Just read this article and weep…

we cannot keep ignoring the fact Africa's colonial borders are at once exacerbating as concealing the problem that has the potential to be another of those points from which the continent gets torn further apart, into smaller antagonistic countries, or turns the continent into a dictatorship worse than the west. people are greatly underestimating the entity tribe, foolishly attempting to put the blame on historicity of the people, politics, democracy, etc. many of you are not aware that even in those countries where things look very calm, the revolution of rising expectations is taking hold. those things not yet attained are getting ever more magnified in importance, and soon enough the other tribe begins to look too much like the very impediment to progress.

there are very good, simple reasons why tribal rivalries exist in Africa. some of them are what can be termed natural, since tribe is a human condition, while others were artificially created by colonizers.

traditionally, colonial missions, working on inside knowledge provided by anthropologists, or the so called discoverers, such as David Livingstone, established and isolated varying tribal personalities, as such managed to chart out places where foreigners could go, and others where hostile people lived, made pacts and usually tended to support those African tribes they could trust or easily deceive with leadership... with the role of sell-out. This means when they handed power to the natives at the end and beginning of the sixties, they almost always gave leadership to a member of the tribe they knew they could do business with - the one that more easily accepts the primacy of foreign interests while, usefully, considering other African tribes to be inferior. these tribes became the new rulers in a new system of indirect rule, performing the same function that mixed race people did during slavery, which was to keep the field hands in check. The belief they were better as human beings prevented useful dialogue between the two sides, while it encouraged insinuation to the one who was of pure blood, the superior being... the white man, who did nothing but give self interested orders.

These realities are still very much alive in as much how separate tribal regions have been developed or neglected, and the very minds of a lot of Africans. Obviously, negative sentiments abound. Many African leaders have tried to find ways of suppressing these sentiments, but the measures, no matter how well thought out, have only succeeded to not only make the problem worse, but to drive it underground.

the Rwanda genocide was not a spontaneous act. It was a problem that had been there at the base, an accident waiting to happen.

let us start thinking seriously about our well-fare as a people on this journey of life, and this means thinking seriously about unifying the continent, redrawing the map so it reflects the ethnic realities on the ground, decentralizing power in some kind of federal or con-federal system, share the continent's resources as one. as long as we go about this process honestly, as long as we avoid unification from the platform of colonial governments, as long as any and all connections to the colonial past are erased within the new Africa, starting with the 1885 border divisions, there will be no negative comebacks to haunt our progeny in the future. Kenya provides us with a small scale version of what Africa will look like if we fail this task.

sorry if i am too direct, and may as a result rub some people the wrong way, but some truths need to be told.

No such thing as ''tribalism'' thats the first thing people need to do away with.

Toloane wrote:
as long as we avoid unification from the platform of colonial governments, as long as any and all connections to the colonial past are erased within the new Africa, starting with the 1885 border divisions, there will be no negative comebacks to haunt our progeny in the future. Kenya provides us with a small scale version of what Africa will look like if we fail this task.

If you look at any other part of the world/ China/ USA/ Europe/ the former eastern block countries it has resulted in war or a few of them to establish a "natural" order or a politically unified land mass.

I cant see how Africa will avoid that pitfall to acheive your above aim. How will you convince Nigerians for example to share their oil deposits within a West African regional block. Call me a pessemist but I can see a big problem. It would take Imhotep himself to promote peace in such varied interests. How would you resolve / negate this. ( I dont think it can be by the way).

the advantages of sharing Africa's resources on a continental scale far outweigh current, colonially rooted, provincial, and often tribal connections to resource centres. mind you, it is not only oil that is being monopolized by a group of people, usually belonging to one ethnic group, for the benefit of a few individuals within the group, but everything else that fetches money on international markets in all countries on the continent... just ask the Ogoni of Nigeria and they will give you details of how they have suffered, how their sons have been assasinated fighting against environmental ruin, how their land has been polluted, how they have not seen as much as a dime from all that black gold.

true, there are formidable African parties involved in the extraction of oil in Nigeria, getting a lot of money from resources the people of Nigeria have in reality lost to western corporations, compared to the middle east where, even though much of the wealth generated is in the hands of an elite group, they struck the better bargain. There are loads of Africans in every country on the continent, even in Nigeria, who see the absurdity of the present situation, especially the colonial roots of this, making it a perfect neo-colonial setup, who have or can do the maths and see that sharing resources continentally is a much more wealth generating process, for all Africans, than restricting them to geographical regions, or the tribes, or people who live in the immediate extraction area. lets face facts, this rule isn’t even followed in the present. Liberia’s rubber plantations have turned local inhabitants into virtual slaves, some indentured. Nigeria's oil fields have ruined local people's very land.

need i go on to other countries?

What we require to do right now is get those people who see the benefit of the method I describe above, of sharing our resources as we aim for a self-contained African economy, to rise up out of the oblivion the empowered uncle toms of the continent have pushed them into, to take the political kingdom, from where, if we play our cards right, all else should follow. Perceived, formidable impediments of the status quo will not stand a chance once Pan-Africans get this ball rolling.

i went off on a limb in my previous reply, but just to make this clear... i am talking revolution here, but there is the possibility our revolution will be bloodless, if Pan-Africans realize their strengths on the continent and play their cards right.

international legitimacy can hang, right? who cares about international legitimacy when you are dealing with as grand an enterprise as a United Africa? what effect will some small voice from Washington be when the wheels have turned as far as this?

but then again the enemies of African unity are powerful. they will do all in their power to prevent a peaceful precipice into unity, and i suspect that it will eventually have to come to a point where blood has to be spilt, but then that is what the red stands for on our red black and green flag. we understand the imperative...

Black lion. You are making a mistake whose ramifications can be as dire as it gets, the same kind Rwandans are making again, and I heard there has been repeats of the same inter-tribe internecine violence since the genocide, though not to the same degree. People are surprised about this, and blame the African… It sounds right and proper to talk like that, to urge one and all that we are all the same and should throw away our petty differences and get in line, but that is not how the entity tribe behaves in real life. In real life your statement becomes rhetoric. It is important to understand what it means to say “tribe is a human condition”. Tribe will make people fight just like or even more so than religion, and we all have been witness to the wars between religions that we just can’t understand, let alone find a solution to.

BTW: the article that I linked to initially is titled “Burnt Forest”. it is already second on the page that keeps getting updated with new articles…

tribe was not a problem in Africa before conquest and colonialism. the story of Hutu and Tutsi intermarriages and coexistence before the advent of the west speaks volumes about how Africans viewed tribal differences. in fact, the denotation of the indigenous term in Africa is not the same as the European word "tribe", but, over time, with language interlarding, the European meaning is slowly seeping into and replacing the African meaning of the term, so that the connotation of brotherhood is being shoved out.

the question intelligent, conscious Africans need to ask about the current situation of tribalism in Africa is "how did it come to this?". we know and understand that tribe is a human condition, but how did tribes that had found a way to coexist before, suddenly turn into enemies ready to kill the other, overnight? rabid tribalism was not created in Africa by merely going in and exploiting tribal issues, but using individuals in the same groups who could be bought, then made to sow seeds of hate. things fell apart slowly, and with conquest the west could sow their evil seeds without challenge.

the only way to reverse what the west did, and continues to abuse is to remove the reason a tribe will feel like fighting another tribe, believing this is the only way they will survive as a group. give each African tribe a homeland, mark their territory out but ensure the parts created are part of a larger united whole. this way no tribe will have reason to raise issue with another tribe... because they feel the election was bought, or that they are afraid of the fate that will befall them when the other takes over, etc.

works all the time.

good example of this strategy in action is the history of the German people. they are perhaps the only western group who have gone through a situation comparable to that of Ba-ntu’s in that they were originally one people, but slight differences in ethnicity and culture that resulted through geographic location and different or differing environmental and cultural exposure caused slight differences to arise in physique, mentality and language, that were identified thenmagnified by the Romans... for their benefit, of course.



I got the following text from a book I am reading entitled "The Closing Of The Western Mind", by Charles Freeman. Second paragraph on page 79 reads:

It was essential to keep many German tribes who jostled with each other along the northern borders disunited. ('May the tribes ever retain, if not love for us, at least hatred for each other', as Tacitus put it.) Their leaders could be offered gifts of money, or special protection against their rivals. The sons of chieftains could be brought up within the imperial court and then sent back as 'Romans' keen to maintain contact with the empire.

interesting... very interesting because this situation is almost a copy of the world we Africans live in, from the small tribal differences that can be as divisive as it gets, to leaders who go to cavort in New York, are so bought out by the west they no longer have souls of their own, who get their children educated in the west, and this combined with the nnumber getting educated in the west, plus the belief western education is the best when the basis of neocolonialism is hidden in the theory, meaning we will have an army of westerners, or trojan horses to contend with.

this resemblance in conquest technique is because the western culture is an adaptation of the Roman culture (in fact westerners consider themselves successors of Romans), which in turn is an adaptation of the Greek culture, that three times denied the Egyptian origin of their philosophy, opting to take the imperialistic stand and claim they were the inventors of it all. now, if tribe is a human condition, then look around you and recognize what the west is waging is a tribal war. it cannot be any other way. problem with this is they have closed your eyes to this reality by acting like they are the most rational, the most understanding humans on earth, so that most black people love white people more than they love their own people. this is just a game they are playing on you, wake up and claim the mature look you parade around town, you fool. they do not love you more than they love their dogs, and will never love you any more no matter how much they get enlightened. to them you will forever remain a Ngr, no matter how much you think you are the polished one who makes things happen.

lets look back to our continent because the solution to our problems lies here. by giving each and every ethnic group their own land, no matter how tiny, as in this climate it is impossible yet to just walk up to one Bantu dialect and explain they are the same people as Bantus living two thousand kilometres away in the south, but with time, as soon as each and every tribe feels they have a home on their continent, and have no reason to fight other people, things will start getting clearer to one and all, and the telling of our story will become much easier.

The stuff I am saying here makes a lot of sense my brothers and sisters, you better recognize otherwise you are really headed for that pool table finale. Watch them fools attempting to play the defamation game on I, and realize there is a very simple reason why they do this.

tribe was not a problem in Africa before conquest and colonialism

this is a lie