On “tribes” vs. “nations”

… Words become very important in the power relations between individuals and groups, in the exercise of law and democratic ideals. They help define the other: a member of a group with other religious, racial, gender, or biological affiliations.

A good example is the use of the five-letter English word tribe. The Western media’s analysis of events in Africa reveals the word as the main obstacle in the way of a meaningful illumination of dynamics in modern Africa. Tribe — with its clearly pejorative connotation of the primitive and the premodern — is contrasted with nation, which connotes a more positive sense of arrival at the modern. Every African community is a tribe, and every African a tribesman. We can see the absurdity of the current usages, where thirty million Yorubas are referred to as a tribe, but four million Danes as a nation. A group of 250,000 Icelanders constitutes a nation, while 10 million Ibos make up a tribe. And yet, what’s commonly described as a tribe, when looked at through objective lenses, fulfills all the criteria of shared history, geography, economic life, language, and culture that are used to define a nation. These critical attributes are clearly social and historical, not biological.

So says Kenyan writer, academic, and activist Ngugi wa Thiong’o in his Transition Magazine essay, The Myth of Tribe in African Politics. My own minor quibble: he uses Western rather than the less-popular, but in, my opinion, more accurate Northern (is South America not, geographically-speaking, ‘the west’?). But his essay drops all kinds of knowledge on language, the concomitant rise of racism and colonialism, and our post-colonial perceptions of Africa that are only slightly more evolved.