Word: africa
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Tribal lines, not national boundaries, make up the true map of Black Africa. The Congo's latent disorder stems more than anything else from its stubborn attempt to throw a skein of nationhood over no fewer than 200 tribes. Even tiny Dahomey numbers more than a dozen tribes within its borders. Worse for national unity, tribalism is growing almost everywhere as a cushion against the shocks of transition into the 20th century. In Africa's multiplying ghettos, tribal "unions" or associations flourish as a kind of foreign embassy in the city for dazed tribesmen from the country. When things...
Says Ivory Coast President Felix Houphouet-Boieny: "Tribalism is the scourge of Africa." Unless tribalism goes, adds Kenya's Minister of Economic Planning Tom Mboya, "much of what we have achieved could be lost overnight." Yet no African leader would stamp out tribalism overnight, even if he could. For safety's sake, the leaders themselves pack their governments with fellow tribesmen. Houphouet-Boigny keeps Baule kinsmen in key posts. In his heyday, Ghana's deposed Kwame Nkrumah heavily favored aides from his Nzima tribe. Mboya, for all his brilliance, may never reach top power in Kenya because he belongs...
...Among Africa's first known tribal groups were the artistically talented Bushmen, who scratched out their lively rock drawings of hunters and wild animals in the Stone Age. Some 7,000 years ago, the Hamites came across the Suez, bringing a rudimentary knowledge of agriculture, and soon they intermarried with Bushmen and early Negroes to produce new races. Over the continent's vast distance, these groups scattered into the polyglot tribes that fractionalize Africa today. Each went its own way. Some tribes raised empires based on hereditary rulers. In other tribal cultures, outstanding men or women and sometimes even children...
Perhaps nothing is more poignant in Africa today than the mental and spiritual effects of detribalization, a process that began when white missionaries undercut the tribal status system by proselytizing its lowliest members, such as women, children and assorted outcasts. As elders lost prestige, the young flocked to cities; severed from tribal morals yet longing for them, some sank into alcoholism, prostitution and petty crime in order to attain Western luxuries. Most were victims of "alienation"?also a Western luxury of sorts...
...countless other ways, tribalism has impeded African progress. Polygyny is still widely practiced throughout tribal Africa, as is the costly custom of buying a bride, which may mortgage a young man's income to his father-in-law for nearly his lifetime. And the bride price is going up with the times: every year a girl spends in school increases her value to otherwise detribalized young urban men eager for educated wives...