Africa: Talking About "Tribe"

analysis

Washington, DC — The Kenyan election, wrote Jeffrey Gettleman for the New York Times in his December 31 dispatch from Nairobi, "seems to have tapped into an atavistic vein of tribal tension that always lay beneath the surface in Kenya but until now had not provoked widespread mayhem." Gettleman was not exceptional among those covering the post-election violence in his stress on "tribe." But his terminology was unusually explicit in revealing the assumption that such divisions are rooted in unchanging and presumably primitive identities.

In his blog the same day (http://www.zeleza.com), African historian P. T. Zeleza countered that such divisions are neither peculiar to Africa nor rooted in "ancient hatreds." Rather, he noted, they are based on uneven regional development in both the colonial and postcolonial periods, followed, at intervals, by the political mobilization by elites of ethnic divisions,

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