Philosophy and the Detribalization of Africa

Johnson Ayonka
Sep 4, 2018 · 8 min read

Accra’s footpaths and alleyways have undergone a tragic degeneration and disappearance, and the city’s streets and pavements are becoming increasingly hostile to walking. Politically betrayed and economically dispossessed, some people have resorted in desperation to street hawking as an avenue for survival. These peddlers have occupied the very few sidewalks in city centres. They have spilled on to the roads where they fight for space every day with the traffic and the pedestrians forced from the pavements by other hawkers. And public space continues to reduce from sales and privatizations that reek of corruption. The lords of the mayhem are the politicians, officials, and bureaucrats at all levels of government, not forgetting more than a few wily toll clerks. As tax collectors of the proceedings and profiteers from the madness these officials exercise no mercy despite abundant evidence that urban design and the management of towns and cities in Ghana has gone to the dogs. In the midst of all this one of the last places of refuge for me as an urban wanderer has been the still available open spaces and green fields of my old university at Legon, just outside Accra (An intensifying policy of privatisation of public spaces and denials of open access means that these last great enclaves are also vulnerable to being walled off, gated, and access monetized or restricted).

This recently brought me close to the philosophy department, whose everlasting obscurity awakened me to a paradox-the university is both a sanctuary from the Ghanaian quagmire and the most important cause of it-in the sense that it is a failure of thoughtful, reflective leadership that has provided accommodation for the anarchy that now affects almost every dimension of everyday life. For an underlying philosophy that shapes the morality and direction of leaders is what Ghana, and perhaps Africa, needs. And if you consider, for example, the subject of tribalism, it is not too difficult to recognize the vital necessity for a school of liberating transcendental philosophies that would seize the imagination of the people for a renaissance. The main reason why this is not happening is the timidity and cowardice of the continent’s thinkers, not only those undergoing decay and irrelevance in the universities but also others in the communities beyond it that may not be formally trained or affiliated. (*I employ the controversial word ‘‘tribe’’ and its variants in this essay on purpose. The intention is to convey the popular understanding of its implication in contemporary Africa).

In virtually every African country, electoral contests have mirrored an underlying ethnic competition, and political parties now represent platforms for sectarian mobilization. Indeed, the structural importance of ethnicity has often transformed political disputes into outright ethnic conflicts. This has materialized in the Ivory Coast, South Sudan, and Kenya. Ethnicity has been fundamentally, though not exclusively, implicated in wars and outbreaks of violence in both Congos. In Guinea, elections have ignited interethnic animosities and violent attacks, while in Zambia, Ghana and Nigeria tribal block voting has been observed in several elections. What makes it unwise to neglect the ethnicity and identity issue in politics and society is not only the violence, mass murder, and rape attributed to it in known cases, for instance, in South Sudan, Congo, Liberia, Chad, the DRC, and the CAR,- all are places that have depicted an almost mechanical, evolutionary and predictable descent to carnage.

The real danger, rather, can be discerned from occasions where total and universal calm has instantly been replaced by open violence after elections or political disputes have degenerated into ethnic wars, such as what happened in Kenya in 2007 and the Ivory Coast in the 2000s. Therefore, what ought to invite immediate attention is the existence of all the ingredients for such sudden transformations to anarchy in the vast majority of African countries that are presently very peaceful and democratic, yet where politics has taken a tribal or regional disposition. Undeniably, the defining paradox across large swathes of Africa is the consolidation of democracy hand in hand with its ‘‘tribalization’’.

This amounts to a strangulation of politics and society in a way that leads to the replacement of real life and death issues with tribal considerations and calculations. The manipulation and abuse of ethnicity did not start today. It is known that the colonial authorities routinely exploited it towards their own narrow interests, and before and after independence, Africans themselves have taken part in the manipulation of ethnicity, even the invention and reinvention of ethnic groups. While the use of subtle and overt ethnic mobilization by the political class is therefore not new, it is compounded by the abuse of elections as contests for the spoils of war alone. Power thus becomes an end in itself when elections are imagined by competing parties. This promotes the degeneration of these parties into factions that organize on the basis and exploitation of fear or suspicion of the other. The environment also contains a psychological raw material that promotes the understanding of political contests as struggles for a kind of ethnic superiority, a kind of proxy for war, or precursor to it. Apart from being manifestations of preexisting ethnic cleavages, this makes elections factional win or lose events and not participatory and state building processes towards the provision of quality services to the people, which is what a diverse Africa needs.

One suggested solution advocates reforms that stipulate cooperation, the devolution of power and collaboration. A practical outcome of this is the establishment of upper legislative chambers and national conferences that seek to bring together important social and political actors in society without the employment of divisive partisan elections. In some places, decentralization has been proposed, specifying the ceding of some political and administrative powers to local governments or governors and local assemblies. But these ideas and policies overlook the ‘‘tribalized’’ foundation, and the heavily cultural and normative dimension it has produced, which would likely be hard to sweep away with mere reforms,-in which case these tribal and nepotistic shadow structures would simply adapt and overwhelm the supposedly reformed arteries of the state, similar to the way democracy and politics have been deformed. A development that has fitted this scenario is the decentralization of corruption almost in tandem with political decentralization and devolution-as if the center has imitated itself and reproduced all its evils in the devolved units, instead of the popular anticipation of grassroots-led governance for social and economic transformation. It is worth noting here that the problem of tribalism that fuelled constitutional reforms in Kenya does not look like it is on the way to being resolved.

Many constitutional provisions and pieces of legislation that ought to have facilitated equity, cooperation and sustainable governance exist only on paper, while the informal distribution of resources and other forms of patronage thrive and become self-sustaining. Reforms are important, but people-centered values are more important. Reforms without values have been demonstrably worthless in the African context as they give a camouflage of progress to deep decay, while a foundation of good values alone, even before the employment of reforms, may lead to transformation and make subsequent institutional restructuring more sustainable. High potential countries are stagnating because of normative weaknesses or the prevalence of bad values, and a look at the few countries that have been doing relatively well, states like Botswana, Cape Verde, Seychelles, and Namibia, as well as the post-war progress being made in Rwanda, would reveal a normative exceptionalism. To adapt Satre, the acquisition of essence must precede action and institutions, essence in the form of philosophies, values and norms. Ideally, reforms and values ought to be inseparable. Still, in my view, the crisis in most African countries has more to do with tribalism and its implications than with the continent’s institutions, which, by and large, are the same institutions in other parts of the world. Mere institutional reforms are no match for the normative supremacy of tribalism, which has profited from its lack of challenge by other value systems of equal or superior strength. Tribalism is a worldview that can only bend to other norms capable of eroding some of its foundations. In this vacuum it has become pervasive and monopolized the psyche of a great many Africans. This is an extraordinary change from when Africa was characterized by multiethnic and ethnically fluid polities. In some cases, people were free to move from one ethnicity to another based on their values or circumstances. In contrast to this dynamic past, present-day Africans seem to have come to accept tribal identity as somehow well established and rigid. With this belief as a solid foundation, a strong sense of attachment to ethnic groups as pure and unchanging, as defining of identity, is built and reinforced. But tribalism is not unstoppable. If there is an idea capable of undermining this ecosystem of identity it is the shared humanity of all Africans, and specifically how this humanity has been mutilated by past and present leadership. It is here that opportunities exist, and have been missed, for ‘‘detribalization’’, at the minimum, of politics and the governance of the state. I must state here that belonging to an ethnic group and expressing attachment to, or pride in, in the culture, language, and positive institutions of that ethnicity is not harmful by itself. Africa’s diversity represents a positive uniqueness that must be celebrated. The problem arises only when identity becomes the basis for the exclusion of people and reason in favour of considerations that create inter-group hatred, division and an opportunistic type of governance at the expense of essential human needs.

And the absence of this restoration to a common universe of values, especially given that most of us Africans have endured a longstanding onslaught on our dignity and material well-being by the failure of the ‘‘tribalized’’ state and politics, is a catastrophe that must be laid squarely at the doorsteps of the philosophers and thinkers of our continent. Politicians who conceptualize, demonstrate and successfully advocate activist philosophies as the paths to shared prosperity will easily extract an underlying, transcendental humanity that inspires people, and eventually mobilizes them beyond the tribe. People would engage with politics on the basis of distinct value based alternative paths to the good society. The ‘‘tribelessness’’ of the anti-colonial struggle in most countries shows that this would hardly be a novelty. The philosopher-politicians of that struggle, like Nkrumah, Nyerere, Machel, Netto and Lumumba, managed to rouse the people’s consciousness beyond tribe to a level where ideas and values linked people to one another and to the common course. What remains is for activist thinkers to emerge from their shells and translate this environment of exclusion and oppression into a potent configuration of philosophies and values towards prosperity and security.

At this critical juncture of democratization, only the displacement of tribalism by philosophy in African politics will lead to the onset of a Renaissance, and the return of thinker-politicians to the African political arena would make this more likely.

Johnson Ayonka studied politics at Lund University and the University of Ghana, Legon, near the city of Accra, where he currently lives and works as a consultant. Accra is also where he was born to parents who hailed from the endless plains of the northern Savanah. Find him on Twitter @kudugo_ayoka and read him on Medium Johnson Ayonka.


Originally published at kalaharireview.com on September 4, 2018.

Johnson Ayonka

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interests: Sci Fi, fiction, nonfiction, culture, philosophy, public policy and cosmopolitanism.

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