View the H-Africa Discussion Logs by month
View the Prior Message in H-Africa's February 2003 logs by: [date] [author] [thread] View the Next Message in H-Africa's February 2003 logs by: [date] [author] [thread] Visit the H-Africa home page.
<sanctity33@hotmail.com> I find nothing wrong with the hypothesis that ethnicity---or its manipulation--- has been a source of conflicts in many parts of Africa. Our sense of the social constructedness of ethno-linguistic identities should not lead us to underestimate the power that such solidarities, affinities, and cleavages wield over social groups on the continent. Nor should we, as scholars, assume that Africans on the ground are necessarily familiar with the nuances that we apply to our analysis of ethnicity. Without seeking to reify or exaggerate the deterministic power of ethnicity in social relations, and while acknowledging that many of today's ethnic groups and/or their formal institutions were direct and indirect creations of colonial anthropology, we should recognize the ways in which political, economic and social competition and struggles have helped invest the notion of "tribe" with meanings that many Africans deem to be worth fighting over. The concept and manifestations of ethnic solidarity in Africa (whether these manifestations are positive or negative) will continue to be legitimate sites for scholarly inquiry as long as they inform struggles and conflicts between people who invoke them and as long as some Africans sometimes express their aspirations and frustrations through the ethnic medium. In fact, the challenge, instrumentally speaking, should be how to divest political ethnicity of its propensity to fuel conflicts, and to turn it into a benign form of cultural and socio-economic mobilization and association.
|