Philip Ochieng
26 May 2008
opinion
Nairobi — ONE WORD SEEMS TO drive our national fate: Tribalism. If the December elections were hijacked, we all blamed it confidently on tribalism. In any case, its most spectacular consequence - the violence that rocked the entire country - seemed to pit certain tribes against others.
Even now that the political belligerents appear to have found a common denominator, we tend to say that the coalition government is a compromise of tribes. And Kenya is not alone. All formerly colonised peoples have the habit of using that word most glibly against one another.
But how many Kenyans and other African and Third World peoples really know what the epithet "tribalist" - by which they denigrate themselves so freely and so frivolously every day - really means? What, in the first place, is a tribe? Let us discuss at least the two definitions that I am aware of.
Originally, a tribe had nothing to do with ethnicity. A tribe was simply one of a number of units into which a sprawling empire was divided to facilitate administration. Ancient Rome was a good example. Indeed, it is to Latin that English owes the word "tribe".
In classical antiquity, today's Kenya - if thought of as an "empire" - would have been divided into eight administrative "tribes" called Central, Coast, Eastern, Nairobi, North Eastern, Nyanza, Rift Valley and Western. Tanzania's "tribes" would have included Kilimanjaro, Mara, Morogoro and Singida.
The second - and much better known - definition is much more recent. But it is terribly tendentious. For it is but a prejudice of the Western intelligentsia, and it dates only from mercantile times 500 years ago, when Western Europe began rising to the position of world hegemony.
According to it, a tribe is a group of individuals with a common blood heritage eking out a living at a very low level of socio-economic formation. A tribe, in short, is an ethno-linguistic community living in very "primitive" conditions.
In line with this second definition, we are told, tribes are extant only in the Third World, especially Africa. Accordingly, Tamil, Khmer, Inuit, Maori, Khosa, Ashanti, Acholi and Kisii are "tribesmen" and what they do among themselves or to their neighbours is what is "tribalism".
Yet, according to Western European and North American thinking, similar or often even lower socio-economic formations - such as Andalusian, Basque, Bosnian, Chechen, Flemish, Irish, Kosovar, Lapp, Sudeten and Welsh - are not tribes but "nationalities" or even "nations."
Whenever these demand anything for themselves or against each other - as in erstwhile Yugoslavia - it is not tribalism but "nationalism"! Critics condemn this as Eurocentrism. But racism is a more accurate term for the attitude that all human beings - except Europeans - live in tribal communities.
The upshot, according to this teaching, is that civilisation and savagery are genetic, not merely cultural, categories. That is why Mahmoud Mamdani, the celebrated Ugandan professor of political science, always uses the term "nationality" to refer to all the African groups that we call "tribes."
IN LINE WITH HIS FIERCE criticism of modern imperialism, Kenya's Taita, Maasai and Borana, say, are not "tribes" but nationalities. Other critics of this "developed-world conceit" - including Kenya's own Ngugi wa Thiong'o - go so far as to refer to those groups as nations.
In his non-fiction, Ngugi has no doubt in his mind that the Somali, Kamba, Luhya, Kikuyu, Luo and comparable communities in other African and Third World countries are nothing less than nations. How can I disagree?
If the Serbs and Croats are nationalities or nations - and not mere tribes - how can the Ibo, Yoruba, Hausa, Zulu, Ganda and Kongo be called tribes? I must point out, however, that it causes much confusion whenever the same objector uses the word "nation" to refer also to a larger entity.
How can the Kikuyu and the Luo be "nations" when Kenya is also a "nation"? How can India be a nation when, within it, there exist such "nations" as the Bengali and the Bihari? But this problem plagues even Europe. The English, Irish, Scottish and Welsh nations compose something called the British "nation."
But among the central ideas about this definition is that a tribe is a social grouping that claims a primordial - often eponymous - ancestor, occupies a defined territorial continuum, speaks a peculiar language and practises a unique culture.
To the Western mind, the Kikuyu are a "tribe" of this kind. For Gikuyu is their (eponymous) father and they speak a definite "Bantu" language, have a set way of doing things and live in the territory that stretches from Mount Kenya to the Ngong Hills.
The Kenyan Luo are another "tribe." Their original core was led into what is now Kenya by an individual called Owiny. For that reason, Uganda's Luo communities - especially the Jopadhola (descendants of Owiny's brother Adhola) - erroneously refer to all of Kenya's Luo as Jokowiny (Owiny's children).
It is, nevertheless, useful to make this distinction because the term "Luo" (or "Lwo") is much more inclusive. It is claimed also by groups like the Lang'i, Acholi and Karamojong of eastern and northern Uganda, the Alur of northeastern Congo and the Nuer, Dinka and Shilluk of Southern Sudan.
Then, too, the Luo of Kenya (and Tanzania's Mara Region, to which they migrated only in colonial times) speak a certain Nilo-Saharan language, practise a certain culture and live in the territory around Lake Victoria's intrusive Nyanza Gulf.
But let us be careful about this Euro-colonial arrogance. Throughout the 20th century, objective anthropologists warned that ethnicity is not really a blood concept. They continue to teach that culture and language are the only reliable definition of an ethnic group.
Though basically Hamito-Negro, by the time they disappeared into history, the inimitable Copts of Egypt (the pyramid builders) carried much Semitic (Hyksos) and Aryan (Persian, Hellenic and Roman) blood in their vena cava. This means that a tribe can be a mixture even of races.
The Khoikhoi "tribe" of South Africa (whom the Anglo-Dutch knew pejoratively as "Hottentots") are classified with the "Khoisan-Bushmanoids" - these including Tanzania's Hadzabe, Namibia's !Kung and the Pygmies of the Congo silva.
But in Khoikhoi veins flows a great deal of Mongoloid (Indonesian-Malagasy) blood. That is why Khoikhoi skins tend towards what the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins called "gash gold vermilion."
LIKEWISE, THE MAGHREB Arabs have swallowed the blood not only of the original Libyans - a Negroid people - but also of the Caucasian Vandals who occupied North Africa for many centuries after the Gothic barbarians had destroyed the Roman empire in the middle of the first millennium AD.
In Ancient Iraq, Georges Roux warns that the Semites can no longer be defined by blood, but only by language. Linguistic syncretism is what enables New-Age commentators like Andrew Phillips and Zecharia Sitchin to allege that the ancient Canaanites (Phoenicians) were Semitic.
But, as Robert Graves indicates in The Greek Myths, the Canaanites came from Uganda and were, by original blood, Hamito-Negro. The best that can be said is that both the Hamites and the Semites originated in the area between Lake Victoria and the Horn of Africa, which is why the two groups of languages are so similar.
Nevertheless, Roux's warning is in one sense pertinent. Until very recently, all human groups perpetually moved back and forth over the face of the planet. In this way, they "donated" blood and "exchanged" culture and language everywhere.
In short, a tribe is always a complex "bloody" mixture. An entity like Luhya or Luo or Kikuyu is so heterogeneous in the veins that its claim to a common ancestor must be dismissed at once as an empty myth.
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