Social Anthropology and Two Contrasting Uses of Tribalism in ...

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Social Anthropology and Two Contrasting Uses of Tribalism in AfricaAuthor(s): Peter P. EkehReviewed work(s):Source: Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 32, No. 4 (Oct., 1990), pp. 660-700Published by: Cambridge University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/178957 .Accessed: 23/01/2012 10:57

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Social Anthropology and Two Contrasting Uses of Tribalism in Africa PETER P. EKEH

State University of New York at Buffalo

A remarkable feature of African studies has been the sharp discontinuities in the characterization of transitions in African history and society from one era to another. Thus, for an important example, colonialism has rarely been related to the previous era of the slave trade in the analysis of any dominant socioeconomic themes in Africa. Such discontinuity is significant in one important strand of modem African studies: The transition from the lore and scholarship of colonial social anthropology to postcolonial forms of African studies has been stalled into a brittle break because its central focus on the "tribe" has been under attack. Social anthropology gained strength through its analysis of the tribe and its associated concepts of kin groups and kinship behaviors in colonial Africa. However, following criticisms of the mission and manners of social anthropology by postindependence African scholars and politicians, and a brave reexamination of the conceptual problems of their discipline, social anthropologists more or less agreed to abandon the use of the tribe and of its more obvious derivative tribalism with respect to Africa.

With the abandonment of the use of tribe and tribalism has emerged considerable confusion in various disciplines concerned with the intellectual discern- ment of African social realities in connection with their capacity to probe with persistence issues troubling Africa for decades and their ability to analyze new conceptions of the notion of tribalism. We list some aspects of this problem. First, in discarding the terms tribe and tribalism, social anthropology has created a gap in African studies by rendering years of scholarship concerned

This paper was prepared while I was a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington, D.C., and on leave from the University of Ibadan, Nigeria. I thank the Senate of the University of Ibadan for granting me leave and the Woodrow Wilson Center for its generous research facilities. My research assistant at the Wilson Center for the summer of 1989, Miss Mary Shaw Galvin, now a graduate student at Yale University, made important and sensitive suggestions which led me to make some changes in the paper. I am particularly indebted to the two anonymous readers for this journal, Comparative Studies in Society and History, whose extensive queries enabled me to rework parts of the original manuscript.

0010-4175/90/4240-3162 $5.00 ? 1990 Society for Comparative Study of Society and History

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with the analysis of kinship as virtually irrelevant. Clearly, such organized focus on kinship behaviors as social anthropology managed for up to five decades ought to be of continuing benefit and current relevance for understanding moder social behaviors in Africa. Second, while it now appears that the term "ethnic group" has replaced the disparaged concept of "tribe" in African scholarship, there is no clear statement about the relationship between the two-whether, especially, there has been transition from one to the other and whether there is persistent relevance in the previous analysis of tribes for our understanding of ethnic groups in moder Africa. Third, while tribalism seems now abandoned in academic scholarship in African studies-with some proposing and indeed using "ethnicity" as its replacement-paradox- ically, the use of the term tribalism is enjoying unprecedented boom not only in everyday interactions among ordinary Africans but more especially among high-ranking Africans in government and university institutions.

There appears to be clear need and justification for a review of the intellectual component of this problem of the tribe and for some analysis of the new phenomenon of tribalism in Africa. This paper carries out the following forms of analysis against this background and understanding. First, I shall evaluate the anthropological theory of the tribe along with its demise, stressing its ahistoricity. Second, I shall go behind the colonial era explored by social anthropology to carry out a probability analysis of the social origins of kinship behaviors in Africa, with the hypothesis that they owe their scope and significance in both the private and public realms in Africa to the weaknesses of the African state, which was unable to provide protection for the individual against the ravages of the slave trade. In other words, I shall argue that kinship assumed the role of state surrogate during the centuries of the slave trade. Along with this position, I argue that ethnic groups arose under colonialism as substantial and notional expansions of kinship systems and kinship ideology entrenched in the slave trade era before colonial rule. Third, I shall distinguish between the meaning of tribalism in anthropology as a valued and desirable attribute of tribes and tribesmen, and its uses in modern Africa, which have inverted the anthropological meaning of this term. In this latter usage tribalism emerges as a counterideology invented to fight against rampant kinship ideology in multiethnic communities in modern African nations. That is, I shall demonstrate that beyond the positive meaning of tribalism in social anthropology as the sum of the ways of life of tribesmen, there is a new usage of the term tribalism that conveys undesirable modes of behavior in modern Africa-a subject clearly requiring some attention. Underlying this attempt at analysing tribalism, and its historical and conceptual antecedents, is the assumption that, in this area at least, there are continuities in African history and society, and that the sociological and historical meanings of modern African phenomena will emerge most fully if they are traced to their roots in the centuries of the slave trade and colonialism.

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EVALUATION OF THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORY OF THE TRIBE

AND KINSHIP BEHAVIORS IN AFRICA

Stretching back to the beginnings of their discipline in Radcliffe-Brown's

early sketches (for example, 1924), social anthropologists reduced African societies they studied to what they termed "tribes." The notion of the tribe was apparently adopted as a heuristic category for the convenience of analysis, with only intuitive meanings attached to it. Indeed, well up to the 1950s there was no known major effort to define the tribe. The itchings and irrita- tions of African nationalist reactions compelled clearer attention to the definition of the tribe in the late 1950s and 1960s, even as social anthropology was in danger of losing its territory of captive "natives," with the twilight of British and French colonization in sight. When finally anthropologists turned their attention to the challenge of clarifying the meaning of the tribe, the outcome was not enlightening.

The net result of various initial stocktaking exercises (for example, Fried 1967:154-74; essays in Helm 1968; and Lewis 1968a) was that anthropologists agreed the term tribe was not amenable to a clear definition and should be modified. The nearest that could be accommodated within the discipline was "tribal society." Given the vastness and frequency of the use of tribe in the literature of social anthropology, this must be seen as a far-reaching conclusion and is as astounding as if sociologists or political scientists were to abandon the use of the term "social class" or the "state" because it was

adjudged to be unamenable to clear definitions (as indeed Easton (1953:107- 8) once contended in vain with respect to the "state").

Nemesis pursued the discipline of social anthropology with controversy despite the refined appearance of "tribal society." As the contributors to the most imaginative debate on the notion of the tribe agree, "tribes" and "tribal

society" are controversial terms (Gutkind 1970). Southall's commanding piece in The Passing of Tribal Man in Africa (1970:28-50) begins thus:

Controversial though the matter is, the most generally acceptable characteristics of a tribal society are perhaps that it is a whole society, with a high degree of self- sufficiency at a near subsistence level, based on a relatively simple technology without writing or literature, culture and sense of identity, tribal religion being also conter- minous with tribal society. (1970:28)

In elaborating further on these characteristics, Southall (1970:46) does add

specifically "the importance of the domain of kinship and [its] multiplex relationships with all the institutional implications of these characteristics." Would such a definition of tribal society then hold for African societies studied by social anthropologists?

Actually, the composition of these characteristics into tribal society would

only beget a straw man. Following elaborate analysis and illustrations, South-

SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY AND TRIBALISM IN AFRICA 663

all (1970:45) gives three cogent reasons why the "tribal concept" should be abandoned: These are

problems of definition (ambiguous, imprecise, or conflicting definitions and also the failure to stick to them consistently); problems of illusion (false application of the concept to artificial and misconstrued entities) and problems of transition and transfor- mation (use of the concept of the tribe unjustifiably with reference to phenomena which are a direct product of modem influences) (italics added).'

It was entirely possible that anthropologists might have been able to reevalu- ate and salvage the concept of the tribe or its new version, tribal society, in spite of these difficulties. However, Southall suggests important reasons outside the logic of science why it was prudent for social anthropology in the postcolonial era to abandon these emotive terms. With anthropology already "naturally embarrassed by the colonialist taint which besmirches it in so much of the [third world]," Southall (1970:47) calls on social anthropologists and, presumably, other Africanists "to stop calling primitive and tribal the contemporary communities" from which may come modem African anthropologists and scholars as their new colleagues. He pleads, "This may be a case in which human feelings have to prevail over strict logic." Continuing in the same vein of prudence, Southall asks that

for the strategic moment ... the word primitive should be dropped from the vocabulary of social anthropology . . .that the term "tribe" should usually be applied only to the small-scale societies of the past which retained their autonomy [hardly to be found in the Africa of the colonial era studied by social anthropologists] and that the new associations derived from them in the contemporary context should be referred to as ethnic groups (1970:48).

Southall's views deserve this extended restatement because they stand out in the debate about the tribe in not only attending to the theory and practice of social anthropology but in also offering a clear prescription. With two decades already past, we may inquire, how well have anthropologists responded to this clarion call to redress the subject matter of social anthropology? Furthermore, what impact has social anthropology made on the new breed of social science and social history in Africa?

There seems to be little doubt that by avoiding the use of the term tribe, the language of social anthropology has become more polite and less offensive in the view of African scholars. Within African studies the more current term is "ethnic group," which is presumed to have the same meaning as tribe. On the other hand, outside of African studies the term tribe continues to be used without hindrance by anthropologists. Recently, Southall (1988:55) once again

1 J. Clyde Mitchell's related views (1970:101) were presented in the same volume in which Southall was writing: "Tribal man as a member of a geographically defined small-scale society, who is immersed in sets of social relations unaffected by events and circumstances outside his community, almost by definition has ceased to be."

664 PETER P. EKEH

complained about the misuse of the "concept of tribe, which is still very generally used, and in a manner that contradicts the more meticulous, if erroneous, formulations once made by Service." Significantly he adds, "E. R. Service, in a series of publications, first promoted the notion of tribe and chiefdom as evolutionary stages in a universal structure, then abandoned it in the face of criticism, but unaccountably began to use it later" (Southall 1988:55n). It is entirely possible that these differences in the continuing use of the term tribe owe something to differing emphases within anthropology. Gutkind (1970:1) did foresee such possibility in his editorial preface to The Passing of Tribal Man in Africa: It is also likely that its usage will, or might, continue longer in cultural rather than in social anthropology as the former, under the impact of ethno-science, appears to be more concerned with preindustrial and prenational ethnic units, their unique behavior, values and language, whereas social anthropology has, in more recent years, paid close attention to social change and modernization. While there is prodigious literature by social anthropologists about literally thousands of "tribes" upon which we have built our discipline, our progressively sociological, and social historical analysis has seriously questioned the utility of the concept of tribe.

It does appear, however, that it is the African sensitivity factor, rather than intrinsic differences between cultural anthropology (active in the United States) and social anthropology (dominant in Great Britain), that accounts for the diminution in the use of the term tribe in African studies. In India, where there is not the same amount of sensitivity concerning its use, the terms tribe and tribal society are in continued use, mostly by Indian scholars, in a strong anthropological tradition more aligned to British social anthropology than to cultural anthropology. The upsurge of the literature on the tribe in India is publicly sponsored, with federal and state government agencies as well as university departments and research institutes fully involved.2 It is also possible that Aidan Southall's one-man crusade against the use of the term in social anthropology has been partially responsible for its infrequent appearance in the literature of modern African studies. But, as he has regretted,

The tribe is one of the beguiling mystifications which continues to have a mysterious stranglehold on the minds of many anthropologists. It is one of the obvious reasons for the bad image which anthropology still has for many African scholars . . . , for our failure to correct the unregenerate approach of the media to Africa, and for the long

2 Some of these research centres include: Tribal Cultural Research and Training Institute, Hyderabad, Andra Pradesh; Department of Culture and Folk Research, University of Gauhati; National Council of Educational Research and Training, New Delhi. Publications bearing titles with the term "tribe" are numerous in India: thus, for example, Pratap (1968); Das (1964); Nagaland (1968); Srivastara (1971).

It might yield some results to compare India and Africa with respect to the fortunes of anthropology and the use of tribe, its key term. Judging by the authorship of the vast literature on the tribe in India, it is evident that Western anthropologists have left the field to Indians; but the interests and discipline of anthropology have not been abandoned. In Africa, with the departure of Western anthropologists, the once dominant and triumphant discipline of social anthropology is in disarray.


time anthropology is taking to become firmly rooted in the academic structure within Africa-though some progress is now being made (Southall 1983:65).

In universities across Black Africa, there are scarcely any separate departments of anthropology to be found anywhere. Originally tucked behind sociology, as the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, anthropology has been conveniently forgotten by university administrations. Modem African governments have befriended both foreign and indigenous political scientists, sociologists, and historians, but they are uneasy about anthropology and anthropologists. In many instances African anthropologists have had to adapt to new academic fields; moreover, there are not adequate graduate pro- grammes in anthropology on the continent to sustain the discipline into the future. Obviously, the taint of colonialism on anthropology has not been easy to wipe clean. This is not to say that social anthropology and its works and products are dead in Africa. On the contrary, much of the organized social knowledge produced by Africans tends to be reaction formations against pursuits of social anthropology during the colonization of Africa.

With respect to the narrower subject matter of this essay on tribalism, social anthropology's erstwhile preoccupation with the tribe has left behind a bit- tersweet legacy in Africa. Whereas leaders of governments and intellectuals reject the label and blame anthropologists for creating it (see Chitepo 1970; Okot p' Bitek 1970:13-14; Mafeje 1971; Mamdani 1976:3; Nnoli 1978:1- 20), they nonetheless show concern about tribalism, which many regard as the new evil plaguing modern Africa. The use of tribalism as a concept is new in moder Africa, although its adoption seems to have been imposed by the sheer predominance of the anthropological uses of the term tribe.3 Because of its importance, I shall attempt to analyze the meaning of tribalism in this essay. However, in order to fully understand its historical and sociological origins, we must first gain a sense of colonial social anthropology's mission and the reactions to it from African intellectuals.

The Character of British Social Anthropology in Africa The character of British social anthropology in Africa4 calls for some exploration not only because it deserves it on its own weight, with regard to its

3 Mafeje (1971:254) notes that unlike such other terms as "clan," "nation," or "lineage," the term "tribe" is only used by Africans when they speak foreign languages and that it has no equivalent translation in indigenous African languages. He argues, "In many instances the colonial authorities helped to create [sic] the things called tribes, in the sense of political communities; this process coincided with and was helped along by the anthropologists' preoccupation with 'tribes.' This provided the material as well as the ideological base of what is now called 'tribalism.' Is it surprising that the modem African, who is a product of colonialism, speaks the same language [as the anthropologists]? If that is a great puzzle to the modem social scientist, it was not to Marx [i.e., Marx and Engels, 1845:64], who in 1845 wrote: 'The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.'"

4 Although other European colonial powers were also involved in the making of colonial social

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achievements in its studies of kinship behaviors in Africa, but more significantly because such exploration will help us to underline how the intellectual reactions to its presentation of African social realities have shaped the contents and conduct of modem African studies in the humanities and social sciences. Perhaps the most important statement about it is that the discipline of social anthropology in Africa was an integral part of colonialism. If such a statement is received today with resentment and even hostility, it is because colonialism has, in its aftermath, come to be seen as less gracious than its dominant contemporaneous image led its practitioners to perceive it. Social anthropologists imagined that their discipline was a gentler aspect of the colonization and conquest of Africa, but it was undeniably a central piece of the craft of colonization.

While colonialism lasted, social anthropology was the dominant social science discipline in the study of Africa. Its Durkheimian imagery of society, expertly reduced to its empiricist dimensions by Radcliffe-Brown for British practice (see Ekeh 1974:6-9), enabled it to become a practical science of men and society in Africa. The inner character of British social anthropology is best revealed in its mission of assisting colonial administration in understanding colonial peoples. With infrequent exceptions, social anthropology was in fact an applied science, with its theories invented to address pressing problems of governance in the alien circumstances of colonial rule. In this regard, one of the clearest statements of the mission of social anthropology is to be found in S. F. Nadel, the Austrian scholar who became a "government anthropologist" of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan:

It has been said that modem anthropology is destined to be of great assistance to colonial governments in providing the knowledge of the social structure of native groups upon which a sound and harmonious Native Administration, as envisaged in Indirect Rule, should be built. Let me say that I for one firmly believe in the possibility of such cooperation between anthropologist and administrator (Nadel 1942:vi).

The doctrine of indirect rule, which enjoined colonial administrators to rule native populations at minimum cost to the imperial government by using permissible indigenous institutional arrangements (see Fields 1985:33), was the cord tying social anthropologists and administrators in colonized Africa. Indeed, when necessary, colonial administrators were required to collect an-

thropological data to assist their work of administration. The architect and theoretician of the doctrine of indirect rule, Frederick Lugard, endorsed this

arrangement. In his prestigious forward to Nadel's A Black Byzantium,

anthropology, no other collection of anthropologists commanded the height and consensus achieved by British social anthropologists in Africa. Thus, while French anthropologists had a significant presence in African studies, particularly in the development of Marxist social anthropology, they were much less part of colonization than in the British experience.


Lugard stated this policy, and praised its author's achievement within its context:

Since it is the declared policy of the British Government to help the different units of native society to govern themselves . . . it goes without the saying how valuable such an objective study [as Nadel's] would be to the Administration. We find that, in fact, it has been utilized in conjunction with the researches of District Officers (Lugard 1942:iv).

Helen Lackner (1973) has traced the origins of the full official union between colonial administration and social anthropology to the so-called Wom- en's War of 1929, the name given to the massive uprising of Ibo women (in Eastern Nigeria) against the colonial state and its policy of indirect rule. It was occasioned by rumours that the "warrant" chiefs, whose offices had been created and imposed on Ibo communities in order to implement the mandate of indirect rule, were about to collect taxes from women, as had been the case with men's poll tax in the previous year. Fearing that indirect rule required far more knowledge of indigenous institutions than was then available, there was now sharper inclination toward the work of professional anthropologists. As several contributors to the symposium "Social Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter" (Asad 1973) have emphasized, there was a continuing debate in the British colonial administration as to whether the necessary research should be carried out by colonial administrators, a view supported by Lugard, or by professional social anthropologists, as advocated by Lord Hailey (for exam-

ple, 1938:40-67). In spite of "a most ambiguous attitude towards

[professional] anthropologists" on the part of the Colonial Office in London

(Lackner 1973:132-3), social anthropologists came to develop close ties with colonial administrations in Africa. As Langham (1981:xv) has remarked, a

distinguishing feature of British Social Anthropology was its close ties with British imperialism. Almost all the influential fieldwork done by British Social Anthropolo- gists was performed in what were or had been colonies of Mother En- gland. . . . Leading anthropologists like Malinowski made blatant (and, one gathers, successful) attempts to raise money for anthropological research by pushing anthropology as useful in colonial administration.

With so much attention paid to pressing problems of governance, social

anthropology had little interest in such leisurely concerns as the reconstruction of the African past. The immediate present was clearly its parish of concern. In caring so little about the African past, colonial social anthropologists could

rely on the authoritative justification on the subject provided by Radcliffe- Brown (1950:2):

For European countries we can trace the development of social institutions over several centuries. For most African societies the records from which we can obtain authentic history are extremely scanty or in some instances entirely lacking except for a very short period of the immediate past. We cannot have a history of African institutions.

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Social anthropology's emphasis on the immediate colonial situation, of course, coincided with administrative problems of governance. A great deal of the problems of colonial rule emerged in communities with scanty historical records, such as the Ibo, whereas societies with well-known histories (for example, Benin, Kano, Ashanti) were more pacific once the initial problems of conquest were resolved. A corollary of this predisposition to antihistori- cism in the discipline was thus the choice of a distinct type of communities for investigation: Those areas posing difficulties in governance were generally preferred to more orderly and pacific communities. To cite West African examples, social anthropology was more interested in riot-prone Tiv (Bohan- nan and Bohannan 1953) than in well-ordered and history-soaked Sokoto Caliphate; and in the examination of the mysterious and turbulent Tallensi political system (see Fortes 1945) than in the history of centuries-old Ashanti kingdom.5

Such lack of interest in the past by colonial social anthropology in Africa was also extended to its disdain for the sociological investigations of the past. In a provocative statement in their introduction to the famous African Political Systems, Fortes and Evans-Pritchard (1940:5) aver:

We do not consider that the origins of primitive institutions can be discovered and, therefore, we do not think that it is worthwhile seeking for them. We speak for anthropologists when we say that a scientific study of political institutions must be inductive and aim solely at establishing and explaining the uniformities found among them and their interdependencies with other features of social organization.

This functionalist injunction against the sociological reconstruction of the basis of institutions in society, said to betoken rejection of nineteenth-century evolutionism, was religiously observed by colonial social anthropologists; and

5 See Forde and Kaberry (1967:xi): "New concepts and field research methods developed in social anthropology during the thirties had little immediate influence on the study of the larger West African [sic] chiefdoms. They had been developed mainly with reference to the interpretation of custom and understanding of social processes in small communities. . . . Interest in uncentralized segmentary societies was fostered by theoretical interest in the processes whereby social structures were maintained in the absence of any institutionalized hierarchy of authority and by the practical problems posed for colonial governments in attempting to integrate such societies in their administration." Also see Michael Crowder (1968:13): The "European ster- eotype of Africa was based on the acephalous society . . . because of the romantic European mind these peoples were more fascinating than those who had attained a more complex form of political administration. And because even scholarly studies of African societies by anthropologists were predominantly concerned in the colonial period with such societies, the latter began to appear to be the rule rather than the exception that they were in West Africa. The preoccupation of anthropologists with segmentary or 'primitive' societies in Africa . . . does much to explain the unpopularity of that discipline among Africans today. Anthropologists became, in the eyes of the nationalist leaders, agents of those who held the view that the African was incapable of self-government."

The mood of the discipline in accepting what was important may be seen in the outstanding career of Meyer Fortes. Although he probably spent as much time in studying the Ashanti as he did the Tallensi, Fortes' fame was established with the benefit of his work on the acephalous Tallensi rather than among the politically sophisticated Ashanti.


it clearly narrowed the scope and depth of their enquiries. According to its tenets, any existing institutions in society were accepted as given. In this fashion, the rampant kinship system social anthropologists encountered every- where in Africa was not probed with respect to how long it had been in existence, why it was so dominant in Africa, or whether it was related to the slave trade that ravaged Africa before European colonization. Ultimately, colonial social anthropology had this latent but fundamental assumption: Kinship is constant over time in any given society in Africa.

Within the ambiance of such an assumption, there was considerable varia- tion as to which end of the kinship pendulum of "blood and soil" (Kuper 1982:71-74) leading anthropologists and their disciples swung (see Kuper 1973:107-22; also Guyer 1981). What seems undeniable is that, relative to world ethnography, Africa was outstanding in having a greater proportion of unilineal corporate descent groups than systems of bilateral kindred (see Freedman 1961:214). Why was this the case? The limitation of colonial social anthropology was that it never attempted to transcend its data and findings by framing larger theoretical issues that would involve an exploration of the African historical past in search of answers to such questions.

Until the "African Independence" benchmark year of 1960 (see Carter and O'Meara 1985), the authority and the views of Radcliffe-Brown and the other coeditors of African Political Systems (Fortes and Evans-Pritchard 1940) and African Systems of Kinship and Marriage (Radcliffe-Brown and Forde 1950) provided the general guidelines for the conduct of social anthropology in colonized Africa. Thereafter the discipline was besieged with problems: "The present crisis in social anthropology . . . has become worse at a time when colonies have become 'independent' and there is no more need for colonial administration, Indirect Rule and the anthropology that they brought about" (Lackner 1973:149). Although British social anthropology has adjusted rather well to this postcolonial crisis-largely by developing other fields of interest outside of Africa (such as urban anthropology) and also by blending into the huge American university milieu-it cannot be said that it has retained its former outstanding identity and vigour cultivated in the midst of British imperialism in Africa. A great deal of the questioning that led to the difficulties the discipline faced came in the form of African scholars' rejections and criticisms of colonial social anthropology's aims and claims, a subject to which we now turn.

African Reactions: Social History Versus Social Anthropology The most important and sustained intellectual reactions to the damaged image Africa suffered from social anthropological publications have come from Af- rican historians originally trained in western historiography and historical methodology. These historians worked to uproot three assumptions and trends prevalent in Europe about African societies. First, there was the common

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assumption that European-type historiography and history-writing were inap- plicable to Africa on the grounds that its precolonial past had not been in- formed by any events and institutions worthy of historical recording. In other words, what was important about Africa was its colonial present, not its presumed autonomous past. Second, it was assumed that any worthwhile history of Africa could be reduced to the European contact with Africa leading to the necessary conquest of Africa in which Europeans, propelled by the imperatives of the creed of the "white man's burden," imposed their benev- olent rule on natives who, without resistance, gladly welcomed the prestige of Western civilization. Third, there was widespread assumption and insistence that social anthropology was the proper discipline to deal with the circumstances of Africa at the intellectual level.

Moder pioneering African historians sought to upturn such issues at the height of colonial social anthropology's dominance during the 1950s and 1960s. Foremost among these historians was the leadership of an intellectual movement, later known as the Ibadan School of History because it crystal- lized its advocacies at the University of Ibadan during these two decades. This movement emerged to challenge what it considered biases against Africa in the mainstream European historical characterization of Africa and to reject choices made by social anthropologists in their study of Africa. Championed by Kenneth Dike and J. F. Ade Ajayi, the movement's mission was clear: To design a new African social history which would recapture the respect for the African past that colonialism and its intellectual handmaidens had erased from the African agenda of existence. In their didactic devotion to this cause, Dike and Ajayi (for example, 1968:394) contended that

A belief in the continuity of life, a life after death, and the community of interest between the living and the dead, and the generations yet unborn is fundamental to all African religious, social, and political life. Thus, although the serious writing of African history has only just begun, a sense of history and tradition has always been part of the African way of life.

The leaders of the Ibadan School of History claimed that in the hands of late nineteenth- and twentieth-century European historians, and their Christian missionary companions, "African historiography became nothing more than a justification of European imperialism" (Dike and Ajayi 1968:397); nor, in their view, had anthropologists been less guilty: "Their primary concern was to describe the quaintness and the peculiarities of tribes, to justify as well as to facilitate the imposition of colonial rule" (Dike and Ajayi 1968:398). Reject- ing the notion, particularly common among British social historians and social anthropologists up to the 1960s, that historical material and sources must be written to be valid, the advocates of the new African social history battled to include oral traditions as legitimate material for historiography,6 leading to

6 In making this claim the Ibadan School of History found a European sympathy in the works of Vansina (e.g., 1960, 1961, 1971). It should also be noted that among the historians of the


such major landmarks in African history as Dike's (1956) Trade and Politics in the Niger Delta and Biobaku's (1957) The Egba and their Neighbours.

Well aware that the net outcome of the anthropologists' work was that Africa was now seen outside Africa, and indeed inside it, as the continent of tribesmen, the new African social historians' confessed mission was to exor- cise African studies of the ugly images thus foisted on it. Ajayi and Alagoa (1974), both leaders of the Ibadan School of History, have given a clear account of the route the new dominant African social history traveled to accomplish its mission: During colonial rule, which embodied an attempt to

cut the African adrift from his historical experience and in effect to undermine his basic humanity, [there emerged] the effort to rehabilitate African history and re-establish the relevance of the African historical experience. Essentially, Africans [i.e. African historians] and Europeans entered into an intellectual struggle for the control of the African mind (1974:127).

Indeed, social history became an active arm of decolonization, and social historians the counterpoise of the "anthropologists championing . . . the stat-

ic, functionalist view of African society." In this struggle Africa's new universities "began to involve professional historians in the politics of decolonization" (1974:129), just as colonial administrations had hired and recruited the services of anthropologists in the colonization of Africa. Last, with independence and the attainment of self-government, Ajayi and Alagoa (1974:131) urge that

If African history is to provide the African with [worthy self-perception], and thus to play an effective role in independent Africa, it has to correct the distortion and bridge the gap created by the colonial experience in the African historical tradition [and] evolve its own identity independent of western historiography (also see Ajayi 1961).

In the view of many Africans, social historians-unlike African social scientists-have succeeded in redressing the subject matter of their discipline and have carried the main burden of the campaign against the injurious consequences of social anthropology, which had conveyed the image of Africa as a land of tribes and tribesmen.7 The emphasis of the new social history clearly bears the marks of reaction to colonial social anthropology. In their search, principally through much of West and East Africa, the social historians chose communities and political entities whose demonstrable histories preceded the

Ibadan School were prominent Europeans who adopted the style and methodology of the new African history. These included R. Smith (e.g., 1969), Ryder (e.g., 1969), and Omer-Cooper (e.g., 1966).

7 It is an indication of the success of the implantation of the new historicism in African studies and the changed circumstances of social anthropology in the postcolonial era that social anthropologists began to incorporate historical methods and substantial history in what must be regarded as a revisionist, if upgraded, version of social anthropology. Thus, apart from the exceptional earlier work on the political history of Zaria by M. G. Smith (1950), by his background hardly a colonial social anthropologist, mainstream British social anthropologists began to include history in their work in the postindependence period: see Lloyd (1971), Forde and Kaberry (1967), Jones (1963), and Lewis (1968b).

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arrival of European conquest and rule, that is, the very areas in which social anthropologists were least interested. Moreover, whereas the principal actors in the accounts of social anthropology were faceless and nameless tribesmen, the new social history celebrated the deeds and lineages of kings and warriors, particularly those challenging the European invaders and conquerors.

In going back in time to a deeper African past before the anthropologists and colonization, African historians necessarily landed in the era of the evil days of the slave trade. In studying it, they were not principally interested in its socioeconomic consequences for Africa;8 rather, their aim was to demonstrate that even here there were African actors who stood on the strength of their will in their interactions with alien traders. They therefore showed no hesitation in dubbing slave trade chieftains as heroes, provided they were not passive and supine in dealing with European traders. Thus, Nana Olomu of the Niger Delta (Ikime 1968), and King Agaja of Dahomey (Akinjobin 1967) were portrayed as heroic figures, even though their hands were sullied in the bloodshed of the slave trade.9

Although colonial social anthropology and African social history share between them the distribution of strength in African studies, in terms of sheer volume of publications and depth of scholarship, their separate contributions have not jointly upgraded our intellectual mastery of social reality in Africa. This is largely because these two dominant disciplines have tended to avoid the explanation and analysis of common issues and themes in Africa. In effect, social anthropology and its intellectual rival social history have not contributed to continuities in African studies, not even by way of dialectical confrontations, because they avoided each other's territory and field of interest. This leads to a lack of consistent pursuit of themes raised in the social analysis of Africa. Thus, remarkably, various aspects of kinship (which anthropologists found to be rampant in African societies) deserve more attention from social scientists and historians than has been paid to it in African studies.

In the rest of this paper, I shall attempt to develop the natural history of

kinship in Africa. It is my view that the scope and persistence of kinship in Africa have their beginnings in the exigencies and imperatives of the slave trade. Under colonialism kinship registered its revised presence in the form of kinship systems studied by social anthropologists. In colonial and postcolonial Africa, kinship has been transformed into ethnic groups whose mem-

8 In fact, Dike and Ajayi (1968:398) have typically shown hostility to any emphasis on the slave trade, dismissing it as "another myth [which] regards the influence of the Atlantic slave trade as so all-pervasive that it can explain all major trends in African history since the nineteenth century."

9 It is remarkable that the contents of the resplendent African social history reveals so little moralism concerning the slave trade, thus contrasting quite sharply with the moral sensitivities displayed by Africans in diaspora (say, Eric Williams 1944; Walter Rodney 1972) in weighing the roles played by various participants in the slave trade.


bers are bound together by new moral definitions. In this postcolonial representation, kinship behaviors have given rise to the concept called tribalism. In order to capture this intricate existence in Africa we begin with a probability analysis and reconstruction of the circumstances of the individual during the era of the slave trade in Africa.

THE SLAVE TRADE AND THE SOCIAL ORIGINS

OF KINSHIP IN AFRICA

Such is the segmentation in African studies that it is likely to appear unusual to link up kinship, the exclusive centerpiece construct of colonial social anthropology, with the slave trade, about which social history (but not social anthropology) has developed some interest. Social anthropology apparently assumed kinship to be so natural to Africa that it saw no need to trace its sociological origins in other institutions or in previous historical epochs, nor to account for its persistence in the African historical landscape. Thus, social anthropologists studying African kinship systems (as the principal aspects of African social structures) immediately at the close of the slave trade did not relate them to the dynamics of that trade.

There is a vast literature on the slave trade, the phenomenon dominating several centuries of Africa's chequered century. First, there is considerable attention to the techniques of the trade and its cold-blooded economics with

respect to the transportation of its victims. This literature includes the lively debates on the number of Africans lost to the trade, especially following the publication of Philip Curtin's (1969) The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census. Second, there have also been some good accounts as to roles played by British and Western European circumstances and personages in promoting the trade and in later ensuring its abolition. The third area is the impact of the slave trade on the New World of the United States, Latin America, and the West Indies. All three strands of literature on the slave trade are of old vintage and of continuing interest and import in Western history and scholarship.

In sharp contrast to such established traditions in the study of the slave trade, there is much thinner focus on its impact on Black Africa itself. Given the duration and scope of the slave trade in Africa, this neglect is not liable to be helpful in any attempts to understand Africa fully. The Arab side of the trade, involving trans-Saharan and trans-Indian Ocean routes, spanned some nine centuries (A.D. 950-1850) and "almost certainly their much longer duration conjointly produced a total export of slaves of the same order as that of the Atlantic trade" (Hair 1978:26). The European trans-Atlantic trade stretched across some four centuries (1450-1850) and involved the successful export of "not less than 12 millions and not more than 20 millions" (Hair 1978:26) of Africans to the New World. Indeed, the Nigerian economic historian Joseph Inikori (1982:25) has calculated that about thirty million men

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and women in their prime were drained from Africa to Arab lands and the New World in these centuries. Surely millions of people, perhaps many more, perished in the civil strife, pestilence, and famine induced by the double- barrelled trade from Africa.

What impact did such prolonged disruptions have on the development of state and society in Africa and the relationship of the individual to both state and society? Neither colonial social anthropology nor its rival African social history was predisposed to pay attention to such a query. The study of the slave trade and considerations of its consequences for African development have not been on the mainstream agenda of these two domains of African studies. As Marvin Harris (1968:536) has pointed out in chiding British social anthropology for its ahistoricism:

It is difficult to imagine a less propitious combination of place and subject for syn- chronic analysis [than in Africa] ... For as surely as the slave-run plantation system of the New World sounded the death knell of American aboriginal societies, it also marked the beginning of vast upheavals of human populations in Africa.

Blame for such neglect of the analysis of the African slave trade's consequences should in fact be extended to African social historians, and indeed to the new crop of African social scientists, who are wont to be uneasy about raising any issue of such moral ambivalence as the slave trade.

Serious consideration of the impact of the slave trade on Africa began as late as the 1960s with claims by the Caribbean scholar Walter Rodney (1966, 1972) of its pervasive negative consequences. In sharp rebuttals of Rodney's views, Fage (1969a, 1969b, and 1974) and other British historians-including notably Hopkins (1973:117-23), Johnson (1976) and Hair (1978)-have engaged in the rather awkward subject of the economics of the slave trade. Most of these works emphasize the economic and commercial effects of the slave trade and tend on the whole to agree with Fage (1969a:55) that the "broad effect of the slave trade seems to have been to create conditions for a commercial revolution" in Africa. 10

The Slave Trade and State Formation in Africa

Fage did venture beyond profit-and-loss calculations on the African side of his assessment of the slave trade. Walter Rodney (1966) had argued that in the Upper Guinea internal slavery and other forms of inequalities had been created in society by the intensity of the external slave trade. In reply, Fage (1969b, 1974) argued that internal slavery and other forms of subject status were not only already in existence in Africa before the advent of the slave

10 There is at least one compelling rejection of this viewpoint. Manning (1982), although engaging in the same economist reckoning of the slave trade as Fage and other writers of this view, did reach important conclusions that show that on balance Dahomey's economic growth suffered disastrously as a result of the slave trade.


trade but in fact betokened political development and state formation in Af- rica. As Wrigley (1971:116) so wryly put it, "Fage is unmistakably congrat- ulating West Africa in having achieved the institution of slavery without European help. Dr. Rodney, who proudly demonstrated that the people of Upper Guinea were innocent of slavery until the eighteenth century, was stood upon his head." In Fage's views, slavery and inequality were the noble em- blems of state maturity. Fage (1969b:402) was even more daring in suggesting the following hypothesis: On the whole it is probably true to say that the operation of the slave trade may have tended to integrate, strengthen and develop unitary, territorial political authority, [and] to weaken or destroy more segmentary societies. Whether this was good or evil may be a nice point; historically it may be seen as purposive and perhaps as more or less inevitable.

Wrigley (1971) has correctly blamed the insensitivity and the amoralism of Fage's position on the historicist preoccupation with the state as the litmus test of political development in African historiography. However, the issues raised by Fage are well beyond the methodology and metatheory of African historiography: They touch on the rare subject of the relationship between kinship and state formation in the context of the slave trade. Fage is arguing that the slave trade tended to destroy kinship organization while usefully promoting state formation. This was why Fage (1969b:403) rued the interventions that terminated the slave trade. Fage necessarily states his case in probability terms, and it can be further extended within its own logic. To put his case in counterfactual terms, Fage would most likely reason that if the slave trade had not taken place, state formation would have been less noticeable and kinship networks more extensive in Africa.

Ironically, the opposite conclusion would seem to emerge from a finer probability analysis that takes into account the probable individual and his reactions in the conditions of the slave trade. Typically, Fage (especially 1974) sees ordinary Africans in their traditional societies as subjects, not as citizens-as persons whose political choices were made for them by their rulers, not by themselves. In addition, Fage's imagery of the African ruler was one of an unfettered Prester John whose untrammelled powers could not be chal- lenged from below by his subjects. The facts of Africa's history and politics are quite different. The individual was more skillful than to leave himself exposed as a subject Caliban nakedly seeking the protection of his Prospero. In practice his membership in a morally defined kinship system protected the average individual from the wantonness of despotic rulers. "Not to belong to a king or one of his feudatories," writes Fage (1974:14), "was to be dan- gerously exposed" in the circumstances of the African slave trade. In fact, however, kinship systems and groups ensured that the individual escaped the fate of subjects and "broken men" who had to belong to a king for their own sake and protection.

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The political sociology of slave-trade Africa was far from being uniform, of course. With respect to political institutions, three categories of states may be identified in this period, each with distinct interrelationships with kinship formations. First, some ancient states in existence at the advent of the Atlantic slave trade continued in their wonted ways of governance and were thus not involved in the trade. Foremost in this category is the remarkable case of Ethiopia, which is usually left out in any considerations of the slave trade, presumably because it did not participate (see Levine 1974:26). On the contrary, this fact is an important element in any fair assessment of the factors predisposing other African states to take part. Ethiopia is noteworthy for its age-old strong state institutions and feudal traditions (with their emphasis on personal and contractual relations between lords and peasants whose safety was thus secured from foreign exploitation). It is the absence of these institutions and traditions"I elsewhere in Black Africa that enabled the exploitation of the slave trade by outsiders to take place. It is also noteworthy that in all of Black Africa, Ethiopia traditionally has kinship structures with the least political salience.

Along with Ethiopia, we may include Benin in this first category of states. Long before the slave trade Benin had developed a strong sense of statehood, with deep experiences in warfare for the sake of protecting the public interest (see Egherevba 1934; Ekeh 1976). Although Benin had empires at various

1 Outside of Ethiopia, no full-fledged feudal institutions and traditions were sustained in Black Africa. The varied claims for their existence by both liberal and Marxist scholars (for example, Mamdani 1976; Prah 1977; Potekhin 1960; Olderogge 1957; Loeb 1962) appear to me exaggerated. Ronald Cohen's discussion (1966) of Bomo helps to illustrate the difficulty of making a case for feudalism in slave-trade Africa. Cohen (1966:92-5) compares the generalized violence in medieval Europe (which, as Marc Bloch argues, was a factor that led to the institution of feudal bonds for the protection of the individual in the absence of an effective state) with the wild violence in Borno, whose victims were sold into the slave trade. He argues that such conditions of violence created possibilities for the rise of feudalism, as it was the case in Europe. But there is this important difference between the two: In western Europe, the state failed to stem the tide of the violence of the invasions from the outside and its institutions consequently suffered, paving the way for the emergence of feudalism. In Borno, the violence that engulfed society was sponsored by the state and its functionaries who were strengthened and emboldened by the profits and armaments of the slave trade from distant lands. In effect, the state was waging war on society, particularly as the state-sponsored raids into other territories (such as Adamawa) spilled over to domestic violence. In these circumstances, those in position of authority had little incentive for feudal contracts. If in Europe the response to the failure of the state to provide security for the individual was the institution of feudalism, in Africa the response to the violation of the citizenry by the state in its sponsorship of the slave trade was the entrenchment of kinship corporations. Because of its links with external mercantile capitalism, the slave trade was inher- ently inhospitable to the emergence of feudal institutions. That feudal institutions and traditions would have eventually emerged in several cultural enclaves without the prolonged slave trade and the succeeding European imperialism in Africa may be imagined from the advanced pa- trimonialism in Benin at the time of its conquest by the British (Bradbury 1973:76-128) and strong indications of protofeudal possibilities elsewhere (for example, Bryant 1929). See Goody's different argument (1969) on the grounds of economy and technology for rejecting claims for feudalism in Africa.


points in its history, the core of its political organization was Benin City. Like most city-states in history, its citizens were sensitive about their freedom, and the power of the King of Benin was tied to his abilities to provide and protect such freedom. It was not therefore surprising that, in spite of pressures from its slave-trading neighbors and European slave traders, Benin did not exploit its opportunities in this respect. As Ryder (1969:198), who reviewed this matter carefully, concluded:

There is no evidence that Benin ever organized a great slave trading network similar to that which supplied the ports of the eastern delta [in moder-day eastern Nigeria], or that it ever undertook systematic slave raiding . . . Benin either could not or would not become a slave-trading state on a grand scale (also see Davidson 1971:65).

Again as in the case of Ethiopia, kinship institutions have been weak in Benin, in sharp contrast to other communities in southern Nigeria. The ordinary Bini relied more on state institutions to protect him from harm than he did on kinship systems (see Bradbury 1973:10-16).12

From the prevalence of the slave trade in Africa, Ethiopia and Benin must be regarded as the exception among the African states in existence at the onset of the slave trade. Unlike them, most other ancient African states, corrupted into the service of the slave trade, constitute the second category of our classification. Examples of these states include Dahomey, Oyo, the Hausa- Fulani states, and Borno. It should be assumed that involvement in the slave trade would compromise the character of these states and make them less dependent on internal sources of power. We should also expect that in the long run the individual citizen would rely less on the state for his own protection in these changed circumstances, both because each state's interest and ability to protect the individual diminished significantly and also because many of them turned on their own citizens, providing them as victims for the slave trade (see Wilson 1856:189-93).

An outstanding example of this second category of states is Oyo, the most prominent of the Yoruba states in West Africa. Its fortunes were ruined, from

12 There is considerable confusion in the literature on the slave trade in the varied references to Benin City (as a state presided over by the King of Benin); Benin River (a waterlogged area around a river named after Benin City in its fame, but quite some distance from the city and dominated by the riverine Ijo and Itsekiri); and the Bight of Benin (a huge bay along the Atlantic Coast in West Africa, which runs from Ghana to Lagos in Nigeria and has no geographical links with either Benin City or Benin River). This confusion has become compounded by the recent change in the name of the country of Dahomey to Benin and the adoption of Benin as the official title for such institutions as the National University of Togo-apparently all in tribute to the olden fame of Benin City. Because of the frequent mention of "Benin" in the historical records of the slave trade with reference to these other areas with "Benin" appellation, there is a false tendency to attribute a great deal of volume in the slave trade to Benin City. It should be noted, on the other hand, that Benin was not innocent of internal slavery, which its aristocracy practised for at least two centuries prior to the Atlantic slave trade. The fact of internal slavery in Benin and the reluctance or refusal of the Benin city-state to engage in the slave trade should undermine the popular argument that the existence of slavery in Africa induced the international slave trade.

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the outside and the inside, as it turned itself into a predatory slave-trading state and frittered away its human capital in the fiasco of the trade. Eventually, it was itself consumed in wars whose captives fed the slave markets of West Africa and slave-holding estates of Brazil in the last phase of the slave trade in the nineteenth century. By contrast with Ethiopia and Benin, what appeared so remarkable about Oyo was the deep involvement of its kinship structures in politics and the governance of the state. Historian Robin Law (1977:63) notes that "The political system of [slave-trade era] Oyo was thus founded upon the lineage .... The city of Oyo can, indeed, be regarded as essen-

tially a federation of lineages" (also see Lloyd 1955; 1962:31-37). Because there are no records of Oyo's political system in the preslave trade period, Law (1977:62) has suggested that "we have to proceed by assuming that the better-documented conditions of the nineteenth century can be projected back- wards into earlier times" and thus conclude that the ancient Oyo state was as controlled by the forces of kinship as in the later slave-trade era. But this piece of retrospective determinism must be questioned. Indeed, Law and other historians of Oyo provide good reasons why it is safer to assume that kinship was less pervasive in the preslave trade era. Thus, the King of Oyo was less dependent on lineage politics in the earlier period; and succession to the throne was by the protofeudal rule of primogeniture (Law 1977:67; Johnson 1921:41). By the later slave-trading period, there had been a decay in the succession rule to competition among units and sub-units of the royal lineage for the throne, with the kin-composed chiefly council, Oyo Mesi, playing a major role in such struggle. We suggest that in ancient African states corrupted into the slave trade, there was great likelihood that there would be regres- sion from protofeudal possibilities to the growth, by way of reaction, of kinship institutions, as seemed to have been the case with Oyo. Even when the machinery of the state appeared more decisive, as in Dahomey, there would be substantial undergrowth of kinship networks not under the control of the state. By way of comparison, it is noteworthy that in Benin, with its strong state institutional ties with society, kinship was not only weak, but the protofeudal rule of succession by primogeniture was strengthened in time (see Egherevba 1934:39, 43-44; Bradbury 1973:16, 97; Ekeh 1976:70).

The third category of states in Africa in the slave trade era consists of those arising from the imperatives of the trade and therefore ab initio dependent on it. A large number of these states did arise with the apparent limited aim of securing captives to feed into the slave trade. Examples of these states come most readily from the most exploited area of the West African Atlantic coast and the Niger Delta. These states-studied by, inter alia, Dike (1956), Jones (1963), and Ikime (1968)-were the direct formations of the slave trade and embodied the poverty of the state in Africa: They had little or no link with any society over which they presided. In spite of the heroic regard in which their "merchant princes" are held by African social historians, they did not rely on


societal legitimacy for their survival. Their power derived from their partners across the Atlantic Ocean, who would eventually, in another guise of imperialism, depose and humiliate them. Such states grew along with kinship systems: The slave trade led to the invigoration, not the attenuation, of kinship systems offering the individual meaningful protection against such brash new state institutions as sprouted up to service the avarice of slave-trade chieftains externally supported by the invisible hand of international mercantile capitalism from across the Atlantic.

Some comparisons may be usefully made among these different categories of states in slave-trade Africa. From the point of view of political sociology, the greatest damage inflicted on the political culture of Africa was the division created between state and society by the slave trade. In the predatory states of the second and third categories, the state grew apart from society in proportion as its dependency on external alien sources deepened. On its part, the forces of society became more independent of the state, with kinship flourishing as the most significant representation of society. In this reckoning, European imperialism must be seen as a historical successor to the slave trade. Once the rules of association were redefined in Europe, the predatory states necessarily fell victim of their dependency on European mercantile capitalism which, as Eric Williams (1944) has argued, had to be replaced in England and Europe by industrial capitalism, demanding more settled conditions of colonial rule in Africa. In spite of accounts of heroic African resistance to imperial conquest popularized in African social history, the onset of colonization was more or less an affair between the African states and their former alien supporters, with little involvement from society. Whereas historians may creditably cite the durability of Samory's "Seven Years War" with the French as an instance of what African resistance to European conquest could demonstrate (see Crowder 1968:86-89), it should be clear on the other hand that, especially in most West African nations riddled with the slave trade, internal problems arising from the separation of the state from society weakened the capabilities of African states to maintain their political independence from foreign conquest. "The example of Sir Gilbert Carter's spectacular progress through Yorubaland in 1893" (Ryder 1969:278) or the lightning speed with which Frederick Lugard subdued the mighty Sokoto Caliphate (1900-04) was hardly a measure of resistance that could be posed from a society mobilized against foreigners. It is again not surprising that Benin proved to be the most difficult area to be conquered in southern Nigeria. As Ryder (1969:287) put it, "It now stood isolated as the last important traditional state surviving in southern Nigeria." When Benin's conquest came, it was in the real fashion of war in which all society was involved (see Bradbury 1973:91). Nor should it be forgotten that Ethiopia was not colonized because of some act of mercy from Europe; the organization of Ethiopia's state and society would hardly be receptive to European imperialism and penetration in the fashion in which the

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rest of Africa was subdued. Its convincing defeat of the Italian invasion (1895-96), at the final battle of Adwa in January 1896, was a feat that could only have been achieved by a mobilized society (see Boahen 1987:54-56; Rubenson 1964).

Involvement in the slave trade clearly shortened the life span of many indigenous African states of the period. As Daaku (1965:137) has put it, "The relatively short lives of many of these states was due [ironically] to the slave trade" because "[their] energies were sapped by the frequent need to fight if not for survival then for political aggrandizement" in the quicksand of the ugly geopolitics of the slave trade. Colonial rule was, of course, the ultimate collective termination of their independence and sovereign authority.

Another type of comparison is instructive. African states in the pre-slave- trade era decidedly attained greater cultural heights than the states operating under the aegis of the violence of the slave trade. In this respect, Wrigley's (1971:123) sensitive observations deserve to be echoed:

A condition of cultural creativity . . . is most unlikely to belong to the kind of state that owes its existence or its greatness to slavery or the slave trade. [It is remarkable] that the acknowledged masterpieces of the Benin and Ife artists were produced before the end of the seventeenth century and that aesthetic decadence set in precisely when the slave trade was becoming the dominant mode of economic and social life.

Wrigley's views here can be extended to the three best known ancient states of Ghana, Mali, and Songhai, which thrived in succession in the western part of Africa from about the sixth to the sixteenth centuries. Various accounts, including those by Arab traders and visiting scholars, present a picture of states showing far more responsibility than the later ones of the slave-trade era. Fage (1964:20) himself said that there seems to be "no question" that the empires of Ghana, Mali, and Songhai "rank among the highest achievements of Negro Africans in history." For example, it is remarkable that the peace and security of these earlier times allowed learned pursuits in the cultural sphere: There was an academic community of scholars and students in Timbucktu in Songhai that has been referred to as Black Africa's first university (Cissoko 1984:208-10). This is a far cry from the purely mundane interests of the slave-trading states in the following centuries.

Of course, vast areas of slave-trade Africa lay outside regions of organized states. Historically, however, they were not isolated from the slave trade, cut off in any tribal enclosures. On the contrary, a good number of the victims of the slave trade were captives from those areas social anthropologists later characterized as stateless societies-the classic examples of the Tiv (Bohan- nan and Bohannan 1953); Ibo (Green 1947); Tallensi (Fortes 1945); Nuer (Evans-Pritchard 1940). These stateless societies were usually bordered by, or at any rate were close to, one or more slave-trading states and networks. From the point of view of history, the diacritical mark of these societies is that they were areas into which predatory states sent organized raids for captives to be


sold into the slave trade. From the point of view of colonial social anthropology, these societies were remarkable for exhibiting pristine forms of unilineal descent systems of kinship that have marked Africa as a region in which, unlike other ethnographic regions, "cognatic systems [of kinship] are rare" (Freedman 1961:214). The relevant question flowing forth about them is this: Is there any relationship between the anthropological and historical con- figurations of these societies?

The correspondence between the vast history of these raids for captives to be sold into the slave trade and the ecology of this pristine form of kinship formation of corporate unilineal descent groups (with prominent political functions) in the same societies seems to be too close to be dismissed as mere coincidence. It appears to denote a notable case of reaction formation. Of course, the apparently fragmented forces of kinship could not adequately match the power of imported gunfire (see Inikori 1977) in the hands of the predatory states. However, in the absence of any shielding state institutions, the little corporations of unilineal descent groups were liable to be strengthened. The individual could at least rely on the support and loyalty of his patrilineage, as much as he was prepared to lend support for its survival by protecting its constituent members. The success of kin descent groups in protecting the individual may now be difficult to measure, but their capabilities in forming networks and alliances for protecting their members should not be minimized.

Because the problem was not posed in this mode in the past, and in view of the proverbial complaint about lack of "authentic" historical records in these societies, we may never have conventional answers to the question as to whether the pristine form of unilineal kinship was a social formation of the slave trade, or at least whether kinship was reinforced and strengthened in these zones of brigandage and vandalism in the centuries of the slave trade. However, we can piece together indirect evidence from the Ibo experience with kinlessness before and during the slave-trade period. In a close-knit and kin- bonded society, to be kinless is a burden of great nastiness to the affected individuals. Kinlessness gains its significance from the intensity of kinship in society: the greater the necessity for upholding kinship bonds in private and public behaviors, the greater the ugliness and burden of kinlessness. We cite a famous European example: In the medieval history of Ireland, the kinless "broken men," or Fuidhirs, had to seek safety and security by attaching themselves to clan and tribal chiefs in a society in which it was dangerous to live outside the realm of one's kinfolk (Maine 1888:173-84). In Iboland, the fate of the kinless, called osu, was similar to that of the Irish Fuidhirs. In the earlier, pre-slave-trade period, kinless men and women sought safety and security through bondage to public gods whose priests were thereby obliged to protect them as "slaves" of the gods from the dangers which kinless people would otherwise face (Basden 1938:247). The crisis of the slave trade led to the

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worsening of the conditions of the daily living of the osu. Isichei (1976:47-48) paints the picture of their plight in the following manner: "Another institution that underwent distortion and corruption [during the general crisis of the slave trade in Iboland] was that of osu, cult slavery ... the evidence suggests that . . . [in] the nineteenth century, their numbers expanded and their status deteriorated dramatically, so that they became outcasts, [sic] feared, and despised." Surely, if there is such dramatic change in the status of Ibo kinlessness as a result of the slave trade, should we not assume that the convulsions created by the slave trade also deepened kinship in Iboland?

It seems fair to assume that in the extended centuries of the slave trade in Africa, kinship systems were strengthened and elaborated as a means of providing protection against the dangers of the violence created by the slave trade. It is my view that the most enduring social structure within which Africans could be assured some measure of protection was provided by the kinship system, not the capricious state institutions that rose and died with the turbulence of the slave trade. In proposing that the slave trade should lead to the attenuation of kinship organizations, Fage (1969b) was obviously apply- ing a favorite Western historical model of development. Maine (1888) shows from his Irish data "how independent kin-based states evolve into complex, centralized polities. The latter eventually destroy the kin bodies which give them origin, and thus ultimately substantiate the discontinuity between kin institutions and state institutions" (Fox 1971:138). Fage to the contrary, the abnormality of the slave trade is that it disenabled this form of development by ensuring that the two grow together, with the kinship institutions serving as countervailing forces to the barbarism of predatory state institutions. As a matter of fact, it could be argued from the African experience that in several instances kinship institutions eventually outlived state institutions.

The slave trade led to another form of abnormal development in Africa. By encouraging the growth of kinship institutions, the slave trade led to the fragmentation of moral perspectives, with the segmented and nucleated kinship entities serving as sanctuaries for moral practices. Rather than develop an inclusive world view defining common morality under the aegis of an inclusive deity, African states of the slave-trade era presided over societies with differentiated moral definitions in many instances celebrated in the sacra- ment of ancestor worship. Outside of Ethiopia, the emergence of a common world view, derived from a world religion, was not achieved in any regions of Black Africa.

European colonial rule was imposed on this substratum of fragmented moral perspectives in the dying decades of the nineteenth century and in the first half of the twentieth century. Its platform of the plexus of kinship was well captured by colonial social anthropologists who, however, failed to trace its social origins back to the unsettling circumstances of the slave trade. Kinship provided the individual room for defining his citizenship (that is, his


rights and duties) and meaningful protection against the vicissitudes of the slave trade and its predatory state institutions.

The relevant question that this analysis leads to is: What was the impact of colonialism on such rampant kinship in Africa? To that query we now turn.

COLONIALISM AND KINSHIP IDEOLOGY IN AFRICA

"Kinship," writes Richard Fox (1971:129), critically paraphrasing entrenched wisdom in political anthropology, "withers away as society passes from primitive to the complex. Familial etiquette gives way to class relationship." Morton Fried (1967:229) defines the state as the conquest of kinship: "A state is better viewed as the complex of institutions by means of which the power of the society is organized on a basis superior to kinship."

The drama and dilemma of political development in Africa stem from this fact, that such respected views on political development to the contrary, colonialism heightened and enhanced the political salience of kinship in the state and for the individual. Plotnicov's comparison (1970:66-7) points to the heart of the matter:

Within the process of modernization in the West, the features of intensive urbaniza- tion, extensive migration, and geographical and social mobility have been associated with a concomitant decline in the importance of wide kinship ties. ... By contrast, in Africa strong and extensive kinship ties . . . have altered little. Ethnic associations have not only persisted, in many cases they have increased in importance in the new towns and cities.

Indeed, under colonialism the notion of kinship was considerably expanded into the construction of ethnic groups and kinship ideology, which thus became central elements of any meaningful definition of the public realm. This persistence of kinship in Africa must be seen as a product of the craft of colonial rule, which by and large built its methods of governance on the dominance of kinship in precolonial Africa.

The resulting colonial state emerged from two processes. First, the authority of existing African states and other nonstate political systems was dissolved and subjected to alien European control. Second, some elements of the Euro- pean model of the state were composed in the colonial setting and imposed on Africa societies as the colonial state. The parts of the model of the European state imported into Africa were mainly coercive aspects needed in the course of its conquest and colonization. Thus the military, police force, and bureau- cracy were prominent. However, the construction of the new colonial state avoided as much as possible controls imposed by societal constraints, including legislative processes. Consequently, the colonial state in Africa was in general separated from the values and morality of both the European societies from which these elements of the state were imported, and the African societies on which they were imposed.

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Contrary to the relationship between the European state and society, in which, as Engels (1884:155) said, the state "is by no means a power imposed from without . . . rather, it is a product of society," the colonial state in Africa was a power imposed from outside Africa and clearly set apart from the societies over which it presided. Several consequences developed from this separation of state and society. First, although the European colonization of Africa resulted in single national states spread across the territories of conquest, there were no national societies commensurate and coextensive with the national states of conquest. In territories like Nigeria, the national state therefore coexisted and functioned alongside several disparate societies with their own distinct morality complexes and normative givens.

Second, state and society in Africa were now operated on different principles of morality. Whereas the state and its extended colonial apparatuses were run on the principle of institutionalized amorality, action within re- stricted spheres of society (say, in an ethnic group) was governed by the principle of morality. Interaction among persons from different societal repre- sentations, such as different ethnic groups, would thus not be subject to moral principles, but rather to the principle of amorality. The dilemma promoted by the involvement of the same persons in morally defined activities in the societal sphere of kinship nexus and amoral activities in the civic public of state institutions poses one set of intractable problems in the analysis of African politics (see Ekeh 1975).

Beneath the colonial state level, in the underbrush of society, the new colonial environment tapped the resources of precolonial society by feeding on kinship codes of moral behavior, leading to their expansion into emergent ethnic groups in the colonial setting. In the precolonial period, there were no opportunities for such ethnic groups: They were social formations in the circumstances created by colonialism in which persons from different kinship entities interacted in urban and polyglot communities, but the ethnic groups that thus emerged were not integrated into a composite society. Furnivall's colonial Burma-based caricature (1948) of a market-oriented and morally impoverished "plural society" was not distant from the pattern of colonial interactions in Africa. Interactions were rich and plentiful, but relationships between persons from different ethnic groups were essentially amoral.

Colonialism led to the crystallization of ethnicity from another direction. Colonial rule involved minimum government and minimum state functions, especially outside the maintenance of law and order. In much of colonial Africa, social welfare for individuals was not part of state responsibility. Consequently, social welfare functions fell into the sphere of the only other

entity organized to undertake it: the upgraded kinship system, which fully absorbed this responsibility for the social welfare of the individual, alive or dead. The items involved in the ethnic social welfare catalogue under colonialism extended from such endeavors as the provision of education and health


(and educational and health institutions) to safeguard against harassment (even by the colonial law enforcement agencies) and assurance that the individual would be given proper burial and his family taken care of after his death. These functions of the kinship system and ethnic groups were particularly undertaken in the cities by "town" and "clan" associations formed from fragments of the kinship system that migrated to polyglot cities. In the colonial setting the individual could only rely on state services at his own peril. Third, colonialism indirectly contributed to the growth of ethnicity by encouraging "voluntary" Christian missions that sought and maintained good relationships with kinship entities. Thus, for instance, by translating the Bible and Christian catechism texts into African languages, the missionaries helped to crystallize the boundaries of the emergent ethnic groups (see Abernethy 1969). Finally, colonial rule did contribute to the expansion of ethnicity by organizing colonial administration along kinship lines. For ease of governance, colonial rulers, especially in British colonies, appointed "chiefs" where they already existed definitively; otherwise the rulers imposed new "warrant" chiefs on existing kinship entities (see Afigbo 1972; Suret-Canale 1964:71-91).

The impact of these developments on the ordinary individual in Africa counts a great deal towards a clear understanding of the colonial African state. Above all else, a major result of the way the colonial state developed was that the individual could only be indirectly related to the state. Membership of a kinship group-either in a substantial context of immediate clan networks in rural areas or in more rarified appearance of ethnicity in polyglot communities in the cities-became an integral meaning of citizenship for the individual in the colonial state. In this sense, then, the colonial state was an overgrowth spread across, and with ties to, a mosaic of kinship groups. The individual saw his duties to the colonial state as only part of his responsibilities to his kinship group. Thus, taxation was for the most part levied and collected on a kinship basis. In other words, the worth of the individual was calculated in the idiom of kinship membership.

The meaning of citizenship in the colonial state as the rights and duties of the individual collectively managed through kinship networks dominated politics at the stage of decolonization and was deepened by the tactics of colonial governors, who exploited this ideology of kinship by encouraging divisions along ethnic lines in the dying days of colonial rule. Postcolonial states thus inherited a definition of politics impregnated with a potent kinship ideology as part of the definition of statehood in independent Africa.

TRIBALISM AND KINSHIP IDEOLOGY IN POSTCOLONIAL AFRICA

The political turbulence in much of postcolonial Black Africa owes a great deal of its virulence to the confrontation between entrenched and rampant kinship ideology inherited from colonialism and the efforts of a fraction of the

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new rulers to destroy what they saw as a divisive instinct standing in the way of the evolution of a united and composite political organization in the fashion of the European state. In this respect, we must acknowledge the hopes and vision of a few pioneering African statesmen who thought it was possible to dislodge such robust kinship ideologies in their attempts at building virile kinship-free African states. Kwame Nkrumah, in Ghana, and Sekou Toure, in Guinea, in their various ways underestimated the strength of ethnic loyalties and blundered into antipluralist policies. Sekou Toure was firm in his denun- ciation of the forces of ethnicity. According to Aristide Zolberg (1966:45):

Sekou Toure stressed that the most important task of the state was "the definite reinforcement of the nation by means of the elimination of the sequels of the regional spirit ... How can the unity of the nation be forged if there remains in the political and electoral domain irrational elements to be exploited or which can influence a part of society?"

But, as Sekou Toure painfully discovered, the "regional spirit" of bonded

kinship was not easy to dislodge. The African state continued, even in Ghana and Guinea, to be plagued by the divisiveness of kinship loyalties implanted during the slave-trade era and emboldened during colonialism.

Unlike Ghana and Guinea, other postcolonial states very early settled to a different pattern of response to the problem of kinship loyalties. In Nigeria, for a prime example, the salience and potency of ethnicity, and its associated

kinship ideology, were fully recognized in the early 1960s as problems that had to be accepted into the definition of the Nigerian state. In Nigeria, Zaire, Cameroun, Kenya, and a host of other postcolonial states in Africa, no efforts were made-unlike the attempts in Ghana and Guinea-to destroy the principle of exercising one's ultimate loyalties to constituent ethnic groups; however, important attempts and compromises were made to contain their destruc- tive effects and domesticate their political ambitions. Perhaps the most articulate of such efforts is the construction of the doctrine of federal character in the 1979 Nigerian constitution, which designed an elaborate formula for the "consociational" apportionment of offices and other state resources on the basis of the ethnic composition of Nigeria (see Ekeh and Osaghae 1989). The

Nigerian doctrine of federal character is an affirmation and recognition of

ethnicity as an organizing principle, but it is also an attempt to blunt the divisiveness induced by the kinship ideology informing public affairs in

Nigeria's postcolonial history, which led to a fierce civil war in the late 1960s. The principle of federal character is consciously intended, in Nigeria, to limit the dangers inherent in the struggle to enhance sectional and ethnic opportunities through the control of state apparatuses.13

13 The framers of the 1979 Nigerian Constitution gave federal character a final cause definition as follows: "'Federal character' of Nigeria refers to the distinctive desire of the peoples of Nigeria to promote national unity, foster national loyalty and give every citizen of Nigeria a sense


Apart from such directed efforts at domesticating the problems arising from kinship ideology and kinship loyalties in Black Africa as through the deliber- ated constitutional device in the Nigerian experiment, an attempt has emerged to limit the dangers of this kinship ideology through societal control of the behaviors of those who act in modem multiethnic communities. It is man- ifested in the widespread use of two terms in modem Africa: tribalism and tribalists. Because tribalism is a sociological construction attacking kinship ideology, I shall term it a counterideology. Although this counterideology of tribalism is one of the most important sociological thoughts to emerge in postcolonial Africa, there is no statement of its meaning in the literature. Indeed, there is a sizeable confusion between this sociological notion of tribalism as a counterideology and as rejection of the tenets of ethnicity and kinship ideology, and the anthropological meaning of tribalism as a strong sense of identifying with one's ethnic and kinship groups in rural enclaves. This confusion is quite significant because outside Africa tribalism continues to be used in its anthropological sense, whereas inside Africa tribalism is widely used in its other meaning in both everyday interactions and in such serious circles as universities, parliament, official government documents, and in newspapers. It appears proper that the distinction between these two uses of tribalism should be outlined.

Two Contrasting Uses of Tribalism in Africa The anthropological meaning of tribalism is best captured from the vast literature and the early direction of the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute of British Central Africa, in which tribalism was understood as the attribute of tribes and of tribesmen who demonstrate loyalty and adherence to tribal ways of doing things. As enunciated by its second director (Gluckman 1945:1), the Institute "aim[ed] to analyze the organization of modem Central Africa and to show how selected urban and tribal communities live within it." The Institute's core attention turned on rural men and tribal folkways, and how their behaviors were transposed to new colonial urban concentrations. As Gluckman (1961:67) was to summarize it much later, "Perhaps out of the tradition of anthropology, we [in the Institute] have been interested largely in the problem of why tribalism

of belonging to the nation notwithstanding the diversities of ethnic origin, culture, language or religion which may exist and which it is their desire to nourish and harness to the enrichment of the Federal Republic of Nigeria" (Williams 1976:x). This condensed definition of federal character was distilled from three separate points of view as proper ways of achieving the supreme constitutional goal of the "promotion of national loyalty in a multi-ethnic society," which urged: "fair and equitable treatment for all the component states and ethnic groups in the country"; "fair and just treatment for all ethnic groups within the area of authority of [any] government" in Nigeria; and the avoidance of "the predominance in the Federal Government or any of its agencies of persons from some states, ethnic or other sectional groups to the exclusion of persons from other states, ethnic or other sectional groups, or the monopoly of the office of the President by persons from any state or ethnic groups" (Williams 1976:viii-ix).

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persists, both in tribal areas and in towns, in spite of the industrial revolution which has produced such great social changes." Accordingly, "detribalization," or the degree to which a townsman departs from his tribal ways, became a central construct of the anthropologists of the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute (see Wilson 1941-2).14

Several studies of tribalism in southern Africa were premised on the meaning of loyalty and adherence to traditional values and norms as a source of individual strength, with ambivalence on the possibility of "detribalization" or departure from tribalism. J. C. Mitchell's acclaimed The Kalela Dance (1956) and Epstein's Politics in an Urban African Community (1958) revolved around this meaning of tribalism. Many distinguished papers on southern Africa which carry "tribalism" in their titles imply approbation for the tribal folkways carried into new urban areas: thus, Gluckman (1960), Mayer (1961), Mitchell (1960), and Lee (1971).

Such an anthropological meaning of tribalism is dramatically different from its moder sociological uses in postcolonial Africa. In this latter context, tribalism refers to obnoxious modes of behavior in multiethnic circumstances that threaten and endanger normal coexistence among persons from different ethnic groups. As used by Africans, tribalism in postcolonial Africa refers to the abhorrence for the abuse of common opportunities and public goods (that is, those owned in common by various ethnic groups) through manifestation of undue preferences for persons of one's own ethnic grouping. Tribalism has also been used as a term of opprobrium to denote objectionable activities of individuals who threaten the integrity of the nation and yet favor its spe- cialized ethnic fragments. Thus, the government of the Republic of Somalia felt compelled to explain the basis of this meaning of tribalism in its book, War Against the Evils of Tribalism in Our Country (Somalia Democratic Republic 1983); and the government of Kenya thought it wise to sponsor a "public opinion poll on tribalism in Kenya" (Market Research Company 1961). Even an employee of the socialist government of Ghana's Information Service Department attempted to offer a Marxist explanation for the existence of tribalism among educated Ghanaians in terms of false consciousness and a misinformed class struggle (Asamoa 1982). In this meaning, tribalism and

14 Richard Brown (1973, 1979) has given symphatetic accounts of the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute and its first two directors, Godfrey Wilson and Max Gluckman. His defense of the Institute and its two pioneer directors was written against the background of what he saw as unfair attacks on colonial social anthropology (1973:173-74). In contrast to such criticisms, Brown (1973:174-75) believes that the case of Godfrey Wilson and the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute is "an interesting one since it illustrates the fundamental ambiguity which lay at the heart of the relationship between anthropology and colonial rule. Furthermore, the RLI was the first institute of its kind in the dependent empire and it served as a model in many respects for those that were later established after the second world war in east and west Africa and in the West Indies." Predictably, the name of the Institute was rapidly changed (to the Institute for African Studies, University of Zambia) in the postcolonial era.


tribalists are seen as evil forces in Africa, which governments, trade unions, student organizations, and newspapers feel compelled to fight.

This intellectually insurgent notion of tribalism in Africa does not necessarily reject traditional ways of doing things. Virtually everyone who pro- motes this counterideology respects tradition, but attacks the abuse of in- terethnic public goods by those privileged to use such goods, especially if they are also in a position to dispense them. Furthermore, this notion of tribalism rejects the principle of exclusivity inherent in kinship ideology as implanted into colonial statecraft. We can characterize the counterideology of tribalism in this sense as an emergent sociological form of decolonization deserving analysis.

The Sociological Contents of the Counterideology of Tribalism

The terms "ideology" and "counterideology," as used in this paper, refer to sociological constructions that have emerged in African history and society in response to the major consequences of slave trade and colonialism. What I have characterized as kinship ideology constitutes a body of ideas and practices that have enthroned kinship as a governing principle of private and public behaviors of individuals whose identity thus rests on their kinship associations. Because such kinship ideology defined the individual's relationships to the colonial state, the usual atrophy of kinship in the face of the increasing complexity of socioeconomic development evident in world history elsewhere has not occurred in Africa. On the contrary, kinship in various manifestations constitutes a major problem for the development of composite national societies and the functioning of national states. The societal invention of a different set of ideas that seek to limit the efficacy of this kinship ideology is what I have termed the counterideology of tribalism.

As a counterideology, tribalism is not an academic construct suggested or invented by any social science analyst. On the contrary, and to the consterna- tion of African scholars who would prefer to forgo the use of the term, tribalism emerged into wide use in postcolonial Africa as a term apparently borrowed from the vocabulary of social anthropology and then inverted into a despised meaning. Also in wide use is the associated term tribalist, that is, a person adjudged guilty of the practice of tribalism. Both terms have rich connotations in modern Africa, and their contents are suggestive of a tele- ological meaning of appropriate rules of coexistence in polyglot and multiethnic communities.

In this meaning, as counterideology, tribalism assumes that when persons from different ethnic groups live together in multiethnic communities, they have to agree to be bound by common rules of coexistence. It attacks behaviors and attitudes tending to be subversive of the prospects of good com- radeship and neighborliness in polyglot and multiethnic communities. In other words, whereas the counterideology of tribalism would accept certain behav-

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iors as inappropriate in multiethnic circumstances, it would not condemn such behaviors if enacted within given enclaves, away from multiethnic environ- ments.15 With respect to participation in the affairs of the state and in its agencies, the ethics of tribalism call for mandatory fairness in sharing out the benefits that accrue to citizens across constituent ethnic groups.

On the whole, the ethics of tribalism as counterideology prescribe what may be termed contrarinorms. They postulate a set of behaviors that ought to be avoided in order to permit harmonious multiethnic existence. That is to say, tribalism recognizes that although it is natural for individuals to be predisposed to enact behaviors that reflect their ethnic background and may well indicate their loyalties towards their ethnic groups, the actor ought to avoid such behaviors and even suppress them in the new circumstances of multiethnic coexistence. These rules emphasize behaviors that ought not be enacted, not those that ought to be enacted.

An important difference between norms and contrarinorms that will help us to understand the nature of tribalism as counterideology may be illustrated with respect to the rewards and sanctions for compliance with, or breach of, norms and contrarinorms. Compliance with norms carry societal approval and possible rewards; their breach carries manifest sanctions, possibly legislated punishment. On the other hand, compliance with contrarinorms carry no rewards, even in terms of approval, but their breach clearly carries sanctions. "Thou shalt honour thy father and thy mother" is a normative rule. Its observance is acknowledged and sometimes rewarded with societal approval; its breach is certainly disapproved and perhaps punished. "Thou shalt not kill" is a contrarinormative rule: Its observance is not rewarded; its breach is punished. This distinction owes something to the differences in the nature of normative rules and of contrarinorms: Norms are statements of rules of normal behavior, whereas contrarinorms state rules that control abnormal behavior. Now, tribalism as a counterideology is a contrarinorm forbidding certain types of offensive behaviors in multiethnic circumstances in Africa and for which postcolonial African societies impose sanctions of disapproval against certain classes of actors.

Tribalists

What endows the notion of tribalism as a counterideology with so much sociological content is the fact that postcolonial African communities have

15 A common example in everyday interactions in Nigeria will help to clarify this point. If two persons, A and B, were holding a conversation in their common ethnic language and a third person, C, from a different ethnic group came upon their conversation, it is expected that A and B would terminate conversation in their ethnic language and switch to a common language, say English. If A and B failed to do that, the third person, C, would be right to label them tribalists. What is probably distinctive here is the use of the label "tribalists" in a manner designed to put pressure on actors to conform to new modes of behavior in multiethnic circumstances.


tagged certain elites in society as those who ought to uphold the new ethics of coexistence in multiethnic societies while sparing other actors at lower levels of society from the responsibility of upholding such ethics. Perhaps a working example from Nigeria will help to establish my point of definition of tribalists. If the head (that is, chairperson in American parlance) of a department in a Nigerian University were to hire only persons from his own ethnic group, he would be labelled a tribalist by his colleagues and others in the university. Such a label would seriously lower such a professor's esteem and may well jeopardize his prospects for any other major appointments. Similar charges of tribalism would also be made against other high-status persons who are national office holders in the public realm, were they to restrict the benefits flowing from their offices to their ethnic groups. On the other hand, if a lower- status person, say a foreman, were given the opportunity to hire persons in the university, his first inclination would be to bring near him as many people as possible from his own ethnic group. He would not, however, be called a tribalist in the way that the head of the department would be so labeled. Nigerians are more likely to laugh off such behavior as expected anyway.

Inside this intriguing distinction is the central character of tribalism as counterideology. In postcolonial Africa, society seems to allow a distinction between low-ranking individuals who may live within the norms of their ethnic groups and those high-ranking members of society, especially if they operate at the national level, who are required to uphold and promote supra- ethnic rules of coexistence in the multiethnic communities and states of Af- rica. It is in this sense that tribesmen cannot be tribalists, and tribalists cannot be tribesmen. Tribesmen, were they to exist, would live their entire existence wrapped up in tribal norms. Tribalists are those, on the other hand, who are deemed to have violated supra-ethnic rules of existence that are their responsibility to promote and uphold.

CONCLUSIONS: TOWARD THE POLITICAL SOCIOLOGY OF AFRICA

The outline of the history of the development of state and society in Europe towers over African studies like a colossus, and its shadows direct the path of African political sociology. The directions given by European models of state and society usually appear in the form of "the tyranny of borrowed paradigms" that, as Oyovbaire (1983) has proclaimed, tend to distort the academic representation of the reality of social existence in Africa (see Sklar 1985:22). In the history of Europe, kinship disappeared quite early (particularly in England) from serious interaction with the state, thus leaving its investigation to reconstruction and inference (for example, Phillpotts 1913; Murray 1983; Maranda 1974). For this reason, apparently, it has been tempting to liken the development of the relationships between the state and kinship in Africa to the European historical pattern, with the expectation that kinship will disappear

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from the public realm in Africa. On the contrary, the burden of this paper is that, in the area of the relationship between kinship and the state, the African experience offers a sharp contrast to the history of Europe.

In Europe, the Hobbesian problem of order was resolved for the individual through the successful transfer of his relations of reciprocal ties of citizenship (which guaranteed his protection from insecurity) from kinship nexus to feudal and protostate institutions. Thus, Marc Bloch (1940:142) credits the rise of feudalism to the weakening of kinship: To the individual, threatened by the numerous dangers bred by an atmosphere of violence, the kinship group did not seem to offer adequate protection. ... In the form in which it then existed, it was too vague and too variable in its outlines, too deeply undermined by the duality of descent by male and female lines .... The tie of kinship was one of the essential elements of feudal society; its relative weakness explains why there was feudalism at all.

Or, as he puts it elsewhere, "Although the obligations arising from blood- relationship played a very active part in [feudal society], it did not rely on

kinship alone. More precisely, feudal ties were developed when those of

kinship proved inadequate" (Bloch 1940:443). Similarly, Maine (1888:155- 6) sees the emergence of feudalism in the inability of kinship groups to cope with the crisis of violence in Western Europe: "The general disorder of the world had much to do with the growth of the new [feudal] institutions . . . a little community compactly united under a feudal lord was greatly stronger for defence or attack than any body of kinsmen or co-villagers."

In Europe, the weakness of kinship enabled the growth of feudal and

protostate institutions that eventually blossomed into moder kinship-free statehood. However, in preparing ourselves for analysing this subject in Af- rican political sociology, we may entertain this counterfactual question: What would have happened in Western Europe if there had been no viable institutions that could have taken over the political functions of kinship of protecting the individual from widespread insecurity? We may imagine that kinship, in reaction to such generalized violence and in the absence of any viable alter- natives, would have been strengthened. This appears in fact to have happened in some sections of Europe: "On this point history is decisive, for the only regions in which powerful agnatic groups survived-German lands on the shores of the North Sea, Celtic districts of the British Isles-knew nothing of

vassalage, the fief and the manor" (Bloch 1940:142). This is quite close to what has occurred in much of Africa.

In the African experience, the Hobbesian problem of order has not been solved for the individual by some embracing state Leviathan nor by any surrogate feudal order of government. It has been alleviated through an under-

growth and suffusion of kinship bonds. The disorder in several portions of Africa's history emanated from the state. When it has not, the state has

generally proved inefficient in its control. In sharp contrast, across the cen-


turies kinship has consistently provided the individual with some security within its limits of efficacy. Clearly, the lot of the individual has thus been worse than that of Europeans, although better than that of the native Aus- tralian or native American Indian. In general terms of world history, the centuries between the fifteenth and nineteenth bore traumatic experiences for the native cultures of Australasia, the Americas, and Africa. If there is judg- ment that in relative terms the African as an individual has withstood the turmoil occasioned by the slave trade and imperialism rather well, then this survival is owed more to the strength of kinship than to any state organization.

States of various grades did operate during the era of the slave trade; and European imperialism did lead to the creation of Western-type states in Africa, but in general the individual, with rare exceptions, could not entrust his safety and security to the state. Indeed, the distrust of the state and its institutions by the individual has been the norm rather than the exception in the history of Africa. In many instances, the individual has needed his kinship ties to save him from harrassment by the state and its agencies. This longstanding contrast between the trustworthiness of kinship ties and distrust of state institutions is related to what Cocquery-Vidrovitch (1978:283) sees as a

juxtaposition of two economic systems impervious to one another, at the village and state levels . . . [and] a dichotomy which has struck all African historians: the invar- iance of the basic self-sustaining communities by contrast with the instability at the socio-political level (italics in original).

Thus, in Africa, the absence of strong and reliable state institutions has led to the strengthening of kinship ties. The political sociology of Africa is distinct in this respect because, rather than disappearing, kinship has had to be integrated into the existence of the modern African state. This uniqueness translates very boldly into the everyday language of politics and society in Africa. However, the semantic exploitation of this prominence of kinship has rarely been captured in moder African studies. In effect, the subtleties of nuanced kinship terminology in modern everyday life and language frequently evade an over-determined and over-Europeanized "Africanist" scholarship.

Indeed, modern African studies in the United States and Europe tend to be rather distant from Africans. Much of it is essentially what it was in the heyday of colonial social anthropology: the interpretation of Africans and their behaviors to non-Africans outside Africa. As such the insider views within Africa are divorced from the outsider definitions of relevance by Af- ricanists. But the academic representation of the African insider views is nowadays besieged with adversities and increasingly, unlike, for example, the Ibadan School of History in the 1950s and 1960s, the research agenda in Africa ignores the insider view in order to be published outside Africa- leading to the adoption of concepts and terminology that hardly fit moder

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African realities. This trend is deeply troubling to the political sociology of Africa, which leaves unexamined such intellectually explosive kinship-based constructs as tribalism.

Another problem of African political sociology has been the segmentation of its concerns into exclusive periods, with major emphasis on the postcolonial state. There is important need for broadening the inquiries concerning the sources of the weaknesses of the African state. Any such reorientation would benefit by avoiding the pitfalls of what I have called elsewhere "the fallacy of dependency determinism."16 It compels the determination of relevance in African studies from the convenience of the "Africanist" scholar and from the point of view of what is fashionable in Western social science. Some balance may be struck by shifting the boundaries of the political sociology of Africa into long-range inquiries into the causes and consequences of the poverty of the African state system. Such efforts will lead, in the view of this paper, to a fuller statement on the inverse relationship between the abundance of kinship and the poverty of state institutions in Africa's history.

16 See Ekeh (1986:23-24): "the fallacy of dependency determination is manifest and widespread in African scholarship in various ideological hues. When a paradigm is prominent in the United States and Europe, or Latin America, usually because it addresses a pressing problem in the society of its invention, it spreads rapidly to African scholarship, even if the problem that gives rise to such a paradigm is of little importance to Africa. Conversely, when a prominent paradigm in the social sciences in the West goes into decline, usually because it is no longer able to cope with new realities, it also quickly suffers a relapse in Africa, even if the problems such a paradigm is designed to solve are still pressing in Africa."

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