Word: tribalized
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...contrast, Kenya's neighbors, Zambia, Malawi and Tanzania, have governed themselves better than anyone expected. One paradoxical reason is the very profusion of East African tribes; no one tribe dominates the rest. Moreover, it is one of Africa's many ironies that tribalism can be used to create national unity as well as shred it. In Zambia last year, for example, the country's angry young university graduates pressured older politicians to step aside, and typically inflated assorted tribal claims to clothe their ambitions. Seizing the tribal issues, President Kenneth Kaunda created a unifying nationalist ideology?a supratribal humanism based...
What Africa needs is precisely such transmutations of tribal loyalties to the larger loyalties of nationhood. The task is formidable, and not only because of the weight of tradition. In many ways, as M.I.T. Professor Harold Isaacs points out, "Africa is the most inhospitable of the major continents to human existence." For all the image of a banana-tree civilization, with food for the reaching, most Africans are permanently undernourished and physically below par or diseased. Life expectancy is barely 40 years at best. Illiteracy is the highest in the world...
Prideful Advertisements. It had not always been so. When the British arrived in Nigeria, the Ibos were among the most primitive people they encountered, scratching out their lives on yam patches and occasionally supplementing their low-protein diet with human flesh. But within their backward tribal culture lay unique seeds for Western-style self-improvement. Unlike many other tribes, they had no autocratic village chiefs. Instead, they were ruled by open councils of what sociologists call high achievers?successful yam farmers...
Jungle Drumbeat. During a two-week orgy of systematic murder that fall, when tens of thousands of their people were killed and hundreds of thousands maimed, the Ibo tribal elders of the East lost all hope of reconciliation within the Nigerian union. Fearing for the very survival of their tribe, they solemnly invoked the ancient power of Ibo Kwennu, the rallying cry of Ibo brotherhood. From family heads and village elders, there went out millions of messages to virtually every Ibo still living outside the East, each with a single, peremptory instruction: Come home. And from every corner of Nigeria...
...special dilemma. If Biafra succeeds in its secession, a Nigerian federation will be doomed. On the other hand, if the Ibos are decimated and permanently embittered, the federation may be doomed in another way. Nigeria's rulers are talking unity, while at the same time conducting a form of tribal warfare that may make unity impossible at best and unnecessary at worst. By granting Ojukwu his demand for airborne relief, the Nigerians would show minimal concern for 8 million people who remain, by their own definition, Nigerian citizens...