The Illusion of African Identity – A ‘tribal’ fetish

Whooshing though the humidity of a torrid afternoon the other day, I was perilously perched on a boda-boda; those pitiable contraptions of public transport in Kampala, often rode by unshaven, unwashed and rank-smelling young men who are the living testimony of the Ugandan government’s abysmal socio-economic failings – when mother sky opened her ‘watery’ bowels and unleashed a torrential deluge that had us drenched in a matter of breaths.

The boda rider, as is their incurable tradition, skidded to a halt and executed a life-threatening U-turn before dashing against the traffic in a one-way street to seek shelter under a filling-station canopy.

Wanton flouting of traffic regulations aside, I was grateful for the lad’s quick thinking and the timely shelter it secured us.

As the bedraggled crowd of marooned pedestrians huddled together for a little warmth, the rains continued for the better part of an hour, pouring down in an opaque, vertical river.

It was not long before this weather-beaten band of Ugandans began doing what they do best; when arbitrarily convened by unforeseen circumstances; be they natural ones like floods; or social ones like funerals – which is, essentially, to trade gossip.

‘Hello Madam – but this El Nino is becoming too much?’

‘How are you Sir? That shirt you are wearing has a yellow spot, are you an NRM?’

‘I knew that it would rain today, I could smell it in the air this morning …’

And other such idle talk that our people like to share when they aren’t at work; which is to say, when they aren’t really thinking.

It wasn’t long before, out of the hubbub of muttering voices, a certain thread of conversation wafted to my brooding ears; and I turned to glimpse two young men exchanging frowns and evidently engrossed in a discussion over how the recent flooding in the city was a bad thing (which no doubt it is), and how Kampala City was being left to the dogs by the country’s ‘nepotistic’ and ‘regionally biased’ government.

Certainly not the choicest of conversations – but as you might imagine, the subject had a strange allure for me, because in the past few months, I’ve been trying to listen to fellow Africans closely as they go about discussing their identity and place in the world; both in formal contexts like boardroom speeches, and in informal settings like the traders’ banter on an odd market-day.

Truthfully – it hasn’t taken me long to notice a very consistent element in almost all these conversations.

Africans seem to be almost simultaneously ‘‘ethnocentric’’ and ‘‘racialist’’ in their attempts to identify themselves.

In the same breath with which we pledge allegiance to our ethnic and ‘‘tribal’’ conclaves, we also vehemently claim membership to the continental (or worldwide) family of black-folk.

An African, either too ignorant to notice the irony or too narrow-minded to care, will shout ‘Long live Africa’ in one moment and then condemn members of (br)other African ethnicities for their intrinsic barbarism and savagery in the next moment.

I’ll try to illustrate this concept using two cases;

The first, at an acute risk of sounding mundane, is a simple social-media conversation I had the ‘amusement’ to follow among some friends recently, in the thread of a WhatsApp group-chat.

These friends were discussing the legacy of a deceased but rather popular African children’s writer named Barbera Kimenye, who penned the eternal Moses Series – a narrative on the escapades of young junior-secondary-school students, which captivated the heart of many a Ugandan primary school pupil in the 90s.

While a few, whom I was silently backing, unreservedly appreciated Mrs. Kimenye’s immense contribution to the continent’s literary scholarship; the vast majority of contributors to the conversation seemed very angry at the poor woman (God rest her delicate, ebullient soul!).

What irked me was not so much that those against Mrs. Kimenye didn’t like her writing or found her works wanting in literary merit (which would be incredible enough to begin with); but so much because these hecklers didn’t consider the late writer African ‘enough’!

Can you imagine that?

Disregarding the good in someone simply because you think their identity denies them claim to certain ‘authority’ or ‘ability’!

The conversation eventually veered away, thanks to the subjectivity of the ‘bigots’, from an honest exchange on Mrs. Kimenye’s books, to a contemptible inquest into and speculation over her ‘whiteness’ and possession of a 'smidgen' of black-blood, or lack thereof, on account of her remote West-Indian ancestry.

Very little, if anything, was said about how committed Mrs. Kimenye had been to Uganda’s Ganda cultural establishment – wedding a Kenyan man, then working in the Kabaka’s court as a secretary and nurse before being forced to flee, against her will, when the political order collapsed after 1971.

These are the African Writers, by the way, who are very fond of writing about winter, snow-covered firs, beautiful 'temperate' autumns and medieval knights in shining armor - things that most of them never get to see beyond a television screen. 

While in formal logic this would constitute an ad hominem fallacy; what aggrieves me, and what I take issue with in that line of thinking is not so much the intellectual incompetence it represents, as much as the warped and insular minds it symptomises.

For one – it is now an open secret that every single person on the planet is descended from an African ancestor; and recent scientific advances in the field of genetics have actually made it possible for anyone – black, white or yellow – to trace their genealogy back to a specific ancient African hominid.

One often hears Africans recklessly attack the white, yellow and red people of the world for the historical crimes unleashed on our ancestors; only for us to turn around and ‘tribe up’ into murderous ethnic enclaves that mete out the same, or worse forms of violence against each other.

Even in America – where you’d imagine that the non-ethnic nature of the African American community should be a prelude to lasting unity, the phenomenon duplicates itself in a culture of ‘gang violence’ – where East-Coast blacks slaughter West-Coast blacks over drugs, illicit music and fabricated feuds.

I submit that gangs are to the Diaspora’s Africans what tribes are to the continent’s Africans – lame excuses for sating our evolutionary inclination to selfishness.

Make no mistake – there are no ‘two camps’ in this phenomenon; the grey area of double-thinkers seems to be most populous.

For instance – while the American people (who are in no way the paragon of multiculturalism), voted their first black President in 2008, on the basis less of his ancestry and more of his allegiance to impersonal national ideals, we all know Obama would never have had a chance of victory if he had attempted running in his paternal Kenya - because he is neither ‘purely’ Gikuyu nor ‘purely’ Luo – which are the premier credentials for Presidential candidacy in Kenya.

In my own country – my Ganda friends truly believe that the root of their ethnic identity is their descent from a man named Kintu, who took to wife the daughter of a god!

This stupid, mythical tale of ethnic origin is a remnant of our preliterate past, which exists in one form or the other for all of Africa’s tribal sub-groups.

Not even the distinguished and greatly respectable Apollo Milton Obote, who is the closest thing to a founding father modern Uganda can boast, was immune to this cancer.

Obote’s greatest cruelties were committed between 1980 and 1986, in an attempt to purge Uganda of what he contemptuously referred to as ‘Banyarwanda intruders’, third generation Rwandan refugees who had fled genocidal wars in their country of origin - their initial flight having also been instigated by a controversy over their identity.

While it may be argued that Dr. Obote pandered to his countrymen’s ethnic parochialism for political expediency – the idea that the nation’s current President Museveni is not a bona-fide Ugandan persists to present day, and bitter critics and apolitical citizens alike, are often overheard telling the ‘Munyarwanda’ and his government to go back.

Not seldom, I read the post of a young African on Facebook or other social-media platform, condemning the white race for slavery and exploitation of Africans and calling on black people worldwide to unite in their oppression – only a few days later, to meet the same young African accusing another group of Africans for having noses that are too long, being too dark-skinned or too short, speaking the wrong dialect, or any of the countless superficial labels that African people attach to one another, often belied by ignorance and selfish motives, when they disagree.

The second illustration I’d like to employ is broader, and functions at the level of African statehood;

African Heads-of-State, especially the most pompous and bombastic-talking ones like my own country’s grey-haired antediluvian – Yoweri Museveni – like to use continental and global platforms like the African Union and United Nations to jabber about the African family, continental unity and the need for Africans to make common cause in this increasingly globalised world.

While fallen Pan-Africans like Thomas Sankara or Kwame Nkrumah were genuinely interested in seeing, and actually worked for a meaningful continental unity; men like Museveni are hypocritical and opportunistic in the way they posture themselves as contemporary successors to this Pan-African legacy.

Nowhere is this hypocrisy better revealed than in the divisive, sectarian and inequitable domestic policies that their governments operate and thrive upon.

While Museveni talks eloquently about African Unity in Addis-Ababa, he also deliberately fans ethnic sentiment in his own country by orchestrating unbalanced regional development and running the state as an oligarchy of clansmen.

Whether or not this split-brained, double-talking conceptualization of our identity is the result of our poor education and a neurosis imparted by extreme existentialist dilemmas, I cannot tell.

But one thing’s for sure – we cannot both have our cake and eat it.

For our own psychological equipoise, if not for the sake of the cultural inheritance we must bequeath the world’s children – it’s necessary for us to make up our minds in favor of one or the other, rather than go about transposing between identities, and changing them like masks whenever one suits us; depending on who we want to hate or what motive we need to pursue.

Identities should not be like cloaks that we adorn or discard at will, in light of present circumstances.

Either we truly abandon divisive ethnic allegiances and embrace our ‘blackness’ – or we unmask this blackness of legend for what it really is, nothing but a shameful illusion - a retreat to the backwaters of Africa’s paradoxically hateful, yet much beloved ‘tribal’ coteries!