The impacts of ethnocentrism on politics in Africa

Political sociology has stressed the influence of collective belonging, or collective identity as the case may be, on political behaviour. There is a well-known saying that people act politically as they are socially. In Africa, especially, different elements constitute the primary points of political mobilisation: tribe, race, class, religion, and ideology.

These harness gathering of individuals, enabling them to aggregate and present social demands on the state. Similar to the ways in which social groups have become subject to explicit ideological contention, collective belonging is present and carries various political meanings. In this essay, we argue that collective belonging is a class determinant and an instrument of political behaviour in Africa`s political sociology. Group belonging, therefore, deepens and influences the language of those at the grassroots and the elite in politics.

Literature review on collective belonging and politics in Africa Donald L. Horowitz considers the implementation of democracy to be much more difficult in Africa`s divided societies. In his article “Democracy in Divided Societies” (1993), he argues that democracy is about inclusion and exclusion, about access to power, about the privileges that go with inclusion and the penalties that accompany exclusion. In divided societies, ethnic identity provides clear lines to determine who will be included and who will be excluded. Since such lines appear unalterable, Horowitz concludes that being in and being out may quickly come to look permanent.

In “Moral Ethnicity and Political Tribalism” (1994), John Lonsdale argues that the process of state intervention was manifested in colonial state leaders’ conscious efforts to utilise identity imagery to temper Africans’ mobility and fueling tribalism by consigning people to particular regional or specific identities. This process was intensified both before and after independence through the manipulative politics of instrumentalist political leaders.

The resultant zero-sum competition that ensued generated confrontational political tribalism. In “The Moral Economy of Mau Mau: Wealth, Poverty, and Civic Virtue in Kikuyu Political Thought” (1992), Lonsdale further describes how colonial and postcolonial African states manipulated the African social order, consciously compartmentalising Africans into ever more narrow ethnic and regional containers while giving succor to instrumentalist leaders. As a result, African states constructed idealised accounts of identity that were embraced by regional political manipulators and state decision makers.

Donald Rothchild has explored efforts to manage ethnic conflict in Africa in an unusually sophisticated analysis that takes into account a situtionally changing complex of colonial historical experiences; unequal resource allocation; and the attitudes of group members, regional leaders and elites. This is the lead argument of his book Managing Ethnic Conflict in Africa: Pressures and Incentives for Cooperation (1997).

Several Cameroonian scholars have equally discussed the linkages between group identity and political behaviour. Without being exhaustive, let’s mention Roger Gabriel Nlep’s “electoral village” and “equilateral triangle” theories, Yvette D. Monga “Au Village! » Space, culture and politics in Cameroon (Cahier d`études Africaines, 2000), Francis Nyamnjoh/Michael Rowland, Elite associations and the politics of belonging in Cameroon (Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, 1998) and Nyamnjoh, Africa’s Media, Democracy and the Politics of Belonging (Zed Books, 2005).

In a case study of Cameroon’s major opposition party, Milton Krieger argues that “the simultaneous pursuit of village interest in the city and retreat of urban people to the village, does not just mentally but specially, burdened political landscape by 2000 with fierce, enervating grassroots contests.” Put differently, he pursues, “what had become impasse in national politics a few years took on more menacing local aspects, as a more inclusive civic vision of the polity lost ground to … “le village electoral” where a more circumscribed politics emerged.” (Cameroon`s Social Democratic Front: Its history & prospects as an opposition party, 1990 – 2011).

Hegemony - social exclusions and stratifications

African societies invest identity with sacred significance and base other interpersonal relationships, including community and political obligations, on its model. Collective identity is both an influential site ideological education and a vector for the intergenerational transmission of political thoughts.

It serves as a locus for developing a notion of trust, electoral base, and political behaviour. In other words, collective identity is a microcosm of the desired political order. Where parties break along identity lines and elections are divisive.

Where armed forces are ethnically fragmented, military coups, ostensibly to quell disorder or to end corruption, may intervene to secure the power of some groups at the expense of the national interest. In such circumstances, whole systems of economic relations can crystallise on opportunities afforded and disabilities imposed by government policy on particular identity groups. (R. Fegley, “Minority Oppression in Equatorial Guinea” in Ashworth, G. (ed.). World Minorities, 1978).

In Ethnic Groups in Conflicts (1985), D. L. Horowitz relies on a situational analysis to explain how colonial-era ethnic and social stratification led to uni-ethnic regional political activity after independence. The Duke scholar explains further that in "unranked ethnic systems," in which ethnic groups were treated unequally, the worst-treated groups constituted "incipient whole societies" that eventually aimed for autononomy or secession from the state. The emergence of subnationalism reflected a historical situation in which states imposed unranked ethnic systems, and excluded groups who lay outside the mainstream of state power and aspired to full-scale autonomy or secession in the postcolonial period.

Applying this analytical tool to African politics, Horowitz gives an overly schematic analysis of the political situation:

Togo and Congo both have northern regimes (based, respectively, on the Kabrai and the Mbochi) that came to power after military coups reversed the ethnic results of elections. Neither regime has had a special desire to accommodate a democratic process it identified with its southern (Ewe or Lari) opponents. Consequently, both took steps to disrupt the process… Kenya, with its Kalendjin-dominated minority government, finally succumbed to Western pressure and conducted a multiparty election.

But the incumbent president, Daniel Arap Moi, was able to use a combination of intimidation, violence and ethnic divisions among the opposition to win both the presidency and the parliamentary majority on a plurality of votes, mainly from his own group and several other small ethnic groups. The result is a regime that continues to exclude the two largest groups, Kikuyu and Luo.

Likewise, Cameroon’s President Paul Biya, presiding over a government supported mainly by Beti and Bulu and opposed by all the rest, benefited from an opposition divide along ethnic lines and an election boycott by the major party…

In a dubiously conducted election in Ghana, the military ruler, Jerry Rawlings, won the presidency, supported by 93 percent of the vote in his own Ewe-dominated area, but polling less than one-third in Ashanti, thus reviving an earlier polarization (Democracy in Divided Societies, 1993:21-22).

When Francisco Macías Nguema began the reign of terror that resulted in the death of 50 000 people and in the forced displacement of one-third (150 000) of the Central African Republic’s population, the violence, like that of Idi Amin Dada (Uganda) and Jean Bedel Bokassa (Central African Republic), was directed by a militia drawn from his own ethnic group, and the victims were ethnically identified.

Again, Somalia’s Siad Barre invaded Ethiopia in part to gain the support of ethnic Somalis living near Somalia’s border with Ethiopia. (Steven David, “Why the Third World Still Matters” International Security, 1992-1993).

In Africa, group belonging provides political representation for class and other social constituents. Political parties generally maintain their institutional and ideological ties to specific identity groups, and most of them depend on the vote or ideological support of their clientele groups to provide a stable base of electoral support. One of the important patterns that emerged recently in African politics is the existence of ethnic voting blocks, and the widespread monolithic regional support for a given candidate. Africans indeed vote in line with their sociological affiliations.

Likewise, governance is carried out along ethnic lines which, according to Horowitz, means the inclusion of the ethnic “winners” of elections and the exclusion of all other groups (the “loosers”) - ought to require an extraordinary mechanism to function. As a result, most radical opposition leaders consist of tribal representatives who are bitter about their exclusion from power.

Most social groups have their own brokers (representatives) within state institutions. Ethnic quotas are exercised in bureaucratic and political appointments and the failure to include leading members of each ethnic group is likely to provoke a social decay and political challenge to the regime from non-represented groups. Generally, the elite class knows that it would have to pay a political price if any group perceived itself to have been left out of these social calculations (Thomson, A. An Introduction to African Politics, 2001). Several countries, among which Cameroon and South Africa, have adopted an official policy of ethnic quotas, the advantages of which are still unclear. It is arguable whether the country maximises utility through a policy of regional equilibrium. In economic terms, competition is driven out of the labour markets; the state ceases to be a profit-maximising agent; the population is worse off in so far as in the provision of labour and investment opportunities, excellence and merit have no room at all.

There is a great deal of accuracy to the observation that collective identities are constructed in part by an internal architecture of rivalries within political collectivities. The process of constructing identities suggests that they are formed by the wider political processes and are inseparable from them. Collective identities are not simply the creators of the political process; the identities so developed serve as agents of African politics, however. Collective identity can empower peoples, widening the horizons of individuals as participants in a larger enterprise and providing them with a distinct political boundary between themselves and others.

The emphasis upon collective claims to the national cake – state resources – political participation, and security makes a sociological interaction so appropriate to the study of the many political identities in Africa. People join political organisations not only because they support their ideology or their electoral plans, but also because that specific political organisation can advance their collective interests and aid them safeguard their cultural and anthropological advantages.

As more collective identity groups have sprung up on African politics, individuals have tended to attach themselves to a number of organisations simultaneously. Group frameworks are therefore at the core of African political fabric: although some social action may be conducted by classes or identity writ large, the reality of social organisation consists of participation in smaller groupings limited in membership and/or geographical scope. African countries seem to have adopted an attitude of masochistic complacency toward authoritarianism and patrimonialism (D.E. Apter and C.G. Rosberg C. G., Political Development and the New Realism in Sub-Saharan Africa, 1994). In short, Africa refuses to develop (A. Kabou, A., Et Si l’Afrique Refusait le Développement?, 1991).

Negative impacts on democratic consciousness

Could it be said that the abuse of group identity in politics has been an obstacle to Africa’s political and economic development?

As already mentioned, identities have historically been significant in the African political process, both under colonial and post-colonial rules. Group identity became a source of conflict during the colonisation period and the debate over the character of precolonial identities is directly linked to the question of ethnic creationism by colonial states. (J. B. Forrest, Subnationalism in Africa Ethnicity, Alliances and Politics, 2004).

Therefore, the differential impact of colonialism set the context of educational, economic and political imbalances which later became significant in the manipulation of identity consciousness to effectively divide and rule, in the politics of decolonisation and in the field of competitive politics. (A. Jega, Identity Transformation and Identity Politics Under Structural Adjustment in Nigeria, 2000).

Group identity became relevant, contradicting the expectations of those who saw in anti-colonial movements the makings of enduring trans-ethnic nationalisms. The transcendent obligation of resistance to the coloniser largely obscured the vitality of identity as basis of social solidarity.

The potency of this factor became clear only in the cold dawn of independence. African scholars, highly sympathetic to nationalistic aspirations, looked naturally for the factors of cohesion rather than for elements of potential discord. Tribalism, religion, race and ethnicity emerged as retrograde forces carrying heavy political weight. It is from this perspective that C. W. Anderson, F.R. Von Der Mehden and C. Young argue in Issues of Political Development (1974) that the future of African politics should belong to the "detribalised."

It is particularly necessary to ask whether collective identity is the cause of current political instability or whether it stems from the long period of post-independence authoritarianism, economic decay and one-party and state-party rules.

In other words, is collective identity an exogenous and predetermined variable, or it is an endogenous variable, whose value depends upon other factors that are ignored? This writer strongly believes that the lack of a unifying collective identity throughout Africa and socio-political decay is a combination of both factors. Collective identity seems to have explanatory value in a continent where many societies experience sharp conflict between social groups, and where secessionist movements arise in countries which had been nationally integrated, so it would see, for years to come.

In Africa where democracy is theoretically approved but practically hindered, mass political participation is still characterized by divisive struggles among ethnic groups over power and resources. In much of Africa, there is no real ethnic core to give identity to the state. Such an undertaking is complicated by the presence of ethnic groups fighting for the control of national resources, for self-determination and for the right to secede.

Building a unitary nation is also hampered by the lack of a common past among differing groups. Resulting conflicts have led to a general paralysis of productive political activity, a demobilization of participatory institutions, and the seemingly ineluctable turn toward authoritarian mechanisms of rule. The differing perspectives on collective identity detract from the essence of national unity and state building. Without a common history and culture to build upon, it is difficult to reach a consensus on present and future policies (S. David).

By Christophe Dongmo Cameroun Link Expert & Independent Scholar

* Excerpt of a draft paper presented at the International Conference on The Challenge of Conflict (Adelaide - Australia, February 2004) and published in U. Dolgopol and J. Gardam (eds.), The Challenge of Conflict: International Law Responds (Brill Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 2006)