for performance of and debate on the ethnic heritage as well as for the collection of materials related to it.

  Another basis for cultural self-pride lies in exceptional success in social ascension. In colonial times, in a number of countries a particular ethnic group acquired the prestige of exceptional prowess in “modernization.” Group mobility usually originated in precocious access to schooling or unusual entrepreneurial and commercial dispositions. Prominent examples include Igbo in Nigeria, Kasai Luba in Congo-Kinshasa, Chagga in Tanzania, and Bamileke in Cameroon. Strikingly, in each of these cases, colonizers in ambiguous admiration compared their talents for education and commerce to the stereotypical Jewish success narrative. The intensities of identity rested both in the internalized self-image of masters of modernity and in the fears aroused by the hostile envy of others. Such fears were well justified; Bamileke, writes Cameroonian scholar Jacques Kago Lele, “are marginalized, excluded from the society and rejected by the national community,” even encountering calls for their extermination.76 Igbo suffered pogroms in northern Nigeria in 1965, and Luba-Kasai were repeatedly expelled from Katanga.

  Historical narrative is a crucial source for cultural construction. The rediscovery or embellishment of a glorious past energizes ethnic consciousness. Zulu ethnonationalism finds rich source material in the Shaka myth: the heroic tale of an all-conquering leader who transformed a minor chiefdom into a powerful state at the beginning of the nineteenth century.77 Zulu warriors then inflicted one of the rare major defeats on a colonial army in 1879 in humiliating a British unit. Buganda ethnonationalism is erected on the narrative of a kingdom engaged in continual expansion in the nineteenth century that accepted British overrule in a treaty of near equals in 1900, contrasting sharply with the subordination through conquest of most other Ugandan groups. Buganda in colonial times enjoyed special status, and its institutions served as model for the rest of the country. Its remarkable cultural architects early in the colonial era, Sir Apolo Kagwa and Ham Mukasa, contributed to the narrative of a powerful kingdom with a rich history, Kagwa through his reconstruction of monarchical chronology, Mukasa through publication of collected proverbs attesting to the invincibility, strength, and terrifying power of the kabaka. The reigning kabaka at the time of independence, Mutesa II (ousted and exiled in 1966), wrote that “we were accepted as the most civilized and powerful of the kingdoms,” whose “integrity and superiority” was “fully recognized” in the 1900 treaty with Britain.78 The binding force of Zulu and Ganda historical narratives is reflected in the unusual salience of these identities in South African and Ugandan national politics.

  Groups weakly endowed with an elaborated cultural ideology were likely to have less intensely expressed identities, especially groups that were small and peripheral to high politics. Those such as Karimojong in northeastern Uganda, Turkana in northwestern Kenya, or the various small groups in southwestern Ethiopia have an ethnic consciousness that is less reflected in mobilized identities. If the group is isolated from the center of postcolonial politics and weakly represented among the intellectual elites, the possibility of it constructing a strong cultural ideology is circumscribed.

  A cultural ideology in itself is merely raw political material. Its activation depends on agents I have in previous work characterized as cultural entrepreneurs and political brokers. The cultural entrepreneur performs the tasks of codification, self-study through membership in associations that group to gether dedicated intellectuals, and promotion. The political broker translates these identity-building materials into a competitive organizational weapon.79

  John Lonsdale offers a further useful gloss on the contrast between identity as cultural resource and political weapon. Within the group, ethnicity defines a moral community, within which a matrix of social responsibility exists. Lonsdale calls this “moral ethnicity”: the positive solidarity of a shared normative order that operates to assure a protective framework of disciplined and cooperative social interaction. As weapon in the struggle for national power and resources, ethnicity loses its moral force and becomes mere political tribalism, an instrument in a ruthless combat for power and pelf.80

  A final dimension of variation of identity intensity inviting reflection is the interface with gender. There is some evidence that men and women experience and enact ethnicity differently. Given the near universality of patriarchal norms embedded in societal structure, one may ask whether the resulting asymmetries influence ethnic consciousness.

  Triggering this interrogation is a thesis advanced in some recent feminist scholarship that nationalism (and by logical inference ethnicity) is inherently gendered.81 The ideology of nationalism in its language and symbolism is masculinized by its salient references to conflict and warfare; its demands of exclusive loyalty reinforce the authority of usually male leadership. The woman is portrayed as protector of the home and producer of children to fill the nationalist ranks. In this perspective, nationalism becomes yet another strand in the fabric of patriarchy.

  This logic is not entirely transposable to the language of ethnicity. But ethnic practice may well implicate gender inequality. The predominant patrilineal descent norm in much of Africa results in the social erasure of female ancestry. Most patrilineal ideologies assume endogamy in which men’s lineal identity is fixed whereas women’s is, by definition, fluid as she must cross lineage boundaries to marry and raise another lineage’s children.82 Various female disadvantages in land rights, inheritance, and property control are often claimed as cultural heritage. Vail makes a cogent argument of the consequences: “An emphasis on the need to control women and a stress on the protection of the integrity of the family came to be intrinsic to both ethnic ideologies and the actual institutional practices. . . . Ethnicity’s appeal was strongest for men, then, and the Tswana proverb to the effect that ‘women have no tribe’ had a real—if unintended—element of truth.”83

  Surely it has an element of truth, but it is not the whole truth: evidently in highly polarized contexts, conflict situations will constrain men and women to ethnic choices in similar ways. Nonetheless Aili Tripp in her m
onograph on Ugandan women’s associations offers compelling evidence that women are more successful than their male counterparts in sustaining cooperation across ethnic lines in their organizations.84 Her findings received normative echo during the 1994 constitutional debates in a passionate denunciation by an outstanding woman leader, Wyinnma Banyema, of politics reduced to equitable ethnic shares in the proverbial “national cake”: “I find discussion around sharing and eating the cake childish at the very least and irresponsible, selfish and parasitic at worst. . . . Values which we women care about such as caring, serving, building, reconciling, healing and sheer decency are becoming absent from our political culture. This eating is crude, self-centered, egoistic, shallow, narrow and ignorant[,] . . . a culture which we must denounce and do away with if we are to start a new nation.”85

  Arab identity is in a class of its own through its transterritorial spread, its intimate link with religion as a provider of a scriptural language for Islam, and its robust ideological formulation.86 The historical link between Arabhood and Islam and the wave of Arab conquest and migration bringing the rapid early spread of Islam gave rise to a millennial process of incorporation of dominated populations that continues to this day. As the language of power and medium of religious observation, Arab identity had exceptional assimilative powers. Its boundaries have always been permeable, and most of those now proclaiming Arab identity in the Maghreb or Sudan are products of such an incorporative process. Only recently has the construction of competing identities—for example, various categories of Berber (Tamazigt) speakers in Algeria and Morocco—gained momentum. Since the nineteenth century, Arabhood has acquired added cultural resources through the appropriation of the idea of nationalism. As an ideology of pan-Arab territorial unification, the doctrine—powerful in the 1950 and 1960s—has, like pan-Africanism, fallen victim to territorialism, even though virtually all the present boundaries of the seventeen Arab states in the Middle East and Africa were drawn by an imperial hand. However, Arabhood is an integral component of the text of territorial nationalism in the half dozen majority Arab African states (Mauritania, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya), as well as Sudan, where the 1956 census counted only 39% self-ascribed Arabs but a substantial majority for whom Arabic was lingua franca. Arabic is also a major lingua franca in Chad and Eritrea, both of which have small ethnic Arab minorities. Although the dialectical variation is substantial, the uniformity of its classic sacred texts and the contemporary emergence of a modern standard Arabic widely used in the schools and media are unifying instruments. But only at the cultural and communicative levels: interstate rivalry and at times conflict between African Arab states is a constant, illustrated by the tussle between Algeria and Morocco over the status of Western Sahara that has been ongoing since 1976. A more banal example was the violence and verbal warfare between Egypt and Algeria in 2009 over a World Cup qualifying soccer match.87