African continent. He argues that from the viewpoint of the sociology of knowledge, objective reality is not easily distinguishable from subjective dispossession. In this sense, social scientific categories are hard to separate from the ideological baggage of their peddlers. It is not by accident, therefore, that when African scholars write about their societies they tend to reach conclusions and to deploy concepts different from those of their Euro-American counterparts. According to Mafeje, liberal idealists, Marxist materialists and African converts alike tended to assign nomenclature that was fundamentally at odds not only with African history, but also with the present day. The problem with social scientific writings in Africa was not necessarily one of concrete realities, but one of ideology – particularly the ideology of tribalism.
The phenomenon of tribalism is traceable to European colonialism and its ideological reconstruction of African realities. Europeans regarded the African continent as distinctly tribal, and European social scientists were unable to transcend the colonial categorisations of Africa used by colonial administrators – precisely because their studies were the handmaidens of colonialism. The assumption that Africa was tribal produced certain ‘ideological predispositions that made it difficult for those associated with the system to view these societies in any other light’.19 Colonial anthropologists, and some of their African counterparts, wrote about Africa as if there were no significant economic and political changes on the continent by the turn of the twentieth century. It thus stands to reason, Mafeje maintains, that if tribalism is uniquely African, then the ideology that perpetuates it is distinctly European.
While some European social scientists sought to exonerate themselves by arguing that they did not use the term ‘tribe’ to denigrate Africans, but because Africans themselves tended to use it,20 it is significant that the term surfaced only when English was spoken, as Mafeje argues. Even if it were true that Africans use the term, social scientists are not bound to use the same terms as their objects of inquiry, and their argument ends up as phenomenological affirmation of what the objects of inquiry say, instead of a critique rooted in historical and wider contexts. At any rate, the question stands: From where did the ‘natives’ derive these categories in the first place? Sometimes, adopting the terminology of the objects of inquiry would be useful and even desirable, but it could also perpetuate stereotypes, particularly if the researcher uses derogatory terms uncritically to mimic the objects of research. Things are not always what they are called. In South Africa the word ‘tribe’ has no equivalent in local languages. People tend to speak of a nation, clan or lineage, or simply identify themselves according to the territory from which they originate.
Mafeje considers that tribes, noticeably the central unit of analysis in anthropological writings, were, by and large, created by colonial authorities and were a result of the setting of colonial borders, which hindered the free flow of African people. That anthropologists were uncritical or otherwise unable to transcend the notion of tribe says something about their complicity in colonial domination and the structuring of African societies. Anthropological studies were serviceable to colonial administrators; it is not surprising that Africans, who are still shaped by colonial distortions, continue to use the term in spite of its connotations. The negative images that Africans come to have about themselves cannot be understood outside this historical and sociological context. In The German Ideology, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels observe that in every period in history the ruling ideas are always those of the ruling class. This means that ‘the class which is the ruling material force of society is at the same time its ruling intellectual force’.21
Significantly, Mafeje reasons, anthropologists had ignored any noticeable changes in Africa by the turn of the twentieth century. The essentialist and purist nature of the assumption that there were no changes in Africa conveniently depoliticised the colonial intrusion that forced African people into migrant labour. This is the period in which Africans were being ensnared into the web of extra-economic and political relations. Even when Africans were residing in urban areas, anthropologists always sought to re-tribalise them by tracing their rural roots or by drawing invidious tribal distinctions among them through perpetuating stereotypes.22 This was not the only method they adopted, since they sought also to draw distinctions between urban-based and rural-based Africans, the former purportedly aspiring to a ‘Western way of life’, ‘Europeanisation’ or ‘civilisation’ while the latter were referred to as ‘red people’ or ‘pagans’. Aspiring to a Western way of life meant that Africans paid the heavy price of deculturation. Such changes in African societies, emanating as they did from extractive economic and political relations, led to studies of social change.
Curiously, while anthropologists saw that African societies were not as static as they had hitherto thought, they did not dispense with tribe as a unit of analysis. The concept became an organising framework in a different way. Initially considered a rural phenomenon, it was now discovered that tribalism persists in urban areas as well – colonialists and anthropologists re-tribalised Africans while at the same time seeking to ‘civilise’ them. The rural/urban divide was, of course, a false dichotomy since the urban African was the same as the rural African. Sociologically, people adjust or adapt to the environments they find themselves in.
Mafeje saw Arnold Epstein as one of the few anthropologists willing to dispense with the concept of tribe.23 Epstein contends that Africans living in urban areas were not necessarily affected by tribalism; in the copper mines of Zambia, miners refused to accept ‘tribal elders’ as their representatives or leaders in negotiations with mine management. Waged workers were suspicious of salaried leaders. Having noted this, Mafeje concludes that this ‘was another instance of class formation among Africans’.24 I believe that this is a controversial point, which some may wish to dispute and to argue that Mafeje mistook social stratification for class – that gradations within the same stratum need not admit class differentiation and the so-called salariat is not a class apart from the proletariat. For Mafeje this was a known datum, however, in that he did not declare the miners to be a class proper, but rather that they were gaining class consciousness. Enthusiastic about such developments, Mafeje was moved to assert that these were winds of change that were fast becoming a reality. He mentions political scientists who came with notions of modernisation in what they considered to be modernising states. That such theories were no different from anthropological civilising missions is not something Mafeje offers to discuss. He goes on to argue, however, that anthropologists were incorrigible in their use of the term ‘tribe’ as an analytical category, only this time they were more determined to buttress the ‘persistence and resilience’ of tribes, rather than their disintegration or disequilibrium. While anthropologists initially sought the tribe in rural areas, they now sought to identify its resilience and persistence in urban areas. This represented, according to Mafeje, a shift (although not a change) in the ideological standpoint of anthropologists. For them, modernisation was not incompatible with tribalism or traditionalism. They thought ‘tribal values’ were an explanation for Africans’ reluctance to embrace modernity and that Africans would fully modernise once they had dispensed with tribalism.
Mafeje says that unlike anthropologists who wholeheartedly embraced the tribal ideology to explain both the successes and failures of modernisation in Africa, political scientists and African nationalists used the ideology of tribalism only to account for failures in modernisation and, unlike anthropologists, preferred to speak of problems of integration, penetration and mobilisation. In spite of this, political scientists had conceptual problems much bigger than those of anthropologists. They lacked the ethnographic detail of knowledge available to anthropologists and their use of the tribal framework made it difficult for them to account for similar problems in other parts of the world. As a result, they fell victim to Eurocentrism in the same way as their anthropologist counterparts. The only difference is that anthropologists have ab initio been engaged in tribal studies.
Having discussed the political antecedents and ideological function of the concept of tribalism, Mafeje turns his attention to its conceptual problems. His question, one that immediately arises, is whether tribalism exists without the existence of tribes. Anthropologists typically described tribes as societies that were ‘self-contained, autonomous communities practising subsistence economy with no external trade’.25 In the 1940s, Meyer Fortes and E.E. Evans-Pritchard introduced new terms such as ‘centralised