Word: tribalized
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...trumpets sound and tin cans tied to the endless concentric coils of barbed wire rattle. By day life goes on. In the French seminary, 50 sandal-clad Vietnamese and French priests keep to their prayer schedules. Sixteen American Protestant scholars continue compiling alphabets and grammars for some 48 Montagnard tribal languages...
That hallowed tribal custom, the bride price, is coming under fire. Africa's young bachelors, caught between higher education and even higher inflation, are growing increasingly unhappy at the ancient laws that force the prospective groom to buy his bride from her parents. In Kenya, the dowry is often the equivalent of five years of the groom's expectable income, usually payable in postmarital installments of livestock, bicycles and money. By the time the bartering is over and the wedding rolls around, only his in-laws have much cause for celebration: rather than losing a daughter, they...
Matter of Value. Few educated Africans are willing to destroy the custom entirely, for despite its iniquities, it is the only form of marriage insurance in many African societies. Tribal laws dictate that if a marriage breaks up because of the wife's misdeeds, her husband gets his money back; if the fault is his, however, he can lose both bride and dowry. "The bride price amounts to peace of mind," says American-educated Grace Wagema, head of Kenya's Community Development Services. "Until we have a marriage law like the Europeans, it will continue...
...sensible as alphabet soup: no fewer than 14 machine-controlled parties, each known popularly by its two-or three-letter initials, provide more than enough confusion for any ordinary citizen. Effective action in Congress is chronically hobbled by interparty bickering and mercurial coalitions. "Our politics have not surpassed tribal primitivism," admits José Eduardo Kelly, a founder of U.D.N. (National Democratic Union), one of the parties in President Humberto Castello Branco's current coalition...
Dingaka may mark a trend of sorts. Most made-in-Africa melodramas use throbbing tom-toms and tribal dances merely as an exotic backdrop for the doings of great white hunters, drunken missionaries, or dissatisfied colonial wives. In Dingaka, South African Writer-Director Jamie Uys does not stint on music and dance, which are an absorbing show in themselves. But the details of native life always remain relevant to this earnest, primitive drama about a proud tribesman (Ken Gampu) whose thirst for vengeance hurls him against the apparatus of white justice in Johannesburg...