It’ll be a long time before Africa sees peace
This morning I woke up to a headline on CNN that read: Renewed ethnic clashes hit Kenya.
Why am I not surprised?
Many of the “nations” of Africa are going to be basket cases for generations to come. This has nothing to do with poverty, democracy, global warming, Jesus Christ, Allah, the surfeit or the lack of any of those things. It has everything to do with tribalism and the way the colonial powers, England, France, Belgium, Germany, Portugal etc., that once ruled Africa, set up many of the new nations that now exist when they withdrew and went home to Europe.
Colonialism in Africa did not occur along tribal lines. That is, the European powers that invaded the continent, drew up colonial boundaries that suited their purposes–without regard to tribal boundaries–then ruled them as they saw fit. The result was that tribes were often split between two or more colonies, and the colonies often included several tribes under one umbrella. Often, the tribes within a colony, such as Kenya, had antagonisms against each other that predated the coming of the Europeans.
Then, in the 20th century, when the the Europeans left, they left behind a bunch of fledgling nations that today have as their national borders the same borders the old colonies once had. This left fractured many of the tribes, and because the nations were formed along colonial rather than tribal lines, the “countries” formed now contain ethnic groups that still have the same age-old animosities toward each other.
Examples of the problems this has caused abound on the continent and include what’s happening in Kenya.
The largest ethnic group in Kenya is is the Kikuyu. Next in numbers are the Luhya then the Luo. But there are also the Kalenjin, Kamba, Kisii. and a host of others including Somalis. (A map showing the ethnic divisions in Kenya can be found in Wikipedia. It’s a nightmare.) Though there are shifting alliances among these groups, there is very little love between any of them and frequently a great deal of animosity. What is happening in Kenya is that large gangs of Kikuyu are finding single or small gangs of Luo and are either maiming them or hacking them to death with machetes. In the meantime, houses are set on fire as part of another age-old dispute: who owns what land?
Another example is seen in the clashes between the Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda and Burundi, clashes that, occasionally, still fill the news. In Rwanda the Tutsis once ruled, though the Hutus were the majority. But when the Hutus came into control of the country, through “democratic” elections there was little the Tutsis could do when Hutu militias decided their country needed an ethnic cleansing–genocide along tribal lines. The result was the slaughter of at least 500,000 Tutsis and perhaps as many as a million. Along with them, thousands of “moderate” Hutus, who wanted to stop the slaughter, also died.
In neighboring Burundi, where the Hutus are the majority, ethnic cleansing goes the other way.
I remember back in the late ‘60s the attempt by the Ibo, in Nigeria, to secede and form their own country, that would include only them and their ancestral homelands. What followed was a bloody civil war that saw the Ibos decimated.
Forming the countries “correctly” would not have solved everything. There still would be wars. But had those countries been formed along tribal or ethnic lines instead of colonial line, or had the Europeans simply left and let the Africans settle the boundaries themselves, there would be many fewer internecine struggles and civil wars which, unfortunately, are going to continue unabated into the foreseeable future. But the Europeans couldn’t leave sensibly because their first concerns were the spheres of influence they wanted to maintain. They hoped to keep old allegiances and controls. The Belgians with what was once known as the Belgian congo, the French with Nigeria, the English with Kenya, etc. They each wanted to keep some kind of trading agreements that would satisfy themselves and to hell with the Africans.
Well, the Africans will pay the price for that into the foreseeable future. Ethnic wars will continue and millions–men, women, and children–will die.
