Word: tribalized
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...Captain Marien Ngouabi, a popular paratroop leader whom the President suspected of being in league with the extreme left. Freed quickly by his own troops, Ngouabi-ambitious and opportunist perhaps, but not a Maoist-threw the President out. Then he discovered that he and his fellow officers, divided by tribal jealousies, could not agree on who should take over. The coup makers, hailing from tribes in the north and the west, quickly came to realize that the only man with any control over the powerful Bakongo tribe of the south (who make up 53% of the population...
...other war," he says, "they never solve anything, it never does any good." The war's origin is simple, he feels: "the Ibos were right to secede. They're smart, the smartest in Africa, they have all the doctors and lawyers." Though the origin of the war is tribal, its continuation may be due to intervention, he says, noting that "there's a lot of oil under Biafra," and that the oil might have something to do with English support for the Nigerians, and the French money and mercenaries aiding Biafra...
...course, serious students of African politics do not find this callous concealment of the truth surprising. They know that the majority of the Biafran leaders currently parading the world as tribal heroes with synthetic slogans of autochthonous virtues are the same politicians who, in concert with other members of the old Nigerian political class, ruthlessly exploited the Nigerian masses without regard to ethnicity only a few years ago. These tribal patriarchs of today were the nationally convicted rogues of yesterday. When the Nigerian masses were revolting against their exploitation in pre-coup Nigeria, the foreign minister, an Ibo, was busy...
These men cheated the Nigerian masses before in the name of free enterprise and unregulated accumulation of private wealth. Today, as they play the cocktail circuit at the seats of political reaction in Portugal, Spain and South Africa, they are once again concealing their particularistic class interests behind the tribal mask. It is not they who are dying; it is not they who are starving; it is their captive Biafran subjects...
Only pseudo liberals and enemies of Africa can seriously advocate organized trips into Biafra with the avowed purpose of forcing American intervention in favour of secession. For quite apart from the risk of creating another Vietnam, such action can only condemn Africa to permanent underdevelopment. An Africa based on tribal units has no chance. Only our enemies can knowingly encourage African fragmentation while they themselves enjoy the fruits of unity in their own countries. Omafume Onoge Teaching Fellow Social Relations Dept...