by David Lamb
One day in Uganda I was talking with a U.S. diplomat at the embassy. His secretary entered the office and said a man was waiting to see him. “Is he Ugandan?” the diplomat asked. “No, he’s Acholi,” she answered. Her implication was clear: in Uganda, there were Acholis and other tribalists, but no Ugandans. One’s identity was tribal, not national.
Only three countries in black Africa—Somalia, Lesotho and Swaziland—are blessed with ethnic uniformity. The result is that those countries are among the few to have a sense of national identity. But in most, such as Zaire, which has 200 tribes, the governments have failed to provide an alternative to tribalism because central authority is weak and often illegitimate and based on the perpetuation of power, not a sharing of power.
The significance of tribalism has not diminished with the end of colonialism, for several reasons. First, there is little intermarriage between various ethnic groups; second, in rural areas, where transportation and communication remain primitive, there is little movement in or out of tribal regions that have existed for generations; third, the family, clan and tribe are the essential elements of African society, the American equivalent of welfare, social security, police protection and Saturday night at the VFW; fourth, since most Africans’ identity revolves around the tribe, taking away that identity would be like telling a devout Catholic that he has been excommunicated; fifth, nationalism is a new concept in Africa, not much more than three decades old, and its implications are not broadly understood; and sixth, African leaders have done little to convince their people that nationhood offers more benefits than tribalism.
To see the results of tribalism in its most extreme and ugly form, consider Burundi, landlocked and resourceless. A Christian nation of over 4 million inhabitants, Burundi is an East African land whose grassy, forested plateaus roll to the slopes of craggy, tortured hills. Despite its high population density—372 persons per square mile, or about ten times the density in the United States—Burundi has virtually no villages or cities. People live instead in family compounds known as rugos, and the only urban concentrations are at a few former colonial and commercial centers such as Bujumbura and Gitega.
There are three major ethnic groups: the Hutus, the Tutsi (Watusi) and the Twa. The short, stocky Hutus (comprising 85 percent of the population) are mostly farmers of Bantu stock, with dark, Negroid features. The Watusi (14 percent), who migrated to Burundi in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries from the north, probably Ethiopia, are cattle people; they are tall, sometimes well over six feet, with long, narrow facial features, and their skin is slightly lighter than that of most other Africans. The Twa (1 percent) are pygmies who were driven into the bush and marginal grasslands by the Watusi generations ago.
Over the years the small group of Watusi immigrants subjugated the masses of aboriginal Hutus into a kind of feudal system. Much as in medieval Europe, a pyramid developed with Watusi lords giving their loyalty to more important Watusi nobility in exchange for protection. A mwami, or Watusi king, ruled at the top of each pyramid. Gradually the great majority of Hutus mortgaged their services and relinquished their land to the nobility, receiving in return cattle—the symbol of status and wealth in Burundi.
Centuries of tradition made the Watusi feel like a privileged, superior people, and the Hutus like an inferior class held in serfdom. The Watusi considered themselves an intelligent people capable of leadership and looked on the Hutus as no more than hard-working, dumb peasants. The Hutus had been conditioned not to disagree. When Belgium granted Burundi independence in 1962, challenges were raised to the concept of the Watusi’s innate superiority, and the Watusi began to worry about the possibility that their power might be transferred to the majority, as had happened elsewhere in black Africa.
The minority Watusi government came up with a simple solution: it set out, in 1972, to massacre every Hutu with education, a government job or money. In a three-month period, upwards of 200,000 Hutus were slain. Their homes and schools were destroyed. Stan Meisler, then the Los Angeles Times’ African correspondent, traveled to Bujumbura, the Burundi capital, a few months after the massacre and was shocked to see no more than a handful of Hutus. “It is a little like entering Warsaw after World War II, and finding few Jews there,” Meisler wrote.
Many Hutus were taken from their homes at night. Others received summonses to report to the police station. So obedient and subservient had the Hutus become to their Watusi masters that they answered the summonses, which even the most unlearned soul knew was really an execution notice. Sometimes, when the death quotas at the prisons and police stations had been filled for the day, the queued-up Hutus were told to return the next day. They dutifully complied. The few Hutus who tried to escape the executioners seemed to make only token attempts. It was a pathetic sight. They would walk down the main road toward the border. If the Watusi gendarme stopped them, they would turn quietly back.
There were many grisly stories about the methods of execution, all difficult to verify, but Western diplomats who were serving in Bujumbura at the time said one thing was clear: the Watusi did not use many bullets. The Hutus’ bodies were then thrown onto military trucks, a pile of bodies and tangled limbs filling the uncovered cargo hold of each vehicle. For several days they rumbled through Bujumbura in broad daylight on their way from the city to a field near the airport. Then the government decided to be more subtle and shifted the death convoys to night runs. Bulldozers worked under spotlights, digging long narrow rows of graves.
In neighboring Rwanda, another former Belgian colony that gained its independence in 1962, a similar tribal imbalance existed. There the Watusi made up 10 percent of the population, the Hutus 89 percent. In 1959 the Hutus overthrew their Watusi masters, killing an estimated 100,000 and winning majority rule. Persecution of the Watusi continued through 1964, at which time the English philosopher Bertrand Russell called the killings “the most horrible and systematic human massacre we have had occasion to witness since the extermination of the Jews by the Nazis.”
But except for a few voices like that of Russell, the general reaction of Africa and the world was silence. A representative of the Organization of African Unity flew into Bujumbura at the height of the killings and congratulated President Michel Micombero, a thirty-two-year-old alcoholic who was later overthrown, for the orderly way he was running his national affairs.* The Western missionaries in Burundi and the Christian church continued their work on God’s behalf without a word of protest. As far as I know, no country cut its diplomatic relations with the Micombero government. And at the very moment an investigator from the International Commission of Jurists was being officially received in Bujumbura at an elaborate reception, twenty-two Hutus were being beaten to death in the police chamber a few blocks away.
If the white South African government had conducted similar atrocities against black Africans, the rage would have rocked the continent like the explosion of a volcano. But that would have been different: the whites’ injustice toward blacks is considered racist; the blacks’ mistreatment of blacks is just part of national growing pains and is somehow acceptable to both Africa and the world beyond.
Sadly, not a great deal has changed in Burundi since the nightmare of the 1970s. Fear still rules the land, and in all except their strength in numbers, the Hutus are a destroyed, powerless people. More than 150,000 have fled to Zaire, Tanzania and Rwanda, and those who remain still work the fields for their Watusi masters, hold menial jobs and carry cards identifying their tribal origins. On my last visit to Burundi there was not a single Hutu private in the 7,000-man national army, and the military government remained suspicious of—and occasionally vetoed—any international aid that might eventually breed opposition by educating or enriching the Hutus. All the power remained in the hands of the Watusi minority. And that, in a word, is what tribalism is about—power.
The ethnic diversity of Africa also creates an immense language problem, making Africa the most linguistically complex continent in the world
. Canada’s national unity is fractured by the presence of just two languages. Belgium is splintered by French and Flemish. But Africa, in addition to half a dozen imported European languages, speaks 750 tribal tongues, fifty of which are spoken by one million or more people. Both Swahili in East Africa and Hausa in West Africa are spoken by more than 25 million people. In Zaire alone, there are seventy-five different languages. In South Africa the whites speak Afrikaans, a colloquial form of seventeenth-century Dutch heard nowhere else in the world. The tribal babble intellectually cripples whole countries and leaves Africa in the unenviable position of not being able to understand itself.
The people of Djibouti, a pint-sized East African country, speak French; the closest other French-speaking Africans are nearly seven hundred miles away. The nomadic Masai of Kenya and Tanzania speak Masai, which has little similarity to any other tongue used in those countries. The Equatorial Guineans are the only people in black Africa whose national language is Spanish. In the rural areas of many countries the language barrier makes it impossible for people in neighboring villages to communicate. When President Daniel arap Moi makes one of his infrequent trips to northern Kenya he speaks Swahili, a language introduced by Arab traders, but the people there do not understand much Swahili and Moi does not understand their tribal tongues. Just the same, people gather obediently to hear his speeches and sit nodding their heads in agreement.
Imagine what would happen if the United States had a similar problem. If you were a manufacturer in Milwaukee and spoke only English, you could not communicate with your suppliers in Chicago; if you were a state senator from Los Angeles, you could not understand a legislative debate in Sacramento; if you were a long-distance truck driver crossing Montana, you would have trouble ordering a meal in Butte, Great Falls and Helena. What would happen? You would do exactly what the rural African does: you would stay within the security of your linguistic boundaries.
Only one country, Cameroon, officially uses two European languages, French and English. But the people who come from the old British part of Cameroon speak little or no French, while the people from the old French region speak little or no English. Meetings between Cameroon officials often bog down on the language problem. The government, though, seldom supplies interpreters for such meetings because the country is meant to be bilingual. As a result, few people understand one another until everyone drops French and English and begins speaking pidgin English, a language that developed in the slave depots of West Africa for the same reason that Swahili developed in East Africa: the slave traders needed a language to give orders to the slaves, and the slaves, representing many different tribes, needed a language to communicate with one another. Today pidgin is a written language that combines many English words with African grammar and syntax.
The Reverend M. G. M. Cole, an African who spent several years in Britain, once delivered an eloquent Sunday sermon against the imposition of a single-party system in Sierra Leone: “Teday the country happ. Make dis thing go as ee de go, en den de go. Nor cause any trouble. Nor gee the president headache … Oona nor amborgin am … nor forget two party. We nor want one party.”
Cole spoke the Queen’s English impeccably, but in this case he was just doing what he had to do to communicate—speak Krio, a language that grew out of pidgin English and is understood by 80 percent of the Sierra Leoneans. What he said translates as: “Today the country is happy. Let’s continue things as it is, as they are. Don’t cause any trouble. Don’t give the president a headache … Don’t you humbug him … Don’t forget the two-party system. We don’t want a one-party state.”
The colonization of Africa brought languages (English, French, Portuguese, Spanish, German, Italian) that enabled Africans to communicate with the outside world and with one another. But the hodgepodge pattern that emerged when the European powers divided Africa did little to unify the land linguistically. Kenya, where about four dozen languages are spoken, is a fairly typical example of how an African country copes with the language barrier.
Swahili (properly known as Kiswahili) is the most widely spoken language in Kenya and, like English, is an “official” language. In 1975 President Jomo Kenyatta remarked casually one day that henceforth Swahili would be the only language used in parliament, as the constitution required. A mild panic ensued, and lawmakers rushed out to buy Swahili dictionaries. Some of them made no headway at all and therefore did not utter another word in parliamentary debate for months. Before long the constitution was amended; English returned as the main language of parliament.
Most Kenyans living in the city speak three languages—English and Swahili, neither of which they may command firmly, and a tribal tongue. Business and the affairs of state are conducted in English. Young children learn Swahili in school with English taught as a second language, but the language of Nairobi University is English. The government runs two radio stations, one in English and one in Swahili, and the six hours of daily television are about evenly divided between the two languages. In the deep countryside, peasant farmers and herders generally speak only their tribal language.
The language barrier is one of the biggest obstacles preventing Kenya and other countries from developing a true sense of national unity. How can Kenyans think of themselves as a national people if they don’t even have a single language unifying them? Language is one of the most important instruments of nation-building, a potentially powerful unifying force.
Demographically, Africa is a young continent: half the population is no more than fifteen years old. And the babies keep coming—one city hospital alone, Mama Yemo in Kinshasa, Zaire, delivers more than 50,000 babies a year. Kenya has the highest population growth rate in the world (4 percent), and Rwanda is one of the world’s most densely populated countries (444 people per square mile). The rugged, spectacularly beautiful hills and mountains of Rwanda are tiered like giant staircases. On each level, hundreds of feet above the valley floors, a family clan lives and farms. The dirt roads that wind through the valleys and across the hills are as busy as the sidewalks of New York’s Fifth Avenue during lunch hour, a shoulder-to-shoulder procession of pedestrians—most of them barefoot and many of them drunk on homemade banana beer—in constant, seemingly undirected motion.
But Africa’s problem isn’t that it’s densely populated; the problem is that it’s unevenly populated. Zambia, twice as big as California, has only 5.3 million people; Rwanda, the size of Maryland, has 4.5 million. There are 30 persons per square mile in Africa, about the same as in the Soviet Union and North America, and far less than the 170 per square mile squeezed into Europe and Asia. The comparison is deceptive, though. About one third of Africa—or an area twice the size of India—is virtually uninhabitable, and some countries (like Kenya) are already using every inch of cultivatable land. No government except South Africa’s has the resources to feed and provide adequate services for its people.
Population control remains a sensitive issue in black Africa, and few sensible politicians dare speak firmly in its favor. To do so would be to challenge the growth of an individual’s tribe, to deprive parents of the hands needed to till the fields today and care for the elderly tomorrow, to denounce religious and traditional beliefs that have belonged to Africa for generations. Some governments consider birth control morally decadent. Others view it as an imperialistic plot to depopulate the Third World. But every argument ignores the unsettling fact that Africa’s growth rate is more rapid than any continent’s and represents the gravest threat facing Africa today.
If you look ahead and double Africa’s population—which the United Nations predicts will happen by the year 2000—while halving the governmental services, a frightening scenario becomes quite plausible: governments grow weaker and crumble under waves of civil unrest; populations shift across borders as people migrate in search of food, land, goods and jobs; conflict and chaos erupt with too many people competing for too few commodities; foreign powers step into the vacuum, creating conditions of confrontation that
pit the continent against itself, one bloc favoring the West, the other the East.*
Many demographers argue that Africans will not have fewer children until they perceive that to do so is in their economic interest and until they are assured that the children they do have will reach adulthood. This will happen, the argument goes, only after the family’s standard of living improves, along with its security and health. In the developed world it has been well established that population control follows—rather than leads to—improved economic conditions.
Africa as yet shows no signs of following that trend. Kenya, for example, has made as much economic progress as any non-oil-producing black nation since independence. But its population growth rate is four times that of the United States—and growing. In 1960, just before independence, the average Kenyan female had 6.2 children; in 1970, she had 7.2; by 1980, 8.3. There are two possible conclusions: first, that Africa does not fit into the established pattern; second and more likely, that the standard of living has not improved sufficiently, and Africans feel even more threatened economically than they did during the colonial era.
Thirty African countries have growth rates of over 2 percent a year; ten others have over 3 percent. Only Gabon, in West Africa, has managed to achieve population stability—largely because 30 percent of the women have venereal disease. The government’s response has been to build a $10 million fertility center to see how its people can produce more and keep pace with the rest of Africa.
Indeed, few concepts are as deeply ingrained in the African psyche as the need and the desire to produce. In many cultures an infertile man is an outcast; a barren woman is shunned and scorned. “If I cannot give my women children, I might as well be dead,” a Masai cattle herder told me. The late king of Swaziland, Sobhuza II, Master of the Spears (1899–1982), fathered more than five hundred children by his hundred or so wives. In Moslem countries such as Niger and Upper Volta, it is common for men to have four wives and twenty or twenty-five children. Even in capitals that are predominantly Christian, men often have a city wife and a country wife. The country wife of a Kenyan government minister, for instance, is probably illiterate and plump; she remains on the shamba (farm, or garden) to take care of the crops, and he visits her perhaps once a week. The city wife, stylish if not articulate, accompanies her husband to the various social functions he must attend.
