Authors: David Lamb
The Portuguese, in the fifteenth century, were the first Europeans to undertake systemic voyages of discovery southward along the African coast. Thus began six centuries of contact between African and European in which the African—until recently, when he learned how to turn the white man’s feelings of guilt into a gold mine of international aid—always ended up second best. The Portuguese
explorers opened the door for the slave traders, who in turn ushered in the missionaries, who were, in their own right, agents of colonialism. Each invader—slaver, missionary, colonialist—sought to exploit and convert. Each came to serve himself or his God, not the African. With Europe looking for new markets and materials during the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century, the European powers scrambled for domination in Africa, Balkanizing the continent into colonies with artificial boundaries that ignored traditional ethnic groupings. By 1920 every square inch of Africa except Ethiopia, Liberia and the Union of South Africa was under European rule or protection or was claimed by a European country.
The manner in which colonial administrations governed virtually ensured the failure of Africa’s transition into independence. Their practice of “divide and rule”—favoring some tribes to the exclusion of others—served to accentuate the ethnic divisiveness that had been pulling Africa in different directions for centuries. Before independence, the colonialist was the common enemy. When he left, the major tribal groups in each country had to confront one another for leadership roles, and on a continent where tribal loyalty usually surpasses any allegiance to the nation, the African’s new antagonist became the African.
Tribalism is one of the most difficult African concepts to grasp, and one of the most essential in understanding Africa. Publicly, modern African politicians deplore it. Kenya’s President Daniel arap Moi (
arap
means “the son of”) calls it the “cancer that threatens to eat out the very fabric of our nation.” Yet almost every African politician practices it—most African presidents are more tribal chief than national statesman—and it remains perhaps the most potent force in day-to-day African life. It is a factor in wars and power struggles. It often determines who gets jobs, who gets promoted, who gets accepted to a university, because by its very definition tribalism implies sharing among members of the extended family, making sure that your own are looked after first:
To give a job to a fellow tribesman is not nepotism, it is an obligation. For a politician or military leader to choose his closest advisers and his bodyguards from the ranks of his own tribe is not patronage, it is good common sense. It ensures security, continuity, authority.
The family tree of William R. Tolbert, Jr., the assassinated Liberian president, provides an illuminating example of how African politicians
take care of their own. Tolbert’s brother Frank was president pro tempore of the senate; his brother Stephen was minister of finance; his sister Lucia was mayor of Bentol City; his son A.B. was an ambassador at large; his daughter Wilhelmina was the presidential physician; his daughter Christine was deputy minister of education; his niece Tula was the presidential dietician; his three nephews were assistant minister of presidential affairs, agricultural attaché to Rome and vice governor of the National Bank; his four sons-in-law held positions as minister of defense, deputy minister of public works, commissioner for immigration and board member of Air Liberia; one brother-in-law was ambassador to Guinea, another was in the Liberian senate, a third was mayor of Monrovia.
In its simplest form, one could compare tribalism to the situation in a city like Boston, where one finds a series of ethnic neighborhoods, with the blacks in Roxbury, the Italians in the North End, the Irish in South Boston, the Jews in the neighboring town of Brookline, the WASPs in the Wellesley suburbs. Each group is protective of its own turf, each shares a cultural affinity and each, in its own way, feels superior to the other. Africa has 2,000 such “neighborhoods,” some of which cover thousands of square miles, and each of those tribes has its own language or dialect—usually unintelligible to another tribe that may be located just over the next hill—as well as its own culture, traditions and, in most cases, physical features that make one of its members immediately recognizable to an individual from another tribe.
In Lusaka, Zambia, a university student I knew applied for a job and was told to report to the personnel manager. My friend leaned over the receptionist’s desk and asked, “What tribe is he?” Told that the manager was a Mashona, my friend, who belonged to another ethnic group, replied, “Then I’ll never get the job.” He didn’t.
A live-in cook in Africa earns about $75 a month—a luxury most expatriates can easily afford—and shortly after arriving in Nairobi, I hired a cook from the Kikuyu tribe, a gardener and an
askari
(night watchman) from the Luo tribe. For the next three months our house was in turmoil as they fought and cussed and argued with one another for hours on end. We fired the watchman after he accused us of trying to poison him—he said we were prejudiced against the Luos—and we put Dishun, the gardener, on indefinite sick leave when he accused the cook of bewitching him with evil spirits. We took Dishun to our British doctor, but the prescribed pills didn’t
help his stomach cramps. He returned to his village, where the witch doctor, using herbs and chants, quickly cured him. In the meantime we had hired a Kikuyu gardener and
askari
. They struck up an immediate friendship with the Kikuyu cook. Tranquillity returned to our home.
One day in Uganda I was talking with a U.S. diplomat at the embassy. His secretary entered the office and said a man was waiting to see him. “Is he Ugandan?” the diplomat asked. “No, he’s Acholi,” she answered. Her implication was clear: in Uganda, there were Acholis and other tribalists, but no Ugandans. One’s identity was tribal, not national.
Only three countries in black Africa—Somalia, Lesotho and Swaziland—are blessed with ethnic uniformity. The result is that those countries are among the few to have a sense of national identity. But in most, such as Zaire, which has 200 tribes, the governments have failed to provide an alternative to tribalism because central authority is weak and often illegitimate and based on the perpetuation of power, not a sharing of power.
The significance of tribalism has not diminished with the end of colonialism, for several reasons. First, there is little intermarriage between various ethnic groups; second, in rural areas, where transportation and communication remain primitive, there is little movement in or out of tribal regions that have existed for generations; third, the family, clan and tribe are the essential elements of African society, the American equivalent of welfare, social security, police protection and Saturday night at the VFW; fourth, since most Africans’ identity revolves around the tribe, taking away that identity would be like telling a devout Catholic that he has been excommunicated; fifth, nationalism is a new concept in Africa, not much more than three decades old, and its implications are not broadly understood; and sixth, African leaders have done little to convince their people that nationhood offers more benefits than tribalism.
To see the results of tribalism in its most extreme and ugly form, consider Burundi, landlocked and resourceless. A Christian nation of over 4 million inhabitants, Burundi is an East African land whose grassy, forested plateaus roll to the slopes of craggy, tortured hills. Despite its high population density—372 persons per square mile, or about ten times the density in the United States—Burundi has virtually no villages or cities. People live instead in family compounds known as
rugos
, and the only urban concentrations are at a
few former colonial and commercial centers such as Bujumbura and Gitega.
There are three major ethnic groups: the Hutus, the Tutsi (Watusi) and the Twa. The short, stocky Hutus (comprising 85 percent of the population) are mostly farmers of Bantu stock, with dark, Negroid features. The Watusi (14 percent), who migrated to Burundi in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries from the north, probably Ethiopia, are cattle people; they are tall, sometimes well over six feet, with long, narrow facial features, and their skin is slightly lighter than that of most other Africans. The Twa (1 percent) are pygmies who were driven into the bush and marginal grasslands by the Watusi generations ago.
Over the years the small group of Watusi immigrants subjugated the masses of aboriginal Hutus into a kind of feudal system. Much as in medieval Europe, a pyramid developed with Watusi lords giving their loyalty to more important Watusi nobility in exchange for protection. A
mwami
, or Watusi king, ruled at the top of each pyramid. Gradually the great majority of Hutus mortgaged their services and relinquished their land to the nobility, receiving in return cattle—the symbol of status and wealth in Burundi.
Centuries of tradition made the Watusi feel like a privileged, superior people, and the Hutus like an inferior class held in serfdom. The Watusi considered themselves an intelligent people capable of leadership and looked on the Hutus as no more than hard-working, dumb peasants. The Hutus had been conditioned not to disagree. When Belgium granted Burundi independence in 1962, challenges were raised to the concept of the Watusi’s innate superiority, and the Watusi began to worry about the possibility that their power might be transferred to the majority, as had happened elsewhere in black Africa.
The minority Watusi government came up with a simple solution: it set out, in 1972, to massacre every Hutu with education, a government job or money. In a three-month period, upwards of 200,000 Hutus were slain. Their homes and schools were destroyed. Stan Meisler, then the
Los Angeles Times’
African correspondent, traveled to Bujumbura, the Burundi capital, a few months after the massacre and was shocked to see no more than a handful of Hutus. “It is a little like entering Warsaw after World War II, and finding few Jews there,” Meisler wrote.
Many Hutus were taken from their homes at night. Others received summonses to report to the police station. So obedient and
subservient had the Hutus become to their Watusi masters that they answered the summonses, which even the most unlearned soul knew was really an execution notice. Sometimes, when the death quotas at the prisons and police stations had been filled for the day, the queued-up Hutus were told to return the next day. They dutifully complied. The few Hutus who tried to escape the executioners seemed to make only token attempts. It was a pathetic sight. They would walk down the main road toward the border. If the Watusi gendarme stopped them, they would turn quietly back.
There were many grisly stories about the methods of execution, all difficult to verify, but Western diplomats who were serving in Bujumbura at the time said one thing was clear: the Watusi did not use many bullets. The Hutus’ bodies were then thrown onto military trucks, a pile of bodies and tangled limbs filling the uncovered cargo hold of each vehicle. For several days they rumbled through Bujumbura in broad daylight on their way from the city to a field near the airport. Then the government decided to be more subtle and shifted the death convoys to night runs. Bulldozers worked under spotlights, digging long narrow rows of graves.
In neighboring Rwanda, another former Belgian colony that gained its independence in 1962, a similar tribal imbalance existed. There the Watusi made up 10 percent of the population, the Hutus 89 percent. In 1959 the Hutus overthrew their Watusi masters, killing an estimated 100,000 and winning majority rule. Persecution of the Watusi continued through 1964, at which time the English philosopher Bertrand Russell called the killings “the most horrible and systematic human massacre we have had occasion to witness since the extermination of the Jews by the Nazis.”
But except for a few voices like that of Russell, the general reaction of Africa and the world was silence. A representative of the Organization of African Unity flew into Bujumbura at the height of the killings and congratulated President Michel Micombero, a thirty-two-year-old alcoholic who was later overthrown, for the orderly way he was running his national affairs.
*
The Western missionaries in Burundi and the Christian church continued their work on God’s behalf without a word of protest. As far as I know, no country cut its diplomatic relations with the Micombero government. And at the very moment an investigator from the International Commission of Jurists was being officially received in Bujumbura at an elaborate
reception, twenty-two Hutus were being beaten to death in the police chamber a few blocks away.
If the white South African government had conducted similar atrocities against black Africans, the rage would have rocked the continent like the explosion of a volcano. But that would have been different: the whites’ injustice toward blacks is considered racist; the blacks’ mistreatment of blacks is just part of national growing pains and is somehow acceptable to both Africa and the world beyond.
Sadly, not a great deal has changed in Burundi since the nightmare of the 1970s. Fear still rules the land, and in all except their strength in numbers, the Hutus are a destroyed, powerless people. More than 150,000 have fled to Zaire, Tanzania and Rwanda, and those who remain still work the fields for their Watusi masters, hold menial jobs and carry cards identifying their tribal origins. On my last visit to Burundi there was not a single Hutu private in the 7,000-man national army, and the military government remained suspicious of—and occasionally vetoed—any international aid that might eventually breed opposition by educating or enriching the Hutus. All the power remained in the hands of the Watusi minority. And that, in a word, is what tribalism is about—power.
The ethnic diversity of Africa also creates an immense language problem, making Africa the most linguistically complex continent in the world. Canada’s national unity is fractured by the presence of just two languages. Belgium is splintered by French and Flemish. But Africa, in addition to half a dozen imported European languages, speaks 750 tribal tongues, fifty of which are spoken by one million or more people. Both Swahili in East Africa and Hausa in West Africa are spoken by more than 25 million people. In Zaire alone, there are seventy-five different languages. In South Africa the whites speak Afrikaans, a colloquial form of seventeenth-century Dutch heard nowhere else in the world. The tribal babble intellectually cripples whole countries and leaves Africa in the unenviable position of not being able to understand itself.