The Politics of Ethnicity
Ethnic identity is an essentially contested concept and there is no formulation for the delimitation of group membership that holds for every recognized group. Nevertheless, ethnic groups can be distinguished from other kinds of groups – nations, races, classes, and interest groups – due to ‘the symbolism which they employ’ (Bates 1986: 154). This symbolism relates to a sense of in-group connectedness and distinctiveness that is rooted primarily in a notion of cultural peoplehood, whereby individuals of different age, status, and wealth are linked (and simultaneously differentiated from ethnic others) through a conjoining of cultural similarity and perception of common descent.
In the mid-twentieth century, there was debate as to whether ethnic identities were the result of primordial attachments that stemmed from the ‘assumed “givens” of social existence’ (Geertz 1963: 109), or whether they were the product of a false consciousness that was cultivated and used by self-interested political elites as a way to mobilize support and suppress class-based dissent (e.g. Mafeje 1971). These primordialist and instrumentalist schools provided opposing accounts of the origins and political salience of ethnic or tribal identities, but both associated such cultural affiliation with traditional or uneducated people, and predicted the decline of ethnic identification and rise of national and/or class consciousness in the face of modernization.
These expectations were not realized. Instead, in a number of countries – for example, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, and Zimbabwe – questions of ethnic identity became more relevant in the post-colonial period as ethnic consciousness was shaped and fostered (rather than negated) by globalization, urbanization, capital accumulation, class formation, political competition, democratization, decentralization, and population growth. Moreover, the recent origins of many ethnic groups in Africa – for example, the Mijikenda, Luhya, and Kalenjin communities in Kenya (which date back to the 1920s, 1930s, and 1950s, respectively) – together with the initial articulation of some ethnic traditions and cultural practices in urban contexts (Mitchell 1956), poses further challenges to a primordialist understanding. In turn, instrumentalist explanations are brought into question by subaltern studies, analyses that incorporate local politics and bottom-up dynamics as well as often more visible, top-down processes (e.g. Lynch 2011a), and high levels of political consciousness and political rationality at local levels (Barkan 1976).
Today, a constructivist approach dominates. Most Africanist scholars view ethnic groups as socially constructed imagined communities (cf. Anderson 1983) and as moral and historic communities that struggle, not because they exist, but because they have come into existence out of a process of struggle (cf. Thompson 1978: 147–49). This conceptualization has led most scholars to reject the term ‘tribe’ in favour of ‘ethnic group’. Both terms refer to cultural and linguistic units, however, tribe carries additional connotations of primitive or static traditions and an assumption of long-standing mechanisms for the discipline and control of group members across a recognized territory, which is a characterization that has never accurately captured more complex and dynamic local realities, as discussed below.
Among today’s Africanist scholars the common understanding is that: pre-colonial African identities were relatively fluid, permeable, overlapping, and complex; and that the more bounded and politically pertinent ethnic identities of today are (at least to a certain extent) the product of a colonial order of delineated control and of dual processes of invention and imagination. This is not to say that there is no disagreement. On the contrary, areas of debate include:
This chapter provides an introduction to some of these issues from the processes of invention and imagination in the colonial period to the negotiation and renegotiation of ethnic identities and political salience of ethnic identities in contemporary contexts. The analysis is biased towards Anglophone Africa and to countries – such as Kenya and Nigeria – where ethnic identities have been central to colonial orders and post-colonial politics.1
Ethnic Invention, Imagination, and Motivations in Colonial Africa
The idea that ‘every African belonged to a tribe, just as every European belonged to a nation’ (Iliffe 1979: 323) was central to how colonial rulers understood sub-Saharan Africa and to how they justified colonial projects. The concept of ‘tribe’ comprised a central element of the discursive repertoires through which the continent was conceptualized as a dark continent in need of civilization and development. In particular, the British model of indirect rule, and specifically its reliance on a hierarchy of provincial administrators, had as its basic premise a notion of ethnic territoriality in which tribal chiefs were presumed to enjoy authoritative powers to legitimately define local duties and responsibilities, proscribe punishment, and measure justice over a certain area and local people. However, many pre-colonial African societies – from highly centralized kingdoms to stateless societies – did not fit this categorization, highlighting the extent to which this portrait of ‘tribal Africa’ was an invention of the colonial mind.
Nevertheless, this image was central to the justification of foreign rule and to how colonial authorities sought to control new territories with limited resources and questionable authority. For colonial officials, the control or disciplinary powers of chiefs and elders – on whom they were largely dependent for law and order, tax collection, and labour supply – were inherently intertwined with their understandings of local cultural practices and hierarchal relations. As Bruce Berman (1990) highlights, African colonial states were simultaneously weak and strong. Largely reliant on local collaborators, they were coercive, intrusive, overly repressive, disproportionately reactionary, and obsessed with the control of subjects rather than the development of territories. As a result, colonial authorities feared ‘detribalized’ natives who, freed from the yoke of traditional power, would stretch policing powers thin. Together with the limitations of the colonial state and perceived experiences of industrialization and urbanization in Europe, this prompted colonial officials to find and delineate tribes and tribal leaders with whom they could work, a process that often involved the creation of entirely new ethnic communities (Iliffe 1979).
European missionaries also helped to define the shape and relevant content of emergent ethnic communities through the standardization of local languages to facilitate the dissemination of ‘God’s Word’, whilst anthropologists provided ‘authoritative’ studies on ‘traditional’ culture and society (Berman 1998: 322). However, many analysts have emphasized the role of African agency in imagining ethnic content rather than in inventing groups and boundaries. Thus, Terence Ranger argued that ‘European classifications and inventions of race, or tribe or language in effect created a series of empty boxes, with bounded walls but without contents. It was all very well to write of “the Ndebele” or “the Kikuyu”, but to give meaning to that identity was a much more complex and contested business’, which was bound to be a matter of internal struggle within African societies (Ranger 1993: 27). According to Ranger, modern African ethnicities were constructed during the colonial period, when – as a result of colonial administrative and economic practice, the influence of European missionaries and anthropologists, and African responses – a colonial view of tribal Africa was invented by Europeans and imagined by Africans.
Clearly, the notion of ‘tribal Africa’ was an invention of the colonial mind. In turn, the process of demarcating and administering Africans as members of supposedly bounded tribes helped foster a sense of local ethnic consciousness, while various facets of the new administrative reality provided Africans with powerful incentives to imagine ethnic content and to think and act ethnically. Africans (both collectively and individually) were catalogued and labelled, their movements often monitored and regulated outside of ‘home’ areas, and ‘aliens’ were sometimes forced to incorporate into the ‘local’ majority. Moreover, collaborators tended to benefit from the clarification and ossification of customary laws and local decision-making processes, which often justified and bolstered their own privileged position.
The fact that chiefs, headmen, and local leaders became the key interface linking state and society – especially in British colonies where they constituted the major channel for distributing state largesse and principal instrument of state control – also provided many Africans with reasons to invest in their relationships with ethnic leaders. Such relations provided a way to access centralized resources and avoid state violence (Berman 1998), and for men in particular to try to assert control over local contexts at a moment of rapid social change (Vail 1989). In turn, reference to common kinship became a way to approach, petition, and plead with administrators and ethnic kin, just as reference to ethnic difference could help one question the legitimacy of administrative powers or the presence of ethnic ‘outsiders’. Colonial officials also encouraged such strategies by supporting ethnic claims and providing them with periodic public forums, while simultaneously suppressing efforts to articulate interests and organize resistance at the national level.
The growth of social and spatial inequalities across the sub-continent also helped foster a sense of ethnic difference – especially in contexts where colonial authorities believed, and acted as if certain communities were relatively ‘advanced’ and others ‘backward’– due to an overlap (both real and perceived) between livelihoods, class schisms, and ethnic groupings (see Cohen 1969 on Nigeria; Prunier 1995 on Rwanda). Parallel developments occurred in urban centres, where migrants tended (and were often encouraged) to reside near kin and residents from home areas. Several factors encouraged these residents to identify themselves and others as ‘tribesmen’, including the uncertainties of urban life, similarities in language, culture, and culinary tastes; the overriding logic of ‘tribal Africa’ and related ethnic stereotypes (which included assumed skills and common proclivities); the establishment of ethnic welfare associations and social groups; and persistent attachment to land in rural areas.
Yet, it is an oversimplification to argue that Africans simply imagined the content of invented ethnic units. First, much of the information used to delineate Africans into tribes and catalogue ethnic content was offered by African collaborators. Such ‘knowledge’ allowed collaborators to influence and manipulate the process of invention according to their own understandings and vested interests (Willis 1992). Second, processes of invention and imagining did not take place in a vacuum but also drew heavily from, and were built upon, existing realities and real linguistic, cultural, and socioeconomic similarities and differences (Lentz and Nugent 2000).
Moreover, many modern ethnic groups – such as the Twa of Central Africa, Kalenjin in Kenya, Maasai in Kenya and Tanzania, Somalis in the Horn of Africa, and Tswana in Botswana and South Africa – do not neatly fit colonial boundaries. Case study analyses of such groups point to the importance of European administrators, missionaries, anthropologists, as well as African culture brokers, in the creation of ethnic groups and imagining of ethnic content, whilst also highlighting a range of motivating factors for ethnic association (e.g. Lynch 2011a).
For many Africans, the appeal of constructing and internalizing ethnic identities in this way was linked to a close association of people and place. This association is not unique to Africa, as reflected in a pervasive politics of belonging that differentiates ‘locals’ from ‘outsiders’ around the world (Geschiere 2009). However, it was an approach that was endorsed and institutionalized with particular effect in colonial Africa. Colonial subjects in British Africa were encouraged to associate with a particular area, as geographic space became intertwined with a sense of legitimate control and rightful occupancy by particular ethnic communities. This association was promoted and ossified in different ways in different contexts, but measures included: the establishment of reserves in settler colonies; the removal of ‘aliens’ who refused to become initiated into local tribes; the passage of laws, sometimes including the requirement to carry a pass; colonial opposition to national organizations; and community-orientated agricultural and development schemes. This approach encouraged a two-tier conception of citizenship that distinguished between national and local citizenship, wherein understandings of who is really ‘local’ tied the relevant demos with a spatially fixed ethnos (Mamdani 1996).
At the same time, economic imperatives often encouraged the controlled migration of ethnic ‘outsiders’ into certain territorial spaces. In parts of west, central, and southern Africa, this process of ‘mobilizing and fixing labor and populations’ (Marshall-Fratani 2006: 15) involved the migration of Africans from neighbouring territories and has been associated with fierce debate and violent confrontations between self-professed autochthons, or ‘sons of the soil’, and those cast as ‘foreigners’ in postcolonial contexts. In contrast, pastoralist communities in colonial Kenya were pushed off fertile lands in the Rift Valley, which were set aside for European settlement, with European labour needs largely met by the recruitment and migration of other communities. The contradiction of economic imperative and administrative practice fuelled competing territorial claims to rich agricultural land in the Rift Valley between those who enjoyed rights as previous owners and those with user and purchase rights – differences that were articulated around independence in 1963 and periodically revived at times of political uncertainty (Lynch 2011a).
The colonial experience thus encouraged Africans to think and act ethnically in three principal ways:
These processes occurred to different extents between and within individual countries. As a consequence, these historical differences – together with varied post-colonial trajectories – can help account for why ethnic identities have proved much more salient and divisive in some contexts than others.
The benefit of a constructivist approach – as compared to primordial or instrumental explanations of ethnic identification – is that it can incorporate all three of these processes. More important still, it can allow for the instrumental use of ethnic identity for political and socioeconomic gain as well as the ‘non-instrumental, deeply affective and emotional character of ethnicity’, through a recognition of how ‘[e]thnic identity cannot be conjured out of thin air, [but] must be built on real cultural experience’ (Berman 1998: 309, 312). This limitation of invention is important and stems from the fact that ethnic bonds require a level of intra-intelligibility – most commonly, a sense of linguistic and cultural similarity, an assumed history of union, and some sense (or rehearsed debate) about what is right and just in terms of intraand inter-communal relations and group rights. The possibilities of invention are also limited by the fact that the boundaries of ‘we-groups’ have mutated from pre-colonial times onward (Lentz and Nugent 2000) and have always drawn (however selectively or creatively) from existing notions of ‘us’ and ‘them’.
While common language, cultural practices, and home area can be used to assert ethnic commonality, the constructivist approach also recognizes that small distinctions of dialect and custom, local debate on relevant borders and geographic units, and divergent histories of migration and interaction can be used to assert ethnic difference. For a sense of common ethnic identity to emerge and persist, similarities in cultural materials must be regarded as relevant or salient and be attended by a sense of a shared past or myth of collective ancestry and an associated conception of rights and social justice. The result is a dynamic reality in which ethnic groups are moral and historic communities, ‘the outcome of an endless process in which they are always simultaneously old and new, grounded in the past and perpetually in the process of creation’ (Berman 1998: 312). As a consequence, the existence and perpetuation of ethnic identities can never be assumed, but must always be explained.
Negotiation and Renegotiation
Colonial experiences encouraged Africans to think and act ethnically, but they did not leave a legacy of fixed and unchanging ethnic signifiers. Instead, a number of recent accounts of ethnic identification in sub-Saharan Africa highlight how people make use of confused terrains of cultural politics to debate and reinterpret ethnic brands, content, allies, and cousins through four distinct but potentially interrelated avenues of ethnic negotiation and renegotiation: ethnic migration; assertions of difference; ethnic amalgamation; and ethnic branding or positioning (e.g. Comaroff and Comaroff 2009; Hodgson 2011; Lynch 2011a). This section will take a brief look at each of these avenues.
First, an ability to migrate from one ethnic community to another stems from an ability to redefine one’s individual or collective ethnic identity on the basis of a re-reading of complex histories (both recent and past). Complexities include past administrative boundary changes, developments in anthropological categorization, the existence of cross-cutting clans, and local histories of inter-marriage, migration, forced removals, incorporation, and cultural borrowing, all of which can allow people (individually or collectively) to look back and redefine themselves according to the assumed ethnic identity of parents, forebears, or ‘original’ ancestors. One example is provided by a small number of Kalenjin in western Kenya who – in the context of opportunities in a local settlement scheme and burgeoning global indigenous people’s movement in the early 1990s – chose to look back at family histories of migration, forced removals, and intermarriage, and conclude that they were not Pokot or Kipsigis as they had previously thought, but Sengwer, another Kalenjin sub-group (Lynch 2006).
In contrast, members of an ethnic sub-group can also assert their difference from a larger ethnic group, or call for the amalgamation of their sub-group with linguistically or culturally similar ‘others’. This stems in large part from the multiplicity of ethnic sets. Individual ethnic groups usually consist of various clans and sub-groups, but also often form part of larger linguistic or regional blocs, nations, or ethnic ‘families’ (such as Cushitic, Bantu, and Nilotic). As a result, ethnic identities can ‘expand and contract in inverse relation to the scale of inclusion and exclusion of the membership’ (Cohen 1978: 387). An assertion of difference occurs when members of a sub-group draw upon cultural or linguistic differences or contested histories of origins and migration to declare that they are distinct and separate from the larger ethnic group with which they are usually associated. In contrast, ethnic amalgamation occurs when people decide – on the basis of cultural, linguistic and/or socioeconomic similarity, interpretations of ethnic pasts, and an assessment of current politics – that two or more groups, which are usually regarded as distinct, actually comprise part of a larger and more inclusive ethnic grouping (e.g. Lynch 2011a).
Instances of migration, assertions of difference, and amalgamation involve debates about relevant ethnic content, boundaries, friends, and foes. However, people can also debate ethnic typology – of whether, for example, a group constitutes a race, a nation, an ethnic minority, a marginalized community, an autochthonous society, or an indigenous people. Such debates are best thought of as a form of ethnic branding or positioning in response to economic, socio-legal, and political ‘markets’ or audiences. Thus, the Comaroffs show how ethnic groups can be commodified for ‘consumers of the exotic, of spiritual reclamation, [or] jungle adventure’, or be converted into ‘corporations’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 2009: 2–4). Similarly, Hodgson reveals how Maasai activists in Tanzania positioned themselves as indigenous and later as pastoralists in their efforts to pursue local political and economic struggles (Hodgson 2011: xi). Alternatively, the Endorois in Kenya provide an example of local culture brokers who chose to assert their ethnic difference from Kalenjin neighbours as a strategy of legal argument to strengthen claims to land and resources on the basis of special economic and cultural attachment (Lynch 2012).
In contemporary Africa, the two most common examples of ethnic branding or positioning are assertions of autochthony and indigeneity, which are similar and sometimes overlap, but are subtly different (see Geschiere, this volume). The minimum requirement of autochthony is a sense that your community belongs to an area more than ‘others’, while indigeneity rests on the idea that one’s culture and sense of self is tied to a specific geographic space. In some accounts, assertions of autochthony are said to rely ‘on nothing but the claim to have been in a certain space first’ (Dunn 2009: 121). However, on closer inspection such a language of belonging lacks even that requirement. Thus, there are numerous communities that proudly recall histories of migration and recognize local indigenous communities, but still employ the notion of being ‘sons of the soil’ as a way to differentiate themselves from more recent migrants (Leonhardt 2006).
Africanist academics have highlighted how, according to such logic, those who have ‘come from elsewhere’– so-called foreigners, migrants, outsiders, aliens, or allogenes – do not enjoy the same kind of naturalized claims as ‘locals’. History provides many examples of where this sense of differential rights has been used to paint ‘others’ as second-class citizens who should not enjoy equal access to local resources or elected office, determine political outcomes, or even be residents (Lynch 2011a). In addition, complex migration patterns together with the cross-cutting layers of ethnic appellations (which result from changes to administrative boundaries and ethnic terminology over time) leads to a disjuncture between autochthony’s promise of ‘basic security’ and the term’s ‘haunting uncertainty’ (Geschiere 2009: 31). Such uncertainty can foster apprehension about autochthons’ ‘own authenticity [and a] need to prove itself by unmasking “fake” autochthons’ (Ceuppens and Geschiere 2005: 403). Especially in contexts where ‘being local’ is an important means of laying claims to resources and political power, where ‘dead certainty’ is sometimes only ‘achieved through death and dismemberment’ (Marshall-Fratani 2006: 38).
In contrast, the language of indigeneity in Africa goes beyond a general sense of belonging, to place ownership and control of land at the very centre of communal identity, as critical to livelihood, culture, and religious practice. The African indigenous peoples’ movement began in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when communities such as the Maasai of Tanzania became involved in international networks and forums. This engagement, together with a common argument that all Africans are indigenous to Africa, led to a redefinition of what it is to be indigenous at the supra-national level, as attention shifted away from an emphasis on original residence to ‘certain forms of inequalities and suppression’ (ACHPR 2005: 87). Thus, according to the African Commission on Human and People’s Rights, the term ‘indigenous’ does not simply refer to ‘first people’ but to:
a global movement fighting for rights and justice for those particular groups who have been left on the margins of development and who are perceived negatively by dominating mainstream development paradigms, whose cultures and ways of life are subject to discrimination and contempt and whose very existence is under threat of extinction.
(ACHPR 2005: 87)
This understanding, together with the legacies, memories, and interpretations of colonial and post-colonial histories, as well as a close association between many African ethnic groups and ‘the land’ (which can include burial and spiritual sites, flora and fauna, and livelihoods), means that it is surprisingly easy for Africans to position themselves as indigenous in contemporary contexts (Lynch 2012). The main motivation for doing so stems from benefits (both real and perceived) at the global level. These include involvement in the indigenous people’s movement, new international agreements and laws, and possibility of assistance from international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) who want to work with small and politically marginalized communities. Becoming and being indigenous is thus usually a ‘strategy of extraversion’, a means to mobilize resources and moral, political, and legal advantage at the global level (Igoe 2006). In contrast, indigenous peoples often gain little recognition from African states, a reality that has led local Maasai activists in Tanzania to shift from basing ‘political claims on discourses of indigeneity to discourses of livelihoods’ at the turn of the twenty-first century in a ‘conscious effort to find less confrontational and more effective ways to engage state policy (and policymakers) in Tanzania’ (Hodgson 2011: xi, 175).
Processes of ethnic migration, differentiation, amalgamation, and branding are – like processes of ethnic invention and imagining – constrained by recognizable similarities and available memory due to the need for popularly accepted ethnic narratives to find resonance at the local level. However, the complexity and confusion that surround ethnic pasts, the ambiguous nature of ethnic identities, and multiplicity of ethnic sets provides ample room for debate.
Finally, processes of negotiation and renegotiation are inherently instrumental as culture brokers and leaders use the language of ethnicity to secure access to political and economic resources and to bolster arguments for social justice. This negotiability of ethnic identities complicates academic study, but it also heightens the concept’s utility, since it provides space for debate, contestation, and reformulation. Indeed, it is this dynamism that enables ethnic narratives to adapt and respond to an ever-changing world and thus remain relevant to ordinary people and useful to political elites.
Political Salience
Political action across sub-Saharan Africa is informed by many factors, including divisions other than ethnicity (such as class, religion, generation, and gender), pertinent issues (such as opposition to graft and the logic of trickle-down Reaganomics), personal characteristics (such as political record and clever use of idiom), and perceptions of likely outcomes. However, in contexts like contemporary Kenya and Nigeria, ethnic identities are clearly central to political debates and alliances. Given the constructed, situational, and negotiable nature of ethnic identities, such examples of politicized ethnicity raise at least two important questions: How and why are ethnic identities formed and sustained? How and why does a particular line of ethnic cleavage acquire and retain political significance?
Generally, the blame for politicized ethnicity and associated divisions and conflicts is placed squarely at the door of African elites who choose to mobilize support along ethnic lines, either for practical political reasons of easy mobilization and tactical advantage in the relative absence of other major social cleavages, or to protect and promote vested economic and class interests (Molteno 1974). At one extreme, such strategies of political mobilization are portrayed as a ‘ploy or distortion’ on the part of African elites who use ethnic identities to ‘conceal their exploitative role’ and as a ‘mark of false consciousness on the part of the supposed tribesmen, who subscribe to an ideology that is inconsistent with their material base and therefore unwittingly respond to the call for their own exploitation’ (Mafeje 1971: 259).
However, most analyses reject explanations that are wholly dependent upon popular self-deception and irrationality and look for alternatives that lend greater agency and reasoning to non-elites.
The standard approach is of economic rationalism with emphasis placed on the immediate material advantages gained from support for ethnic patrons. Molteno (1974: 84–85) hints at such relations in his argument that a conflict of interests between urban and rural populations was mitigated by networks of communication and assistance. Many have expanded on this notion of mitigation through networks to argue that patron-client ties (or clientelism) link politicians and supporters through:
a largely instrumental friendship in which an individual of higher socio economic status (patron) uses his own influence and resources to provide protection or benefits, or both, for a person of lower status (client) who, for his part, reciprocates by offering general support and assistance, including personal services, to the patron.
(Scott 1972: 92)
In post-colonial Africa, this is often believed to have resulted in neopatrimonial regimes ‘where the chief executive maintains power through personal patronage, rather than through ideology or law’ (Bratton and van de Walle 1994: 458), and in which the ‘customs and patterns of patrimonialism co-exist with, and suffuse, rational-legal institutions’ of the modern bureaucratic state (ibid.: 62; see also Erdmann, this volume).
In turn, much of the literature on ethnic politics in sub-Saharan Africa lays principal or even sole emphasis on logics of short-term material gain. In so doing, scholars often look (at least in part) to popular political metaphors for evidence, and in particular to the common reference to the African state as a ‘cake’, to politics as eating, and to popular demands for ‘our turn to eat’ (e.g. Bayart 1993). However, in addition to motivations of immediate consumption, individuals also invest in patron-client networks as a way to defend personal and communal interests against a dangerous and unpredictable state. Everyday experiences of nepotism, ethnic bias, and corruption produce a vicious circle that reinforces ‘reliance on the ethnic solidarity and patron-client networks that dominate bureaucratic processes in post-colonial African states’ (Berman 2004: 39). The perception that others are gaining from their ethnic identity and connections leads people to invest in and support their own ethnic leaders, both in the hope of future assistance and the fear of losing out if ethnic ‘others’ gain power. In such contexts, ethnically biased leadership becomes a reinforcing cycle of expectation and action, as voting for ‘one of your own’ becomes a rational response to the system as perceived. Moreover, it is a cycle that becomes particularly vicious in multi-party contexts where the electoral process is viewed as ‘a zero-sum game with definite winners and losers among a country’s ethno-regional communities’ (Lemarchand 1992: 104), since, while victory in such instances appears to open the door to various opportunities, defeat carries the threat of marginalization, dispossession, and even persecution.
Over time, such rational calculations of short-term material loss and gain can become intertwined and reinforced by more economically irrational feelings of affection, resentment, anger, and hatred. In short, feelings of belonging instil ethnic identities with strong emotive force (and thus political utility) when they are linked with strong remembered or interpreted collective histories of victimhood, marginalization, and entitlement. These histories provide a discursive lens through which the notion of ‘others’ and the morality and justice of different political and economic dispensations can be viewed. In such contexts, ethnically delineated political support can be economically rational in the short to medium term; reactive to the actual and assumed behaviour of others; and highly emotive due to the link between collective pasts, group status, self-worth, and assumed prospects. However, while such behaviour may be reactive and emotive, it can still be regarded as rational for two closely related reasons. This is because of logics of ‘exclusionary ethnicity’, or a focus on who should ‘not get power and control the state’s resources’ (Mueller 2008: 201), as well as ‘speculative ethnic loyalty’, or calculation regarding the advantages of electing community spokesmen who promise assistance but who also successfully portray themselves as strong defenders of local interests (Lynch 2011a). The latter often includes a commitment to tackle past injustices, such as historical land injustices, state neglect, or repression. Unfortunately, this dual logic further fuels a reinforcing cycle of ethnically biased leadership and political support, and can help justify participation in intercommunal violence in instances where the opportunities or threats appear to be particularly strong.
In contexts where such political dynamics are visible, support for ethnic leaders becomes embedded in assistance broadly understood as immediate material reward and longer-term security as well as a promotion of ‘rights’, ‘social justice’, and ‘status’. In this regard, a politician’s perceived ability and commitment to defend and lobby for local ‘interests’ is usually more important than campaign expenditure and financial promises per se. Interpretations of this ability are formed through an ongoing interaction between perceptions of a politician’s past performance and future potential, perceptions of stasis or flux, communal narratives of suffering and desert, and institutional frameworks.
Finally, this understanding of ethnic groups as moral and historic communities complicates a common distinction between good and bad ethnicity as ‘ethnicity from below’ versus ‘ethnicity from above’ (Eyoh 1999: 273). In such analyses, the positive aspect of ethnic association refers to largely depoliticized in-group relations of interdependence and assistance and bottom-up pressures for redistribution, while the negative aspect refers to highly politicized external relations of inter-communal competition and conflict, associated with top-down processes of political mobilization. In African studies, this distinction is often articulated through reference to moral ethnicity – ‘the contested internal standard of civic virtue against which we measure our personal esteem’– and ‘unprincipled “political tribalism” through which groups compete for public resources’ (Lonsdale 1994: 131). Lonsdale presents moral ethnicity as having the potential to provide a ‘culture of personal accountability’ and common political morality (Lonsdale 2004: 95). However, while Lonsdale is cautious as to the practical impact of moral ethnicity, others insist on the democratic and anti-democratic nature of moral ethnicity and political tribalism, respectively (e.g. Klopp 2002). This is an oversimplification that distorts the more nefarious logic that can imbue both elite and non-elite thinking, which ensure that internal moral debates and a sense of competition can become conflated and confused.
First, and as Cheeseman has argued with respect to the Kenyan context, moral ethnicity is largely grounded in ‘the idea that MPs are personally responsible for funding local development and all manner of other local needs’ (Cheeseman 2009: 13). This places a heavy financial burden on political elites, provides an incentive to abuse state funds, and explains why ordinary citizens do not unite against their leaders. Second, since ethnic groups are also historic communities, communal memories of past injustice, marginalization, suffering, and achievement can be used to lay claims to protection and entitlement in the present. In this way, evidence of a eader’s assistance of his kin can appear highly immoral for communities that believe they have been neglected or marginalized. In turn, such remembered pasts can form the basis of claims that it is ‘our turn to eat’, while the relative advancement of ‘others’ can become a strong source of resentment, especially when they are deemed to be ethnic ‘outsiders’ (Chua 2003).
Thus, while top-down processes of mobilization and incitement are critical for explaining instances of politicized ethnicity in sub-Saharan Africa, the availability and success of such strategies should be assessed through a comprehensive analysis that recognizes the potentially dubious morality of bottom-up pressures. Consequently, more attention should be given to the highly personalized and localized nature of much African politics, which ensures that public political forums provide opportunities for the expression of intimacy and conviviality, as well as subjection and domination (Mbembe 2001). The realm of public political ‘theatre’ provides local citizens with an opportunity to express perceptions, expectations, and fears, if only through their silence, body language, or sliding scale of applause. In turn, while politicians play a critical role in constructing ethnic identities and in mobilizing ethnic support, they also need to respond to and can be constrained by messages from below. These are not only performed at political rallies but are also discussed and developed in other contexts, from vernacular radio stations to church pulpits and local markets. Politicians can soon find themselves politically isolated if they ignore (at least too blatantly) local fears, grievances, interests, and divisions, while easy political mileage can often be gained from playing upon local communal narratives of angst and moral outcomes. The discursive repertoires of ethnicity thus produce a complex, confused, and often contradictory moral terrain of politics that can be manipulated by elites but which, in highly divided societies, is often foolhardy for them to ignore.
The construction, negotiation, and politicization of ethnicity are thus instrumental in motivation and opportunistic in character, but simultaneously rooted in linguistic, cultural, and ethnographic similarities, and communal experiences of marginalization, neglect, injustice, and achievement. These communal pasts can acquire strong emotive force as historical layers of interaction influence everyday conceptions of bodily, socioeconomic, and political fortunes and future prospects. The corollary is that ethnic identities can lose emotive force if such factors are absent or if they are countered by strong, ethnically neutral leadership and institutions.
Consequently, the realities of ethnically delineated political support reflect pragmatism and expectations of patronage, as well as the significance of remembered pasts and associated narratives of justice and strategies of acquisition. Such discursive repertoires provide a list of grievances that elites can use to foster a sense of difference and mobilize local support bases, but also provide non-elites with a means to question and counter intra- and inter-communal differences and thus social and spatial inequalities. Ethnic identification and political support are thus rational but not for the simple reasons that classic neopatrimonial accounts suggest. Consequently, a comprehensive understanding of the nature and political salience of ethnic identities can help us better to understand those contexts where ethnic identities are central to political dynamics as well as those where such consciousness has limited political importance.
Note
1This chapter draws extensively from previously published material, most notably Lynch 2011a, but also Lynch 2006, 2011b, 2011c, 2012.
Bibliography
ACHPR (African Commission on Human and People’s Rights) (2005) Report of the African Commission’s Working Group of Experts on Indigenous Populations/Communities, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers/ ACHPR and IWGIA.
Anderson, B. (1983) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso.
Barkan, J. (1976) ‘Comment: Further Reassessment of “Conventional Wisdom”: Political Knowledge and Voting Behaviour in Rural Kenya’, American Political Science Review 70(2): 452–455.
Bates, R. (1986) ‘Modernization, Ethnic Competition, and the Rationality of Politics in Contemporary Africa’, in M. Doro and N. Stultz (eds) Governing in Black Africa: Perspectives on New States, New York, NY: Africana.
Bayart, J.-F. (1993) The State in Africa: The Politics of the Belly, New York, NY: Longman Publishing.
Berman, B. (1990) Control and Crisis in Colonial Kenya: The Dialectic of Domination, London: James Currey.
Berman, B. (1998) ‘Ethnicity, Patronage and the African State: The Politics of Uncivil Nationalism’, African Affairs 97: 305–341.
Berman, B. (2004) ‘Ethnicity, Bureaucracy and Democracy: The Politics of Trust’, in B. Berman, D. Eyoh and W. Kymlicka (eds) Ethnicity and Democracy in Africa, Oxford: James Currey.
Bratton, M. and van de Walle, N. (1994) ‘Neopatrimonial Regimes and Political Transitions in Africa’, World Politics 46(4): 453–489.
Ceuppens, B. and Geschiere, P. (2005) ‘Autochthony: Local or Global? New Modes in the Struggle over Citizenship and Belonging in Africa and Europe’, Annual Review of Anthropology 34: 385–407.
Cheeseman, N. (2009) ‘Kenya Since 2002: The More Things Change the More They Stay the Same’, in A.R. Mustapha and L. Whitfield (eds) Turning Points? The Politics of African States in the Era of Democracy, Oxford: James Currey.
Chua, A. (2003) World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability, London: Arrow Books.
Cohen, A. (1969) Custom and Politics in Urban Africa: A Study of Hausa Migrants in Yoruba Towns, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Cohen, R. (1978) ‘Ethnicity: Problem and Focus in Anthropology’, Annual Review of Anthropology 7: 379–403.
Comaroff, J.L. and Comaroff, J. (2009) Ethnicity, Inc. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press.
Dunn, K. (2009) ‘“Sons of the Soil” and Contemporary State Making: Autochthony, Uncertainty and Political Violence in Africa’, Third World Quarterly 30(1): 113–127.
Eyoh, D. (1999) ‘Community, Citizenship, and the Politics of Ethnicity in Post-Colonial Africa’, in E. Kalipeni and P. Zeleza (eds) Sacred Spaces and Public Quarrels: African Cultural and Economic Landscapes, Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, Inc.
Geertz, C. (1963) ‘The Integrative Revolution: Primordial Sentiments and Civil Politics in the New States’, in C. Geertz (ed.) Old Societies and New States: The Quest for Modernity in Asia and Africa, New York, NY: Free Press of Glencoe.
Geschiere, P. (2009) The Perils of Belonging: Autochthony, Citizenship and Exclusion in Africa and Europe, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Hodgson, D. (2011) Being Maasai, Becoming Indigenous: Postcolonial Politics in a Neoliberal World, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Igoe, J. (2006) ‘Becoming Indigenous Peoples: Difference, Inequality, and the Globalization of East African Identity Politics’, African Affairs 105(420): 399–420.
Iliffe, J. (1979) A Modern History of Tanganyika, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Klopp, J. (2002) ‘Can Moral Ethnicity Trump Political Tribalism? The Struggle for Land and Nation in Kenya’, African Studies 61(2): 269–294.
Lemarchand, R. (1992) ‘Africa’s Troubled Transitions’, Journal of Democracy 3(4): 98–109.
Lentz, C. and Nugent, P. (eds) (2000) Ethnicity in Ghana: The Limits of Invention, Basingstoke: St Martin’s Press.
Leonhardt, A. (2006) ‘Baka and the Magic of the State: Between Autochthony and Citizenship’, African Studies Review 49(2): 69–94.
Lonsdale, J. (1994) ‘Moral Ethnicity and Political Tribalism’, in P. Kaarsholm and J. Huttin (eds) Inventions and Boundaries: Historical and Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism, Roskilde: Institute for Development Studies, Roskilde University.
Lonsdale, J. (2004) ‘Moral and Political Argument in Kenya’, in B. Berman, D. Eyoh and W. Kymlicka (eds) Ethnicity and Democracy in Africa, Oxford: James Currey.
Lynch, G. (2006) ‘Negotiating Ethnicity: Identity Politics in Contemporary Kenya’, Review of African Political Economy 33(107): 385–410.
Lynch, G. (2011a) I Say to You: Ethnic Politics and the Kalenjin in Kenya, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Lynch, G. (2011b) ‘Kenya’s New Indigenes: Negotiating Local Identities in a Global Context’, Nations and Nationalism 17(1): 148–167.
Lynch, G. (2011c) ‘The Wars of Who Belongs Where: The Unstable Politics of Autochthony on Kenya’s Mt Elgon’, Ethnopolitics 10(3–4): 391–410.
Lynch, G. (2012) ‘Becoming Indigenous in the Pursuit of Justice: The African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights and the Endorois’, African Affairs 111(442): 24–45.
Mafeje, A. (1971) ‘The Ideology of “Tribalism”‘, The Journal of Modern African Studies 9(2): 253–261.
Mamdani, M. (1996) Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Marshall-Fratani, R. (2006) ‘The War of “Who is Who”: Autochthony, Nationalism, and Citizenship in the Ivorian Crisis’, African Studies Review 49(2): 9–43.
Mbembe, A. (2001) On the Postcolony, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Mitchell, J.C. (1956) The Kalela Dance: Aspects of Social Relationships among Urban Africans in Northern Rhodesia, Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Molteno, R. (1974) ‘Cleavage and Conflict in Zambian Politics: A Study in Sectionalism’, in W. Tordoff (ed.) Politics in Zambia, Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Mueller, S. (2008) ‘The Political Economy of Kenya’s Crisis’, Journal of Eastern African Studies 2(2): 185–201.
Prunier, G. (1995) The Rwandan Crisis, 1959–1994: History of a Genocide, New York, NY: Columbia University Press.
Ranger, T. (1993) ‘The Invention of Tradition Revisited: The Case of Colonial Africa’, in T. Ranger and O. Vaughan (eds) Legitimacy and the State in Twentieth Century Africa, Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Scott, J. (1972) ‘Patron-Client Politics and Political Change in Southeast Asia’, The American Political Science Review 66(1): 91–113.
Thompson, E.P. (1978) ‘Eighteenth-Century English Society: Class Struggle without Class?’, Social History 3(2): 133–165.
Vail, L. (1989) ‘Introduction: Ethnicity in Southern African History’, in L. Vail (ed.) The Creation of Tribalism in Southern Africa, London: James Currey.
Willis, J. (1992) ‘The Makings of a Tribe: Bondei Identities and History’, The Journal of African History 33(2): 191–208.