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The Ideology of ‘Tribalism’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 November 2008

Archie Mafeje
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Extract

Few authors have been able to write on Africa without making constant reference to ‘tribalism’. Could this be the distinguishing feature of the continent? or is it merely a reflection of the system of perceptions of those who write on Africa, and of their African ‘converts’? Objective reality is very difficult to disentangle from subjective perception, almost in the same way as concepts in the social sciences are hard to purify of all ideological connotations. Might not African history, written, not by Europeans, but by Africans themselves, have employed different concepts and told a different story? If so, what would have been the theoretical explanation? Are things what they are called, or do they have an existence which is independent of the nomenclature that attaches to them? When it comes to Africa, answers vary independently of whether the observer is a liberal idealist, a Marxist materialist, or an African ‘convert’.

Type
Article
Information
The Journal of Modern African Studies , Volume 9 , Issue 2 , August 1971 , pp. 253 - 261
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1971

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References

Page 254 note 1 Gulliver, P. H. (ed.), Tradition and Transition in East Africa: studies of the tribal element in the modern era (London, 1969), pp. 2, 7–8, and 24.Google Scholar

Page 254 note 2 Marx, K. and Engels, F., The German Ideology (London, 1965 edn.), p. 61.Google Scholar

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Page 261 note 1 Apthorpe, R. J., ‘Does Tribalism Really Matter?’, in Transition (Kampala), 37, 10 1968, p. 22.Google Scholar

Page 261 note 2 For an example, see Gulliver, op. cit. p. 24; I might also cite an M.A. candidate at Makerere University who said that ‘tribalism’ did not start in Kigeze until 1958.