Society for Comparative Studies in Society and History Social Anthropology and Two Contrasting Uses of Tribalism in Africa Author(s): Peter P. Ekeh Reviewed work(s): Source: Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 32, No. 4 (Oct., 1990), pp. 660-700 Published by: Cambridge University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/178957 . Accessed: 23/01/2012 10:57 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Cambridge University Press and Society for Comparative Studies in Society and History are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Comparative Studies in Society and History. http://www.jstor.org Social Anthropology and Two ContrastingUses of Tribalismin Africa PETER P. EKEH State University of New Yorkat Buffalo A remarkablefeature of African studies has been the sharpdiscontinuities in the characterizationof transitionsin African history and society from one era to another. Thus, for an important example, colonialism has rarely been related to the previous era of the slave trade in the analysis of any dominant socioeconomic themes in Africa. Such discontinuity is significant in one importantstrand of modem African studies: The transitionfrom the lore and scholarshipof colonial social anthropologyto postcolonial forms of African studies has been stalled into a brittle break because its central focus on the "tribe" has been under attack. Social anthropologygained strengththrough its analysis of the tribe and its associated concepts of kin groups and kinship behaviors in colonial Africa. However, following criticisms of the mission and manners of social anthropology by postindependenceAfrican scholars and politicians, and a bravereexamination of the conceptualproblems of their discipline, social anthropologistsmore or less agreed to abandonthe use of the tribe and of its more obvious derivative tribalismwith respect to Africa. With the abandonmentof the use of tribe and tribalismhas emergedconsid- erable confusion in various disciplines concernedwith the intellectualdiscern- ment of African social realities in connection with their capacityto probe with persistence issues troublingAfrica for decades and their ability to analyze new conceptions of the notion of tribalism. We list some aspects of this problem. First, in discarding the terms tribe and tribalism, social anthropology has created a gap in African studies by renderingyears of scholarshipconcerned This paper was preparedwhile I was a fellow at the WoodrowWilson InternationalCenter for Scholars, Washington,D.C., and on leave from the University of Ibadan, Nigeria. I thank the Senate of the University of Ibadanfor grantingme leave and the WoodrowWilson Centerfor its generous researchfacilities. My researchassistant at the Wilson Centerfor the summerof 1989, Miss Mary Shaw Galvin, now a graduatestudent at Yale University,made importantand sensitive suggestions which led me to make some changes in the paper. I am particularlyindebted to the two anonymous readers for this journal, ComparativeStudies in Society and History, whose extensive queries enabled me to rework parts of the original manuscript. 0010-4175/90/4240-3162 $5.00 ? 1990 Society for ComparativeStudy of Society and History 660 SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY AND TRIBALISM IN AFRICA 66I with the analysis of kinship as virtually irrelevant. Clearly, such organized focus on kinship behaviors as social anthropologymanaged for up to five decades ought to be of continuing benefit and currentrelevance for under- standingmoder social behaviorsin Africa. Second, while it now appearsthat the term "ethnic group" has replaced the disparagedconcept of "tribe" in African scholarship,there is no clear statementabout the relationshipbetween the two-whether, especially, there has been transitionfrom one to the other and whether there is persistentrelevance in the previous analysis of tribes for our understandingof ethnic groups in moder Africa. Third, while tribalism seems now abandoned in academic scholarship in African studies-with some proposing and indeed using "ethnicity" as its replacement-paradox- ically, the use of the term tribalismis enjoying unprecedentedboom not only in everyday interactionsamong ordinaryAfricans but more especially among high-rankingAfricans in government and university institutions. There appearsto be clear need andjustification for a review of the intellec- tual component of this problem of the tribe and for some analysis of the new phenomenonof tribalismin Africa. This papercarries out the following forms of analysis against this backgroundand understanding.First, I shall evaluate the anthropologicaltheory of the tribe along with its demise, stressing its ahistoricity. Second, I shall go behind the colonial era explored by social anthropologyto carryout a probabilityanalysis of the social origins of kinship behaviorsin Africa, with the hypothesis that they owe their scope and signifi- cance in both the private and public realms in Africa to the weaknesses of the African state, which was unable to provide protection for the individual againstthe ravagesof the slave trade. In other words, I shall arguethat kinship assumed the role of state surrogateduring the centuries of the slave trade. Along with this position, I arguethat ethnic groupsarose undercolonialism as substantialand notional expansions of kinship systems and kinship ideology entrenchedin the slave tradeera before colonial rule. Third, I shall distinguish between the meaning of tribalism in anthropologyas a valued and desirable attributeof tribes and tribesmen, and its uses in modern Africa, which have inverted the anthropologicalmeaning of this term. In this latter usage trib- alism emerges as a counterideologyinvented to fight against rampantkinship ideology in multiethnic communities in modern African nations. That is, I shall demonstrate that beyond the positive meaning of tribalism in social anthropologyas the sum of the ways of life of tribesmen,there is a new usage of the term tribalism that conveys undesirablemodes of behavior in modern Africa-a subject clearly requiringsome attention.Underlying this attemptat analysing tribalism, and its historical and conceptual antecedents, is the as- sumptionthat, in this area at least, there are continuitiesin Africanhistory and society, and that the sociological and historical meanings of modern African phenomena will emerge most fully if they are traced to their roots in the centuries of the slave trade and colonialism. 662 PETER P. EKEH EVALUATION OF THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORY OF THE TRIBE AND KINSHIP BEHAVIORS IN AFRICA Stretching back to the beginnings of their discipline in Radcliffe-Brown's early sketches (for example, 1924), social anthropologists reduced African societies they studied to what they termed "tribes." The notion of the tribe was apparently adopted as a heuristic category for the convenience of analy- sis, with only intuitive meanings attached to it. Indeed, well up to the 1950s there was no known major effort to define the tribe. The itchings and irrita- tions of African nationalist reactions compelled clearer attention to the defini- tion of the tribe in the late 1950s and 1960s, even as social anthropology was in danger of losing its territory of captive "natives," with the twilight of British and French colonization in sight. When finally anthropologists turned their attention to the challenge of clarifying the meaning of the tribe, the outcome was not enlightening. The net result of various initial stocktaking exercises (for example, Fried 1967:154-74; essays in Helm 1968; and Lewis 1968a) was that anthropolo- gists agreed the term tribe was not amenable to a clear definition and should be modified. The nearest that could be accommodated within the discipline was "tribal society." Given the vastness and frequency of the use of tribe in the literature of social anthropology, this must be seen as a far-reaching conclusion and is as astounding as if sociologists or political scientists were to abandon the use of the term "social class" or the "state" because it was adjudged to be unamenable to clear definitions (as indeed Easton (1953:107- 8) once contended in vain with respect to the "state"). Nemesis pursued the discipline of social anthropology with controversy despite the refined appearance of "tribal society." As the contributors to the most imaginative debate on the notion of the tribe agree, "tribes" and "tribal society" are controversial terms (Gutkind 1970). Southall's commanding piece in The Passing of Tribal Man in Africa (1970:28-50) begins thus: Controversialthough the matteris, the most generally acceptablecharacteristics of a tribal society are perhaps that it is a whole society, with a high degree of self- sufficiency at a near subsistencelevel, based on a relatively simple technology without writing or literature, culture and sense of identity, tribal religion being also conter- minous with tribal society. (1970:28) In elaborating further on these characteristics, Southall (1970:46) does add specifically "the importance of the domain of kinship and [its] multiplex relationships