Maravi

(HERALD) Tribalism: A Western creation?

Tribalism: A Western creation?
Friday, 20 April 2012 00:00
Amengeo Amengeo

The unfolding and expanding crises in Kenya and Chad demonstrate for all who refuse to delude themselves that Western-style solutions to African problems inevitably end in disaster. The emphasis of the Western media is on the “tribal” element of the disturbances, but the truth lies deeper and goes back further, back to the inception of Africa’s struggle for liberation from white colonial rule.

Although it is considered divisive and politically incorrect to question the role of Western imperialism and neo-colonialism in Africa’s ongoing crises, it must be acknowledged. At the start of the Liberation Era, there was no mention or room for “tribalism”. Tribalism had no place in the unifying ideology of the struggle for African freedom. Goals were defined and the enemy clearly identified.

All Africans were united in their struggle for freedom. The potential for greatness was awesome. The whole of Africa, with perhaps the exception of DRC then Zaire and Cote d’ Ivoire (then both beachheads of neo-colonialism) supported materially and morally the armed struggles in the South, North, West and East.

There were no Kikuyus, Luos, Northerners or Southerners but Africans striving for their freedom and unity with dreams of growth and development and the urge to rise above the imperialist past.

Thinkers like Kwame Nkrumah and Nyerere, Amilcar Cabral and Frantz Fanon advocated for African unity and continual struggle against an unrepentant imperialism. Their dreams and ideals have been sidelined and discredited. The idea of African thinkers seeking African solutions has been replaced by alien ideologies which fit like square pegs in round holes in the African body politic.

Africa is in a state of constant regional instability with the West slapping the “tribal” label on every conflict and lecturing Africans on how to run their lives as if they are incapable of governing themselves. What went wrong and why? To begin with, as the Liberation era dawned in the late 1950s and early 60s, the West realised the great threat posed to its hegemony by an independent and unified Africa.

Frantz Fanon, the Martinique-born psychiatrist was organising an African Continental Liberation Army, building on the growing success of the Algerian FLN which was then waging war against the French.

Many times, he escaped the assassins of the French intelligence services as he traversed West Africa organising networks and building contacts. Nkrumah was preaching the need for African unity and warning about the dangers of neo-colonialism.

The entire continent was in outrage and mourning at the assassination of Patrice Lumumba with the guidance of the CIA, who feared his independent Pan-African thinking and had him killed using the rationale that he was a “communist” when the true reason for his death was that he was sitting on the most mineral-rich country in the world and could deny the West to access the strategic minerals therein.

King Leopold had killed 10 million Congolese to get at these resources in a genocide that outdid any genocide that occurred in the 20th century, an historical barbarity that the West has conveniently chosen to forget. In this period (1960s) the Liberation Committee of the OAU was formed to train and arm guerillas for the anti-colonial wars then raging in Angola, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, South Africa and Guinea-Bissau.

Networks were set up, arms shipped, intelligence collected, guerillas trained and sent to wage increasingly successful war against the enemy. This remains the one great Pan-African achievement of the OAU. Thanks to the commitment of African leaders and their people in this epoch. The liberation forces were able to force the Portuguese to relinquish their empire, the “Rhodesians” to a ceasefire and South Africa to the negotiation table. None of this could have occurred had not Africans worked together, fought together in a spirit of true Pan-Africanism. There was no tribe or “ethnic cleansing,” there was vision and unity of purpose and dedication to the ideals of liberation and unity of the continent, much of which is sorely lacking among Africa’s leaders today. Africans have lost their way, culturally, politically and economically. Nowhere is the neo-colonial thumbprint more evident than in Kenya.

In the book Every Spy a Prince: the Complete History of Israel’s Intelligence Community, the author Dan Raviv reveals how pivotal Kenya is to Israel’s intelligence activities in Africa and the Middle East and boasts of how Israel “owned Kenya.”

Naturally, given this mindset one should not be surprised that foreigners are exploiting crises in Africa for their own benefit. Immediately a crisis breaks out in Africa, the Western media invokes the genie of “tribalism,” or if they want to be politically “sensitive” they use the term “ethnic.”

Africa is at the mercy of Western propaganda and media conglomerates which relentlessly paint the Continent as one beset by poverty, crime, diseases and endless wars which has to be rescued by white aid workers and sanctimonious celebrities. What is happening in Kenya is the result of decades of Western support for corrupt autocrats in order to facilitate hegemonic and neo-colonialist interests.

Bad advice, meddlesome aid agencies and “charities,” resource speculators and competing geopolitics have all served to exacerbate the sociopolitical fault lines in Africa caused by the wholesale adoption of Western political ideologies and values. As a result, Kenya and most African countries have developed societies headed by Westernised elites, negligible middle classes and a vast poverty-stricken majority that reaps very little of the benefits of economic growth.

l The writer is a specialist in Spanish, Latin American, Caribbean as well as African History. He has also been a journalist, civil servant and graphic artist.

Labels: NEOCOLONIALISM, PANAFRICANISM, TRIBALISM

posted by MrK @ 7:55 PM