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© 1997-2002 Wim van Binsbergen
[ van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1997, ‘Ideology of ethnicity
in Central Africa’, in: Middleton, J.M., ed., Encyclopaedia of
Africa south of the Sahara, New York: Scribners, vol. 2, pp.
91-99]
In
the post-colonial nation-states of Central Africa today (from the
equator to the Limpopo River), Black Africans identify as members
of named categories designated ‘tribe’, ‘ethnic group’,
or equivalents of these terms in African and European languages
in local use. Such ethnic groups tend to be felt as a tangible
reality. They are claimed to organize major aspects of the
individual’s life in the field of language, expressive and
ritual culture, kinship, production, and reproduction; allegiance
and opposition in traditional and modern politics are considered
to be largely determined along ethnic lines. The national
territory is often seen as parceled up in contiguous sections
each of which forms an ethnic group’s rural home area
administered by a traditional ruler (chief, headman); the natural
habitat of ethnic identity is therefore thought to be ‘the
village home’, a category implying purity, meaningfulness and
order.
This view is largely nostalgic.
Significant ethnic processes in Central Africa today evolve not
only in rural context, but also in towns, bureaucracies and
national political circles; they include born urbanites
organizing themselves not in historic localized groups but
through dyadic network contacts and formal organizations.
Moreover, massive 20th-century social change in the rural areas
has blurred the distinction between town and countryside.
This actors’ ideology of ethnicity must
form our point of departure. It is similar to the views held by
European travelers, administrators, Christian missionaries,
employers of African labor, and anthropologists, active in
Central Africa throughout the colonial period. Colonial
administration parceled up the territory into strictly
demarcated, named units thought to possess, as ‘tribes’, a
unique culture and indigenous socio-political organization
allegedly underpinned by centuries of inescapable tradition. In
their selection and diocesan administration of certain areas, and
codification of local languages for education and Bible
translation, Christian missions reinforced the tribal illusion.
Central African intellectuals and politicians reproduced these
views in articulating their own ethnicities; they continue to do
so by the invention of tradition in the form of ethnohistory,
ethnic festivals, folklorization, reinstatement of traditional
leadership as a focus for ethnicity.
Also anthropology adopted the tribal
illusion. It was only in the 1960s that the concept of
‘tribe’ was subjected to profound criticism as a Eurocentric
and reified designation of an ethnic group, and ethnic
differentiation was problematised as a socio-political process.
Today, anthropologists view Central African ethnicity as
constructed and situational. Recent research shows how many
current ethnic names (ethnonyms) in Central Africa originated in
colonial practices. Whereas the ‘tribe’ was once thought to
sum up a total, bounded and localized culture, ethnicity is now
stressed to be only one among several primary structural
principles in Central Africa societies.
Ethnicity
poses great analytical difficulties because it can be seen at
work in many different social and political contexts, where it
displays many different and contradictory dimensions. Ethnicity
in Central Africa today is, among other things: a system of
social classification; which pretends to be rigid yet depends on
flexibility and manipulation at the level of both ethnic groups
and individuals; it is a structure for the definition and
interaction of sub-national power groups making up the national
polity; it is a system of social inequality; a strategic network
for redistribution; it constitutes the actors’ folk theory of
political causation; as well as an ideology justifying inequality
and violence vis-a-vis named ethnic others. This
multidimensionality makes for the complex ethnic dialectics
typical of Central African societies today and causes its
impredictability.
Definitions are a first step to
disentangle this complexity. An ethnic group is an
explicitly named set of people. Within the social field
more than one such sets, but only a limited number, are being
distinguished; at least the numerically largest set in the social
field is of considerable demographic scope, although other sets
may be quite small. Membership of a set is in principle
ascriptive, i.e. by birth. Within the set people identify with
one another, and are identified by others, on the basis a few
historically determined and historically changing, specific ethnic
boundary markers, including ethnonym, language, historic
forms of leadership, modes of production, selected other cultural
traits, sometimes also selected somatic characteristics such as
skin color, hair texture, facial characteristics, deliberate
human interference with the body’s appearance — both
reversible (e.g. hairstyle) and irreversible (e.g.
scarification). Ethnicity is the way in which the wider
social field is economically, politically and culturally
structured in terms of a multiplicity of such ethnic groups in
interaction. Identity is the self-image which members of any
social category construct as members, on the basis of
identification and of stereotyping both among themselves and
among outsiders. Identity tends to be situational, multiple
(since every social field consists of many intersecting social
categories), strategic, and subject to historical change. This
applies to ethnic identities no less than to gender, class,
professional, religious, and other identities. Socializing early
in life, as well as social control, propaganda, taking
consciousness later on, may cause a specific identity to become
so deeply entrenched in the personality as to produce a fixed,
self-evident vision of reality, no longer consciously negotiated
in social contexts. Ethnicization marks the process by
which ethnic identity is made into a militant political idiom
taking precedence over an individual’s other identities, as a
basis for political action. Culture comprises the total
package of attributes a human individual acquires as a member of
society.
Ethnonyms tend to be nested. Local groups
that are clearly distinguished at the regional level may be
merged at the national level in the face of non-members of either
group. If either local group is of higher status, such merging
amounts to ethnic ‘passing’ on the part of members of the
group considered inferior. Ethnonyms are segmentary, shifting,
situational, manipulative, and so are ethnic boundary markers.
The history of ethnic groups within a social field includes the
capricious pattern of the emergence, distribution and
redistribution of boundary markers including ethnonyms. For
instance, in the region straddling Angola, Zaire and Zambia male
circumcision today serves as a boundary marker between groups
(e.g. Lunda, Ndembu, Luvale, Mbunda, Chokwe, Luchazi) associated
with the widespread Lunda complex of language and political and
ceremonial culture, as against other yet related groups such as
Nkoya and Mbwela, who practiced circumcision until the 19th
century. Throughout Central Africa, language plays a major role
as ethnic boundary marker. This springs partly from the
codification of African languages since the 19th century but also
more in general from language’s capability of encoding and
displaying identity or alienness in social interaction. More than
any other part of institutionalized culture, language is encoded
in formal rules whose infringement (e.g. by non-native-speakers)
immediately causes puzzlement, ridicule, rejection, or a
breakdown of communication among listeners and readers. Language
for the native speaker tends to be the last refuge of owning and
belonging, of competence and identity. However, such emotive
appeal already presupposes ethnicization; without this factor,
the role of language as an ethnic boundary marker is attenuated
by Central Africa’s widespread multilingualism.
Tribal model and ethnicization erroneously
equate ethnic identity with a total culture embracing all aspects
of human life, instead of with selected cultural items serving as
boundary markers. In Central Africa, a specific cultural package
encompassing all aspects of human life is seldom limited, in
place and time, to a specific named ethnic group; usually it has
a much wider distribution. For instance, in the savanna belt of
South Central Africa scores of ethnic groups have been
distinguished one next to the other since the nineteenth century;
yet the distribution of patterns of production, reproduction and
signification shows such an underlying unity that we should speak
of one large culture region. Within this far-reaching regional
continuity distinct ethnic groups have merely distinguished
themselves by relatively minor cultural items marking ethnic
boundaries.
Ethnicization constructs ethnonyms so
as to mark ethnic boundaries, and pre-existing culture so as to
fall within those boundaries and to offer distinctive boundary
markers. The cultivated sense of a shared history makes sense of
experiences of powerlessness, deprivation and estrangement, and
kindles hope of improvement through ethnic self-presentation. The
ethnonym and the principle of ascription then produce for the
actors the image of a bounded, particularist set of solidary
people. The vulnerable individual’s access to national
resources, and the formal organization (state, industry)
controlling them, becomes the object of group action. In
postcolonial Central Africa, ethnicization increasingly includes
cultural politics. A set of people is restructured so as to
become an ethnic group by designing a cultural package which in
its own right constitutes a major stake in the negotiations with
the outside world. One dissociates from rival ethnic groups at
the local and regional scene through a strategic emphasis on
cultural and linguistic elements; and at the national level one
competes for the state’s political and economic prizes via the
state’s recognition of the ethnically constructed cultural
package. New intra-group inequalities emerge. The mediation takes
place via brokers who are more than their fellow-members of the
ethnic group in a position to exploit the opportunities at the
interface between ethnic group and the outside world. Asserting
the ‘traditional’, ‘authentic’ (but in fact newly
reconstructed) culture appears as an important task and as a
source of power and income for the brokers. Ethnic associations,
publications, and festivals, constitute general strategies in
this process.
Ethnicization restructures actors’
perception of time and space. It creates social meaning by
offering to the members of Central African society today a folk
theory which enables them to impose a sense of spatial
localization and temporal continuity on the otherwise bewildering
fragmentation and heterogeneity of their postcolonial experience.
The actors not only frame selected items of their regional
culture within the boundaries of their ethnic group and within
their image of ‘home’, but also project these items onto a
glorified past. Political, judicial and moral relations are
underpinned by reference to the virtual, dreamed village, which
never was the ideal setting it is now made out to be, but whose
evocation (in urban ritual, ethnic festivals, political
demonstrations embellished by traditional costumes and ceremonial
weapons, traditional leaders etc.) enables people to derive
symbolic comfort from their communion with mythical images — as
a basis for ethnic leaders’ mobilizing appeal.
Ethnicity displays a remarkable dialectics
between inescapability and constructedness, which largely
explains its great societal potential. On the one hand, as a
classification system ethnicity offers a logical structure, which
is further ossified through ascription and which presents itself
as unconditional, bounded, inescapable and timeless. This is what
made early researchers of Central African ethnicity stress primordial
attachments. On the other hand, the social praxis of
ethnicity as ethnicization means flexibility, choice,
constructedness and recent change. Together, these entirely
contradictory aspects constitute ethnicity, as a devise to
disguise strategy as inevitability. This dialectics renders
ethnicity particularly suitable for mediating, in processes of
social change, between social contexts with are each of a
fundamentally different structure. Because of this internal
contradiction, ethnicity offers the option of strategically
effective particularism in a context of universalism, and hence
enables individuals, as members of an ethnic group, to cross
otherwise non-negotiable boundaries and to create a foothold or
niche in structural contexts that would otherwise remain
inaccessible; this is how recent urban immigrants (cf. urban
markets of labor and housing) and citizens (cf. bureaucracies)
use ethnicity.
Ethnicity
is rarely a mere classification system of parallel groups
operating at the same level of power, esteem and privilege, but
usually implies an element of vertical hierarchical
subordination: ethnic group membership is a status position in a
hierarchy of politico-economic power and prestige, and
ethnicization aims at improving the position of their entire
ethnic group; failing this, the individual may try to pass singly
to a more highly placed group by the adoption of new boundary
markers (a different ethnonym, language, dress style, world
religion etc.). Ethnic formulations express all other conflicts
over social inequality in the society. Ethnicity is not the
dominant and independent factor in Central African society ethnic
actors (ad many outside analysts) claim it to be. Since ethnicity
has established itself as the Central African political folk
theory, all major social conflicts assume ethnic manifestations.
This is possible because of ethnicity’s unique capability of
being manipulated by ethnic and political brokers, whilst
possessing a suggestion of inescapability, a focus on ethnonyms
which makes actors reduce complex structural issues to identified
social groups, and spatial and temporal imagery which renders
ethnic constructs highly persuasive in the light of mythical
times and the nostalgic, idealized village home. The appeal to
historic ethnic symbols emulating precolonial conditions
(pastoralists versus agriculturalists, lords versus clients)
suggests that the conflict is rooted not in contemporary power
relations but in precolonial, perennial, inter-group conflicts,
and hence is unsolvable. The redefinition in essentialistic,
primordialist ethnic terms transforms social conflicts to a
format where they can hardly be contained, especially given the
poverty and erosion of many postcolonial states in Central
Africa, which render them prizes instead of arbiters in social
conflict. Ethnicization turns class conflict into ethnic conflict
over the state, and having captured the state, puts it political
and military resources at the disposal of one of the contesting
sides. With the global availability of sophisticated weaponry and
political support, such conflicts easily precipitate into
large-scale violence, of which the 1994 tragedy in Rwanda is only
once example from Central Africa. While the cultural and
mass-psychological factors in such events should not be ignored,
and the unique historicity of events makes a systematic
explanation difficult, ethnicity is largely a template for class
conflict.
Although
ethnicity in Central Africa today has been greatly influenced by
inter-group processes within political arenas defined by the
colonial and post-colonial state, many ethnonyms and other
boundary markers have undoubtedly a pre-colonial origin.
Ethnic groups as defined above are too
prominently and consistently represented in oral traditions than
to be explained away as mere projections of colonial or
post-colonial realities into a pre-colonial past; although such
projections do occur. Moreover, the same ethnonyms appear in
documents generated in the nineteenth and early twentieth
century, before colonial administration could have made an
impact. However, the various generic and proper names for groups
thus distinguished by precolonial Central Africans must have
lacked the standardization and territoriality imposed with
colonialism. Their dimensions diverged: named political units
constituting precolonial state systems did not coincide with
linguistic clusters, but probably did reflect ecological
specializations of agriculturalists, pastoralists, hunters,
fishermen, petty commodity producers. Precolonial states, as
systems integrating ecological diversities, were usually
multi-ethnic: one dominant ethnic group, several other ethnic
groups, several languages and an underlying regional culture.
Ethnonyms in precolonial times may reflect rejection of a central
state or regional cult; e.g. Tonga and Kwangwa, designating
groups ‘tired, sc. of subservience’ as found
repeatedly in Zambia, Malawi and Zimbabwe; of course such
structural designation precludes any genetic link between groups
thus named. Also outside states, ethnonymic practices articulated
ecological specialisms, e.g. between hunter-gatherer Pygmies and
agriculturalist Bantu-speakers in Zaire, and Khoi-San-speaking
hunter-gatherers versus Bantu-speaking agriculturists and
pastoralists in Zambia, Botswana and Namibia. Here both
ecological specialization and language served as ethnic boundary
markers. The historic ecological contradiction between
pastoralist/ agriculturalist opposition provided the imagery (if
nothing more) for the most violent ethnic conflicts Central
Africa has seen in post-colonial times, in Rwanda and Burundi.
If ethnicity in Central Africa has
definite precolonial antecedents, this is not the case for the
most obvious form in which colonial ethnicity has presented
itself: as a hierarchical structure of bounded, mutually
exclusive geographical ethnic, linguistic, religious, political
and administrative units projected onto a map, and administered
by traditional rulers reduced to being colonial officials. The
impact of European colonization on ethnicity and identity in
Central Africa made itself felt in a number of structural
contexts reflected by our successive headings below.
In
modern formal organizations (state bureaucracies, industrial and
commercial enterprises, and voluntary associations including
churches, political parties and ethnic associations) ethnicity
emerges as the specific social format in which actors negotiate
between the universalist legal rules and statuses as defined
within the formal organization, and their individual and group
goals of economic survival, material appropriation, prestige,
interpersonal power, and the acquisition of a political
following. When of two interaction partners one is an official,
their ethnic identification often persuades the latter to divert
resources for unofficial means. Ethnicity then amounts to a
structure of redistribution and patronage, which undermines the
universalist principles of the formal organization but at the
same time informally ties a significant section of the population
both to the redistributing official and to the organization, and
ultimately to the state.
The situationality of ethnicity means that
only in certain contexts a display of ethnic exclusiveness is
acceptable, and even then under specific conditions (e.g.
discretion, privacy, leisure time). Outside these contexts,
universalism is the norm, and there the migrant, job seeker,
client, merges inconspicuously into the background of urban and
formal-organizational mass society, submitting to generalized
styles of dress and conduct, and using a lingua franca instead of
a minority home language — the ticket to ethnic solidarity.
Before independence, industrial officers
in Central Africa were mainly European and Asian expatriates;
this introduced an ethnic factor, both between the expatriate and
the local Africans, and between expatriates from different parts
of the world. African labor has been one of the largest problems
of local economies; initially the solution was found in
recruitment across considerable distances, which (even against
the background of extended regional cultures) made for
considerable linguistic, social and cultural diversity at the
towns, mines and plantations where migrants converged. Urban
ethnicity emerged under such conditions. The labor market
features niches reserved to specific ethnic groups, exemplifying
chains of redistribution between town and countryside. Some of
today’s ethnonyms (e.g. Nyamwezi) are derived from people’s
functioning in the colonial labor market. Initially, industrial
social control was exercised on a rural ethnic basis, by
‘tribal elders’, in line with managerial fictions of the
‘target worker’ ‘the bachelor labor migrant’ and of the
migrant as a ‘temporarily displaced villager’; but soon this
solution was no longer acceptable to urban and industrial workers
developing a worker’s class consciousness. All this led to a
situation where, in Central Africa, industrial conflicts tend to
be expressed as ethnic conflicts.
The struggle for independence in Central
African countries comprised not only the emergence of political
parties (often with an ethnic or regionalist element) striving
for constitutional reform, but also a distinct ethnic conflict:
between on the one hand a dominant White, Europe-derived group
controlling the colonial state, its bureaucracies, industry and
large-scale agriculture, and on the other the African population
regardless of ethnic composition. Independence marked a
replacement of White personnel by Black, and in the latter’s
rallying for access and control ethnicization played a major
role.
Voluntary organizations in Central
Africa may be implicitly or explicitly organized on an ethnic
basis; of this tendency the standard example is formed by ethnic
organizations aiming at the presentation of ethnic identity
through music, dance, annual festivals, the furthering of
traditional leadership. In a multi-ethnic environment they offer
people the opportunity of creating refuges of ethnic
particularism, as a basis for effective dyadic network
relationships between individuals. The colonial and postcolonial
state’s intense fear of mono-ethnic group activity has led to a
paucity of such associations in Central Africa. More frequently,
voluntary formal organizations can be seen to function in a
multi-ethnic manner, in reflection of the fact that everyday
life, especially in towns but increasingly also in rural areas,
is multi-ethnic. Voluntary associations of a recreational,
sportive and religious nature provide a usable model of the wider
society and teach people to operate within the latter. Christian
churches furthered ethnic and regionalist particularism; however,
this was often balanced by such nationalist and anti-racialist
orientation as Central African adherents derived from their
churches’ cosmopolitanism. The same point applies to Islam, a
major presence in the north-eastern and eastern parts of Central
Africa. As a result world religions and their formal
organizations constitute the least ethically divided domain in
postcolonial Central Africa: many congregations are multilingual
in their rituals, and whereas ethnic conflicts (also between
Africans and non-Africans) may contribute to congregational
fission, in general the adherents’ ethnic particularism yields
to religious universalism.
The
towns of Central Africa, products of the imposition of colonial
administration and of the capitalist mode of production, have
served as laboratories of multi-ethnic social life. African
townsmen have shaped converging forms of urban life, molding the
multi-ethnic and multi-lingual influx of migrants into viable
urban societies where — with the aid of a lingua franca —
formal and informal norms of conduct, patterns of experience, and
sources of identification and mobilization, are widely shared
across ethnic and regional divisions. On this basis they have
asserted themselves in the face of the modern state and the
declining postcolonial economy.
A widespread academic opinion stresses
increasing irrelevance, in the urban situation, of historic,
rural-derived forms of social organization (kinship, marriage,
‘traditional’ politics and ritual). Here Mitchell’s Kalela
dance (1956) offers the classic paradigm, stressing how at
the city boundaries elements of rural society and culture may be
selectively admitted onto the urban scene, yet undergo such a
dramatic transformation of form, organization and function that
their urban manifestations must be understood by reference to the
urban situation alone. Or, in Gluckman’s famous words, ‘the
African townsman is a townsman’, not a displaced villager or
‘tribesman’ but ‘detribalised as soon as he leaves his
village’. The pioneering researches by Mitchell and Epstein on
the Zambian Copperbelt in the 1950s viewed urban ethnicity
principally as a classification system for the management of
dyadic network contacts and marital choices in town: an
exclusively structural feature, not as a vehicle for cultural
continuity between rural areas and new towns. Whereas
Mitchell’s later work developed the theory of urban ethnic
categorization, Epstein abandoned the earlier position. He
elaborated on the emotive aspects of identity as deriving from a
sense of collective history, and from identification between
(alternate) generations. He admitted that the private urban
domain of the household, kinship, and sexuality, was informed by
cultural orientations from the migrants’ distant rural homes.
This issue is elucidated by subsequent
research on kinship rites, life crisis rites, and historic
African rituals in town. What is reproduced in such urban ritual
is not an ethnically specific distinctive set of practices
(although ethnicization pretends otherwise), but the overall
cultural orientation of the wider cultural region. The
rural-derived practices bring to bear historic cultural meaning
and the attending cosmological orientation upon the culturally
fragmented urban existence, in order to complement such symbolic
orientation as derives from the modern state, the capitalist
economy, world religions and global consumer culture. Underneath
the multiplicity of ethnic labels circulating in town,
institutionalized modes of inter-ethnic discourse (joking
relations, funerary friendship) and marriage also mediate this
joint substratum. Historic African cults, syncretistic cults, and
independent Christian churches in town, which tend to be
trans-ethnic, derive much of their appeal from the way in which
they articulate and transform this historic substratum and thus
recapture meanings for urbanites having loosened their direct
contact with rural culture.
In
Central Africa today the distinction urban/rural has become
merely gradual, formal organizations exist also in rural areas,
and much of the above patterns of ethnicity therefore are found
also there. Through rural-urban links (migration, marriage,
part-time farming, ritual and healing) many Central Africans
participate both in urban and in rural life, and ethnicity
provides strategic connections between these structurally
different settings.
The colonial project sought to turn rural
Central Africa into a patchwork quilt of ‘tribes’, but never
succeeded. Although in many countries the administration of rural
areas is partly in the hands of traditional rulers (chiefs and
headmen) whose authority is defined territorially, chief’s
areas today are not homogeneous in terms of the inhabitants’
ethnic and economic characteristics; they include national and
international ethnic strangers — primary rural producers as
well as representatives of all sorts of national-level formal
organizations. The rural areas are involved in processes of class
formation, in which the increasing scarcity of land as an
agricultural resource leads to ethnic conflict because of the
link between ethnic groups, traditional rulers, and land
allocation. For such ethnic confrontations, as well as for the
contest over scarce resources trickling down from the central
state and from international development agencies, local and
regional politics constitute an arena; the players include
traditional rulers, ethno-political brokers conversant with urban
and national-level conditions, and non-locals pursuing supralocal
political and economic concerns. As small agricultural producers,
equipped with the power to vote, and usually with personal
knowledge of urban conditions at the political center, peasants
also play a role. Their view of politics tends to be dominated by
ethnicity as a folk political theory. Here they are inspired by a
collective sense of rural deprivation in the course of a shared
colonial and postcolonial history. Expecting to extract, from
state, party, and individual politicians, goods and services
which until recently have been denied them, peasants give voting
support to politicians who involve them in and through
ethnicization; the latter, often with a local background but
through their education and careers involved beyond the local
level are often in collusion with local intellectuals, ethnic
associations if any, and traditional rulers.
Provided ethnicization leads to
recognition from the center (in the field of expressive culture
and traditional leadership) and a trickle down of material
benefits, it often results in increased regional and national
integration. The view of ethnicity as invariably politically
divisive and centrifugal cannot be supported in its generality.
However, if local ethnicization is systematically frustrated, if
the rural area is near a national border, and if across that
border ethnic identification is cultivated with other groups
sharing the same regional culture — then the conditions may be
building up for secessionism — one of the most obvious,
spatial, expressions of ethnicized intra-statal conflict, and one
most feared by Central African governments.
The
post-colonial state is far from a fixed and static bedding for
ethnic processes to flow through. On the contrary, today’s
resilience of ethnic phenomena in Africa and world-wide reflects
the erosion of the nation-state, internally by regional and local
pressures, externally the global economy and the changing
international political order. If wealth flows from the state,
ethnicity provides a network to redistribute it; if the state can
no longer deliver, ethnicity provides counter-structures for
security, distribution, assertion of group rights, etc.
In Central Africa, national politics has a
regionalist rather than an ethnic bias. Many small ethnic groups
coalesce into a few regional power blocs; the latter feature at
the national level, in shifting factional arrangements striving
for control over the state. In Zambia for instance, this process
has now given rise to ‘mega-ethnic-groups’ such as the
‘Nyanja’ (marked by a simplified version of the Chewa
language as lingua franca), and the ‘Bemba’: no longer one
among many other ethnic groups in the country’s north-east, but
an ethnic composite encompassing the entire northern part of the
country which since 1930 has provided the bulk of labor migrants
to the Zambian Copperbelt towns — whose urban lingua franca
(more than the rural ethnic group) gave the block its name.
Ethnic boundary markers between the constituent ethnic groups are
shed and even their ethnonyms become obsolete. The emergent
mega-ethnic-group, through largely a national-level political
construct, begins to coincide with the underlying regional
culture. Here lies part of the future of ethnicization in Central
Africa.
This increase of scale in ethnicization is
partly brought about by national elites who in the absence of the
political expression of existing class and religious cleavages in
national politics, for voter support appeal to the ethnic folk
theory of politics. In the 1970-80s, one-partyism and military
rule in Central Africa had as one of its major rationalizations
the avoidance of ethnicization in the national political field.
The elite sought to borrow from the underlying regional culture
symbols of authority with nation-wide appeal. A case in point is
President Mobutu’s drive for authenticite in Zaire. In
other Central African postcolonial states however historic
African symbols were combined with or supplanted by North
Atlantic, Christian and Islamic ones in the bricolage of national
symbolism.
With the general reinstitution of
multipartyism c. 1990, the explicitly ethnic element in Central
African politics has greatly increased and occasionally (Rwanda
1994) assumed genocidal proportions.
Is
there a limit to the manipulative capacity of ethnicity in
Central Africa? Here is it useful to distinguish between
•
a person’s identification with a particular, named ethnic group
and its regional and national trajectory in terms of political
and economic power, prestige, inter-group conflicts; and
•
a person’s cultural orientation which is usually shared by many
people belonging to a vast region comprising various ethnic
groups.
Culture organizes the life world,
fundamental conceptions of the body, time, space, causation,
hierarchy, morality, legality, relations between genders, between
generations, between the human, natural and supernatural world.
Invested in symbolic contents rather than in boundaries and their
markers, the identity produced by such an overall cultural
orientation does not have a name and may be termed existential,
as against contrastive identity that marks the members of named
ethnic groups through contrasting boundary markers. Ethnicization
therefore amounts to a conceptual and organizational focusing or
framing, so as to make a social contradiction or conflict capable
of being processed within the available technologies of
communication, bureaucratic organization, and political
representation. The emergence of ethnic associations is one
example at the organizational level. Individuals and groups can
and do readily drop certain ethnic boundary markers and adopt
others (e.g. a different language, ethnonym, puberty rites)
without fundamentally affecting their overall cultural
orientation; however, ethnicization, and the intercontinental
response it generates, prefer (unjustifiably) to condemn any such
strategic shift (e.g. the discouragement of a minority language
for educational and judicial reasons; or of puberty rites for
medical reasons) as a denial of existential identity and an
infringement of human rights. By contrast, such assaults on
existential cultural identity as the imposition of colonial rule,
world religions, the capitalist mode of production, have affected
the people of Central Africa profoundly, but in the first
instance not at the level of their specific ethnic group
affiliations. However, after religious, psychopathic and military
responses, ethnicization has tended to emerge as a powerful
secondary response to threatened destruction of existential
identity. This has often produced new ethnic groups as the
obvious focus for taking consciousness and for political action.
It is a standard strategy of ethnicization to present the wider
regional culture as eminently peculiar to one’s own ethnic
group; the emergence of mega-ethnic-groups must be seen also in
this light. Ethnicization thus becomes a strategy in the struggle
not only for political and economic power, but particularly for
the rebuilding of an eroded life world within new boundaries —
the reconstruction of existential identity through contrastive
identity. The actors engage in a social process that allows them,
by the management of boundaries and the positioning of people,
ideas and objects within and outside these boundaries, to create
a new community of meaningfulness. For such symbolic
reconstruction ethnicity is a ready context, but not the only one
in Central Africa today. Religious congregations in world
religions prominently play a similar part.
In the third instance, ethnicization has
yet another role to play. Ethnic identity can become hardened and
militant to the point that people are prepared to undergo and
inflict violence for its sake. This is when the ethnic identity
becomes the focus of people’s experience of recent political
history specifically involving the ethnic group — which
consolidates itself in the process — as a distinct political
actor. The actors take the injury their ethnic group as a whole
has suffered, as a central personal concern. The awareness of
shared historical experience is a powerful mobilizing force, and
when it focuses on ethnicity it may lead to such stigmatization
of other ethnic groups and to such dramatization of one’s own
ethnic group’s predicament, that ethnic identity becomes a folk
theory of history, power and deprivation. The images it conjures
up instigate such intransigence that violence becomes an obvious
answer, as Central Africa has repeatedly shown in recent decades.
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