Ethical Ethnicity: a Critique

Abstract

It has become increasingly evident that a conceptual framework of ethnicity is being employed by analysts for understanding the continent as the discrediting of African nationalism proceeds apace. Indeed, it has become a commonplace to assert that part of this project's failure can be put down to its notorious disregard for indigenous awareness. ‘In order to overcome ethnic differences exploited by colonial powers’, according to Alan Fowler, ‘many African governments systematically negated traditional social organisations in the belief that they ‘reinforced an unwanted ethnic awareness and, through their values and practices, acted as barriers to rapid growth and modernisation’. The conversion to a positive view of tribalism by Basil Davidson has served as something of a watershed. In 1992 he wrote that while modern African nationalism amounted to a western imposition, ‘The history of precolonial tribalism ... was in every objective sense a history of nationalism’.