adminMichael Mhlanga
The year 1995 heard President Daniel arap Moi of Kenya characterising “tribalism” as a cancer. This is an accurate description of a demoralising challenge that we face in Zimbabwe.
As an urban raised native I too see “tribalism” as an evil that we have to overcome. Increasingly lately I have come to regard “tribalism” both as a cancer and also a tool that can be used to propel Zimbabwe to a new dimension of development.
Despite the common narrative that tribalism is an entirely exclusionary sociological phenomenon, I would argue that the truth about it is how it should be founded on collective complementary identity of different groups.
Lessons from African truths
Tribalism is the root and fabric of the African society. I argue that it is where we derive a sense of pride in being African. I consider myself more of a Tshangaan than a citizen of Zimbabwe, in the same way a Zulu might feel more of a Zulu than he is a South African citizen, and a Ndebele can feel more Ndebele than they are Zimbabwean/South African.
A Shona can feel more Shona than they are Zambians/Zimbabwean. Tribal belonging is never an exclusionary model of identity, but a valuable set of communal behaviour which guides, religious, economic and political organisation of a people with ample room to identify with, embrace and accommodate differently practicing beings based on a common good.
However, what has contributed to the state of tribalism we find ourselves loathing in my view, can be summated by the flowing.
How I cannot begin to understand the origin of the beliefs and values of the nationalist leaders who have been trying to implement a Eurocentric system of Government that ignores our tribalism. I do not understand their notion of nationalism that define “nations” through colonial borders.
I do not understand how they think such borders which sometimes divide tribes into different nationalities could bring about national solidarity.
The first step to getting rid of an ailment is an accurate diagnosis and an admission by the patient that he has something that ails him.
Once the diagnosis and admission have been made then a course of treatment is initiated that allows healing to begin.
We need to admit that Africans are by nature tribalistic and this in itself is not inherently evil. Fact: tribes had institutions and systems that catered for the welfare of all the tribal members.
Could it be that African states by totally disregarding tribal institutions and systems have weakened themselves? Could it be if you weaken the family you weaken the nation? Africans traditionally belonged to extended families, which in turn belonged to a clan, and which in turn belonged to a tribe.
In our haste to make the absurd partitioned Africa (Berlin Conference and the partition of Africa) into nations we chose to totally disregard this established socio-political order to our own peril. So we have tried and failed at making the great leap from individual tribal members to national citizens.
How do we believe what is wrong?
In most African nations you are defined as a citizen only on paper, your primary designation is that of an ethnic group.
Patrick Harries in 1988 exposed his kind when he documented The Roots of Ethnicity: Discourse and Politics of Language Construction in South-Eastern Africa.
He argued that one of the first reactions of European explorers and colonists, on being confronted by a world that was wholly novel outside the bounds of their experience, was to reorder it according to their existing structure of knowledge.
This entailed imposing their intellectual grid on the mass of unfamiliar detail that surrounded them.
Linguistic and other borders and boundaries were erected in order to restructure the African world in a way that could make it more comprehensible to Europeans.
Patrick Harries alleges that two prominent Christians in the names of Paul Berthoud of The Free Church of the Canton of Vaud and Enerst Creux of the Paris Missionary Society were instrumental in using linguistic orthography on our People in Southern Africa to categorise them and teach them their difference.
This, among a plethora of scholarship on the emergence and existence of the “us and them” finds credence in that it focuses on how language as a carrier of culture and identity was used as a weapon of disintegrating African societies for political expediency.
I also find it reasonable to conclude that we are what we are as a result of other people’s thirst of understanding us in order to exploit us. We belong to groups that were created for us because they could not understand us.
None of us chose to be born the way we are, whether for privilege or lack thereof, it’s the lottery of birth — a philosophical argument which states that since no one chooses the circumstances into which they are born, people should not be held responsible for them (being rich, being poor, being Black, Tonga, Venda, White etc) John Locke, Thomas Hobbes and Rousseau explain it in depth but John Rawls as a modern day thinker in his book A Theory of Justice illustrates it better for me when he reminds us that we should not punish other people because they are grandsons of your father’s enemies, or reciprocate the hatred because someone hates you for what you are not responsible for.
Why should one suffer for what they did not choose, why should we affect national sanctity and progress because of façade identity subscriptions? That is a question Africa should answer.
Zimbabwe’s regular imported identity
Dear reader, you will agree with me that Zimbabweans like the majority of Africans are not able or willing to forsake their tribal allegiances, so what do we do with this mindset? How can we channel this tribal energy into a national mainstream?
Frankly, today, tribes are a contradiction in today’s Africa, they are an evil if your tribe is not in power (which ever power you can think of), and a benefit if your tribe is in power- our own created devil.
This fosters a climate of stereotypically excluding others because you assume they belong to a different group than you or they are beneficiaries of your past and present misfortune.
Some people’s lives are miserable today because every debate in our society is trivialised to be about “Shona or Ndebele” as if any of those groups really exist, aren’t these creations of Western intelligence attempting to understand Africans for debriefing to their colonial masters who were preparing for the annexation of our land?
Our custom reference to names, accent and place of residence as a determination of privilege or excluding someone is not only misplaced but a catastrophic pursuant of a colonially designed framework of understanding us. Gerald Mazarire in Becoming Zimbabwean by Prof Raftopoulous reminds us how D N Beach and Terrence Ranger deny the existence of a group called Shona and a reminder that Ndebele is a group of people found along the way by Mzilikazi until his settlement in what is today Zimbabwe.
Of some of the people referred to as Ndebele today, their ancestors were tribes that are found in the Shona grouping today, they wanted protection from the powerful Kingdom by then.
It is unfortunate for a Bulawayo born and bred Manyika person to be excluded by his own because of place of residence and involuntary failure to speak his folks’ language. This is one of the paranoia we find ourselves in, we use surnames, address; accent and village headman to include or exclude other Zimbabweans in national contribution.
Dr Kwame N’Krumah, first President of Ghana and one of the greatest supporters of Pan Africanism, made some interesting studies about all this.
He emphasised the necessity of the effective involvement of all ethnic groups to the development of Africa and African countries.
A good question to answer is why his work and ideas have not had more impact not only on other African governments but also in the diaspora. Selfish interests?
Manoeuvres of western countries willing to maintain their “own share” of the great continent?
The debate is open on this question. But a good understanding of those reasons is necessary to improve anything in the way we are relate today.
@mhlanga_micheal
derick.khumalo