century, still self-contained, autonomous communities that were practising subsistence economy. Thus, Mafeje reasons, the continued use of the word ‘tribe’ is a contradiction in terms.
Instead of dispensing with the concept altogether, the social anthropologist Isaac Schapera shifted the proverbial goalposts by redefining tribes as ‘separate “political communities”, each claiming exclusive rights to a given territory and managing its affairs independently of external control’.27 This is a loosely formulated definition; if this is what passes for a tribe, then surely an array of societies, including nation states, are tribes. The constituent elements of a tribe outlined in Schapera’s definition are to be found in many places even to this day. In this regard, anthropologists, following Schapera’s definition, were not only contradicting themselves, but were also, as evidenced by the double standard of the definition, performing an ideological role. It is noteworthy that according to Mafeje the concept of culture never figured in the foregoing definitions of tribe until the arrival of pluralist sociologists and political scientists. Moreover, by 1969, anthropologists had dispensed with the term and sought, once more, to redefine it. By then, Philip Hugh Gulliver had defined a tribe as ‘any group of people which is distinguished, by its members and by others, on the basis of cultural-regional criteria’.28 Again, this is not an airtight definition. There is no reason to suppose that the same cannot be said of European societies. Moreover, the notion of a tribe had, in Gulliver’s view, become a subjective perception.
Having mounted a critique of colonial anthropological writings, Mafeje concedes that ‘although their reasons are suspect, anthropologists may have been right in insisting that traditional or pre-colonial African societies, large or small, were tribes’.29 Although Mafeje concedes that anthropologists might have been right, there is very little evidence, on the basis of the definitions he enumerates, that this was actually the case. If I am reluctant to endorse what he says, it is not because I believe that Mafeje was wrong; it is simply that he himself was uncertain about the veracity of what he said – ‘anthropologists may have been right’. In his second impression on the concept, Mafeje concedes unambiguously that a ‘careful analysis of African social formations would indicate that tribal formations did exist in Africa but that they were not characteristic of all regions of the continent’.30 Adesina questions the validity of this. He argues that ‘the problem is that Mafeje pursued his line of thought at the expense of conceding that the category might have been valid at an earlier time. Not only does Anthropology deal with its objects of enquiry outside of history, it is ill-equipped to address the issues of history.’31 Mafeje goes on to say that he did not deny the existence of tribal sentiments and ideology on the African continent. His argument is that this ideology and sentiment has to be reconceptualised in the post-independence period. Mafeje says we have to make a distinction between someone who tries to preserve the traditional integrity, customs and autonomy of their tribe and someone who invokes tribal ideology in order to maintain power, not in a rural but in an urban setting, and thereby undermines and exploits fellow Africans. For Mafeje, ‘the fact that [the ideology of tribalism] works, as is often pointed out by tribal ideologists, [was] no proof that “tribes” or “tribalism” exist in any objective sense’.32
That tribalism seems to work in Africa is not a sign that the term exists objectively but, rather, an indication of false consciousness on the part of Africans. This is so because in subscribing to tribalism, which leads them to ignore the real causes of their suffering, they unwittingly submit to voluntary servitude. Tribalism is of great benefit to African leaders who peddle tribal rhetoric because it leads away from a correct comprehension of reality and, in the process, conceals the exploitative role of the African elite. It is ‘an ideology in the original Marxist sense’, something that the African elite share with their ‘European fellow-ideologists’.33 Mafeje points out that if tribalism per se does not matter, the ideology of tribalism does – for three reasons. First, it performs a capitalist, colonialist and imperialist function that obscures the nature of economic and power relations domestically (it also performs the same function between Africa and capitalist countries of the West). Second, it is not only divisive among Africans, but also between Africans and people from outside the continent. Third, it is an outdated concept that thwarts analysis and cross-cultural comparisons. Elsewhere, Mafeje argues that ‘“tribalism” is more an ideological reflex than an index of some concrete existence in Africa’,34 and he laments the fact that his earlier critique of tribalism was taken to mean a denial of the existence of tribes in Africa. That is not so, Mafeje argues. His original argument ‘was that the idea that all African societies were “tribes” was a result of the colonial legacy on the continent’ and he concedes that the problem with this misunderstanding may be a result of the fact that ‘the original paper was not definitional and was concerned mainly with exposing the falsity of that assumption [that all African societies were tribes] by pointing to contrary cases’.35
Mafeje maintains that ‘“tribes” refer to particular forms of political organisation which are kin-based. The chief is the most senior man of the most senior lineage of the founding clan, whether putative or real’.36 Mafeje was only shifting the deckchairs here. First, if ‘kin-based relation’ is what makes the political organisation a tribe, how many of abaThembu, for example, are abaThembu because of consanguinity? Consanguine relations and political structure relate to entirely different elements of social life. Second, if this is what defines a tribe, what is a clan or lineage? It is not uncommon to use the label ‘tribe’ to define people who share a common language – even if the sub-variations of the language are such as to make aspects of communication mutually unintelligible. If, as Mafeje argues, the word ‘tribe’ does not exist in the indigenous languages, what is the point of African intellectuals seeking to sustain the idea? What makes 11 million amaZulu a tribe and 5.3 million Scots a nation?
In his second impression on the concepts of tribalism, Mafeje writes that African intellectuals believe that the European assumption that there is tribalism in Africa reflects the usual European stereotypes derived from colonialism.37 Significantly, this leads to an ideological and epistemological disjuncture between African intellectuals and their Western counterparts. Mafeje goes on to argue that the problem ‘is not to decry a spurious category called “tribalism” but to confront the problem of cultural pluralism within modern nation-states which, deriving from the European historical antecedent, are supposed to be unitary. What is called “tribalism” in Africa is often an attempt by disadvantaged sociocultural groups to gain more social space within the given political and economic setup. In the circumstances, democratic pluralism is at issue rather than a dictatorial insistence on misconceived unitarism.’38
Mafeje suggests that with democratic pluralism tribalism would wither away; yet this ignores the patent reality that democracy does in fact facilitate a resort to narrow jingoism in mobilising support or articulating grievances. There is little evidence that democracy necessarily attenuates tribalism. Mafeje modified his earlier position on tribalism; he oscillated between cultural pluralism and democratic pluralism. It is far from clear that the two are the same or that the existence of one necessarily entails the existence of the other. Mafeje did not quite spell out what he really had in mind when he invoked the notion of pluralism. In an article titled ‘The Bathos of Tendentious Historiography’, he says that ‘in recent years there has been an observable social drift toward democratic pluralism … Democratic pluralism is more of a social than a political concept. For instance, it does not mean “multipartyism” but, rather, the right of people(s) to form their own organisations for self-fulfilment and for having a direct input in the formulation of national policy regarding things that affect them.’39 He did not use pluralism as it was used by anthropologists and subsequently criticised by Magubane.
As early as 1969, Magubane had questioned the notion of pluralism and its anthropological counterpart, tribalism. According to him, anthropological writings on pluralism and tribalism were too tentative and superficial to explain what was taking place in Africa during colonialism.40 Symptoms were treated as underlying causes. For Magubane, the problem with pluralism is that it treats social cleavages as though they are innate or as though societies are static. In this regard, the pluralist anthropologists could not construct what Magubane