Word: tribalized
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...century ago, missionaries had hardly begun their work. Spiritual power lay in rites performed to propitiate thousands of tribal gods. Tribal religion is still strong, but it is gradually losing ground. In the past 25 years Africa has thrown off colonial rule, sometimes replacing it with cruelly oppressive independent governments. It is also the historic battleground between Islam and Christianity, the world's two most powerful monotheistic faiths...
...explanation, Tutu and others cite various factors, secular and spiritual. Tribal religion lost power as Africans began to cross tribal lines. Islam might have filled this void, but the much anticipated Muslim surge, funded by new Arab oil wealth, has yet to materialize in black Africa. More important, most experts agree, is the record of the Christian missionaries. According to one theory, the past stereotype that missionaries were deeply disliked and distrusted stemmed from colonists, not from Africans. Today missionaries are sometimes seized upon as political scapegoats and expelled by new nationalist leaders. But Africans are still surprised and touched...
...Tribal councils are upset by passages referring to sexual practices, including homosexuality, oral sex as part of the marriage ceremony, the sodomizing of war prisoners and a brief mention of a woman who delivered a child and then ate some of the afterbirth. For the straitlaced Sioux, these references are a bit much. "The Lakota, next to the Cheyenne, were one of the most sexually restrained native societies that have been documented," says Sioux Anthropologist Bea Medicine. Adds JoAllyn Archambault, a Lakota Sioux studying for her Ph.D. in anthropology at Berkeley: "No one's objecting to what did happen...
...serving as Minister of Home Affairs and Police, is clearly unhappy over the shabby treatment his party has received since its electoral defeat. Only three of 24 Cabinet posts and one of 20 available Senate seats were given to Nkomo men. Party rivalries are further exacerbated by the traditional tribal enmity between Nkomo's Ndebele and Mugabe's Shona supporters. Says Willie Musarurwa, Nkomo's longtime press spokesman: "What the Prime Minister must do is make our people feel that they belong. People who have played a very strong role are being left out. The most important...
...vice president, made a degree of headway in reforming the top leadership after he assumed the presidency in 1971. Alarmed by an outbreak of rioting last year over a government proposal to raise the price of rice as a spur to production, he supported a constitutional amendment giving most tribal Liberians the right to vote for the first time. But this reform came too late to assuage a growing civilian opposition to his rule as well as deepening resentment in his own armed forces. In the end, it was a band of country people in the enlisted ranks...