This
paper constitutes an attempt to make some sense out of the vexed
question of ethnicity in the context of a democratizing Southern
Africa and in Southern Africa alone, although several of my
observations may also be valid, with little or no modification, for
other parts of the continent. Its objectives are limited to making
some general observations on the historical development of ethnic
groups, most of which I prefer to call nationalities
for reasons which I shall make clear below. Evidently, a discussion
of the history of ethnicity presupposes that ethnic groups do have a
history, something which I take to be axiomatic.
I am not concerned
with those viewpoints which deny a history to ethnicity by seeing
so-called 'tribalism'
as either inherent in African society or indeed as a simple left-over
from pre-colonial times (primordialism). The evidence for such a
history is overwhelming. At the same time, I attempt to move beyond
the histories (nationalist and statist in persuasion) which see
ethnicity as simply a creation of the colonial state and/or
reactionary as a matter of principle. Unfortunately for such
conceptions, 'tribalism' did not disappear under the conditions of
independence in Africa. Rather the trend has been for post-colonial
statism to smash any demonstration of popular ethnic opposition as a
threat to national unity, irrespective of the content of the demands
(whether democratic or undemocratic) of such opposition. In actual
fact, the sanctification of national integrity by the post-colonial
state has always been rather hypocritical, as the state ruled partly
by giving different nationalities (or other groups such as party
members) differential access to resources. Therefore, the national
claims of the post-colonial state itself have often been dubious, a
fact which goes some way towards explaining its insecurity in this
regard.
This paper builds upon arguments on the political economy of rural
relations in Southern Africa which I have developed at length
elsewhere (Neocosmos, 1993a). In this work, rural working people
were considered principally economically, as petty-commodity
producers and labour migrants for example. While this is in essence
a valid procedure as commodity relations, especially under monopoly
conditions, did systematically transform their conditions of economic
existence, their modes of livelihood operate within, and are only
comprehensible in terms of a history which was constrained by
nationality divisions. To give a simple example, access to land (the
main means of economic reproduction), is acquired generally through a
chief or another state institution (such as land boards in Botswana
for example) and provided only to members of an 'ethnic community',
not to 'strangers'; in addition it is provided within a cultural
context and thus its provision is governed by cultural prescriptions.
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