Word: africanness
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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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...
...variety is endless. An African's language may be spoken by a million other people or by only a few thousand. A man may believe that work is degrading?or the proof of manhood. He may have been taught that eating people is wrong; then again, he may relish them. He may believe in the lofty concept of one god who lives on a nearby mountain; or he may believe there is a god in every tree in the forest...
...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...
...industry, it is not only a matter of getting people to work whose tribal ethics disdain labor or money. "Africanized" companies have other personnel problems. Where once an African hand would take orders from a white, he now loathes doing so from a black foreman of another tribe. Too-youthful management also goes down hard with tribesmen accustomed to the rule of the senior elder...
With few exceptions, multi-party forms of democracy left behind by the departing colonial powers have vanished from Africa. Reason: the tribal tradition of decision by consensus leaves no room for a "loyal opposition." To the African mind, a political group is either for the government or against it, and if the latter, it has no business existing. More than half of the 30 independent Black African nations are still ruled by the same men who took over in the first days of freedom. While this reflects a stability of sorts, only one African leader has been voted...