The Sunday News
Michael Mhlanga
I revisit an argument I posited two years ago when I posited that tribalism is the root and fabric of the African society. I argued that it is where we derive a sense of pride in being African. I might consider myself more of a Tshangaan than a citizen of Zimbabwe, in the same way a Zulu might feel more of a Zulu than he is a South African citizen, and a Ndebele can feel more Ndebele than they are Zimbabwean/ South African. A Shona can feel more Shona than they are Zimbabwean.
Tribal belonging is never an exclusionary model of identity, but a valuable set of communal behaviour which guides religious, economic and political organisation of a people with ample room to identify with, embrace and accommodate differently practicing beings based on a common good.
However, what has contributed to the state of tribalism we find ourselves loathing in? Africans are by nature tribalistic and this in itself is not inherently evil. Fact: tribes had institutions and systems that catered for the welfare of all the tribal members. But there are some serious problems in the manner in which we have used our ethnicity or tribes. We have created the “us and them” scenario, which has impacted negatively on nation building.
Could it be that African states by totally disregarding tribal institutions and systems have weakened themselves? Could it be if you weaken the family you weaken the nation? Africans traditionally belonged to extended families, which in turn belonged to a clan, and which in turn belonged to a tribe. In the haste of the Berlin Conference there was totally disregard of the existing established socio-political order. In Zimbabwe, like in most African nations, you are defined as a citizen only on paper, your primary designation is that of an ethnic group and this is augmented by the national registration system which still prioritises regions of “origins”.
Patrick Harries in 1988 exposed his kind when he documented The Roots of Ethnicity: Discourse and Politics of Language Construction in South-Eastern Africa. He argued that one of the first reactions of European explorers and colonists, on being confronted by a world that was wholly novel outside the bounds of their experience, was to record it according to their existing structure of knowledge. This entailed imposing their intellectual grid on the mass of unfamiliar detail that surrounded them. Linguistic and other borders and boundaries were erected in order to restructure the African world in a way that could make it more comprehensible to Europeans. Patrick Harries alleges that two prominent people in the names of Paul Berthoud of The Free Church of the Canton of Vaud and Enerst Creux of the Paris Missionary Society were instrumental in using linguistic orthography on our native people in Southern Africa to categorise them and teach them their difference.
This, among a plethora of scholarships on the emergence and existence of the “us and them” finds credence in that it focuses on how language as a carrier of culture and identity was used as a weapon of disintegrating African societies for political expediency consequently reconstructing the meaning of “tribe” to the hazardous meaning we carry today.
I also find it reasonable to conclude that we are what we are as a result of other people’s thirst of understanding us in order to exploit us. We belong to groups that were created for us because they could not understand us.
None of us chose to be born the way we are, whether for privilege or lack thereof, it’s the lottery of birth; a philosophical argument which states that since no one chooses the circumstances into which they are born, people should not be held responsible for them (being rich, being poor, being Black, Tonga, Venda, White etc). John Rawls as a modern day thinker in his book: A Theory of Justice, illustrates it better when he reminds us that we should not punish other people because they are grandsons of your father’s enemies, or reciprocate the hatred because someone hates you for what you are not responsible for. I emphasise this point because we use tribe to differentiate those we hate because of a legacy or history they did not participate in or have a choice to be born in. The hatred’s epicentre is only justified by an “unjust legacy”.
Why should one suffer for what they did not choose, why should we affect national sanctity and progress because of façade identity subscriptions? That is a question Zimbabwe should answer.
Frankly today, tribes are a contradiction in today’s Africa, they are an evil if your tribe is not in power (which ever power you can think of, even in burial societies), and a benefit if your tribe is in power — our own created devil.
This fosters a climate of stereotypically excluding others because you assume they belong to a different group than you or they are beneficiaries of your past and present misfortune. Some people’s lives are miserable today because every debate in our society is trivialised to be about “Shona or Ndebele” which is where the recurrent problems reside: The “us and them”; the “privilege and the marginalised” and so forth, and we always fail to remedy key challenges because we are blinded by if it’s not “us” fixing it, then it should not be “them”. These are creations of colonial intelligence attempting to understand natives for debriefing to their colonial masters who were preparing for the annexation of Africa.
Our custom reference to names, accent and place of residence as a determination of privilege or excluding someone is not only misplaced but a catastrophic pursuant of a colonially designed framework of understanding us. Gerald Mazarire in Becoming Zimbabwean by Prof Raftopoulous reminds us how D N Beach and Terrence Ranger deny the existence of a group called Shona and a reminder that Ndebele is a group of people found along the way by Mzilikazi until his settlement in what is today Zimbabwe. Of some of the people referred to as Ndebele today, their ancestors were tribes that are found in the Shona grouping today, they wanted protection from the powerful Kingdom by then.
