Word: tribalized
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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...
...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...
...politics, civil servants are plagued by tribal kinsmen who expect to be put on the dole if not put up in the city man's home. Ministers and senior civil servants can usually afford a separate wing for the "tribal family." Youthful civil servants cannot, and hence often ask to be sent to work in a village as far from their own as possible. To help relieve the burden, Niger's President Hamani Diori has declared war against "family parasitism...
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...