Word: tribalization
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Before the advent of colonialism, the Africans had lived in tribal groups. The social structure was purely communalistic. The tribal headman or chief established the legitimacy of his authority either by birth or by his prowess in battle. All the other paid their loyalty to him. The chief in turn was answerable to a council of elders. Every individual was a part of the decision-making body. And a chief could easily be deposed either by a decision of the majority or by the elders, if they found him tyrannical--an event that is almost impossible in present day Africa...
...Wampanoag Indians in Mashpee, on Cape Cod, are now in court seeking to regain some of the land they lost to the white man centuries ago. Another group of Wampanoags on Cape Cod obtained some tribal land by concession from their town's government, and the Passamaquodies along with the Penobscot tribe are suing Maine for nearly half the state...
...declares Abdullah! Abdi, a Somali military commander in the ugly little war that is being fought today in the Ogaden desert region of eastern Ethiopia. After years of sporadic guerrilla activity, the forces of the Western Somali Liberation Front (W.S.L.F.)-backed by their tribal cousins in the Somali Democratic Republic to the east-have been fighting fiercely since July to wrest the Ogaden from Ethiopia, which has controlled it off and on for 400 years...
...notes Forbath, the Congo has settled into something resembling stability. A confederation of tribes has been loosely tied into the nation of Zaire. The country, Forbath writes, is becoming un recognizable. "The tribal villages are also by and large gone . . . displaced by dreary modern mining towns" where tribes men wear plastic hard hats and carry lunch buckets, and "fires can be seen burning everywhere, burning through the grass, blackening the earth, destroying the land." But the river remains unchanged...
Adler is Jewish, and a Jew in this rural, tribal and fiercely Christian heartland is a wanderer indeed. There were Jews in Savannah well before the turn of the 19th century - George Washington's letter of good wishes to the city's Jewish congregation dated 1789 is the book's epi- graph - but most of those Adler meets feel that they remain in Georgia on the most precarious kind of sufferance. Their prudent rabbi has eliminated Hebrew from most of the ritual, and their new temple, Adler notes wryly, lacks only a cross to make it indistinguishable...