Ethnicity in Bondage : Is Its Liberation Premature? Keynote address by Ali A. Mazrui (Director, Institute of Global Cultural Studies and Albert Schweitzer Professor in the Humanities, SUNY Binghamton), UNRISD/UNDP International Seminar on Ethnic Diversity and Public Policies, (New York, 17-19 August 1994)
Two interrelated forces in world history have contributed towards the erosion of human diversity. One force has been the triumph of the nation state as a model of political organization; the other has been the wider impact of Western civilization as a whole on societies far and wide.
The nation state as a model was predicated on cultural homogenization. Far from a hundred ethnic flowers being allowed to bloom, these were often denied sustenance, and were sometimes brutally crushed altogether. The nation state was often culturally monopolistic. In Germany in the first half of the twentieth century, it even attempted to be genetically monopolistic. That was what the Holocaust was partly about, the Aryan purity goal.
In post-Ottoman Turkey, the nation state has tried to be linguistically monopolistic, denying legitimacy to the languages of other indigenous ethnic groups. The Kurdish language suffered in Turkey. Iraq tried to turn Kurds into Arabs; Iran to turn them into Persians. In the first quarter-century of post-colonial Africa, the concept of the nation state rejected the word "tribe", treated ethnicity as a political pathology, and erected constitutions that made little effort to accommodate ethnic loyalties. The UNESCO General History of Africa banned the word "tribe" from its eight volumes. All in all, the whole paradigm of the nation state was so committed to the principle of cultural homogeneity that ethnicity often retreated in shame. Ethnicity was indeed in bondage.
The other modern force that has eroded human diversity is the closely related one of the impact of Western civilization as a whole on societies far and wide. While Western liberalism itself values pluralism and diversity, few forces have done more to create uniformity in the world than Western culture. At the end of the twentieth century, many more people are dressing alike, eating alike, thinking alike and speaking Western languages than was conceivable at the beginning of the century. As the world has become more Westernized, it has become less diversified.
And yet it is precisely at the end of the twentieth century that ethnicity is at last trying to break loose from the confines of both the nation state and the inhibitions of Western civilization. A hundred ethnic flowers are indeed trying to bloom - but the short-term cost is high. Full many a flower not only weeps, but bleeds. In the short term, is the cost worthwhile? Or does the world have to get used to the idea that ethnic loyalties are here to stay and cannot be wished away - either by the ideology of the nation state or by the relentless erosion caused by Western culture? Or is the liberation of ethnicity premature?
Between Ethnicity and Labour
When Moshood Abiola won the Nigerian presidential election in June 1993, he was the first southerner to be elected executive head of state in the country's post-colonial history. In previous elections Nigerians brought northern Muslims into power. In June 1993 they still brought back a Muslim victor - but this time he was a southerner. Did the military government of Ibrahim Babangida nullify the elections for those ethnic and regional reasons? Was Moshood Abiola denied the presidency because he was Yoruba rather than Hausa?
Abiola's biggest mistake of 1993 was in exaggerating the scale of Western hegemony in the world. On being denied the presidency, instead of staying at home to fight it out, he travelled to the capitals of the Western world to seek international help in the fight against the military government in Nigeria. Washington and London made small gestures. Abiola damaged himself seriously at home.
In 1994, a few weeks before he resumed his struggle for the presidency, Abiola was in Washington again. But this time he knew that the main battlefield had to be Nigeria. He telephoned my home and missed me. With the help of my wife, he tracked me down at a hotel at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. He told me "I am going to Nigeria to become president. I will see you at the inauguration!" I was startled. In a sense I am still startled. But that phone call was also a lesson to me in political courage.
A few weeks later Abiola declared himself president of Nigeria at a rally in Lagos attended by thousands of people. It is true that he should have done that a year earlier. He had gambled in 1993 on Western hegemony and lost. But, on matters of principle, "better late than never"!
Abiola's electoral support had been multi-ethnic. But his support in the fight against the military régime came to be heavily Yoruba and based in the Western region. The fight has produced one remarkable phenomenon - the strike of the oil workers and their supporters in defence of Abiola. The strike became the most impressive utilization of labour power for democratic ends in the history of post-colonial Africa - regardless of whether or not the strike ultimately succeeded. Its capacity to sustain itself for many weeks and hold the nation's economy to ransom on an issue of national democratic principle has already earned it a place in post-colonial history.
In Poland under communism in the 1980s, the defiance of the trade union movement, Solidarity, was widely acclaimed in the Western world. The petro-labour strike in Nigeria in the 1990s in defence of democracy fired few imaginations in the Western world - in spite of the fact that Nigeria was several times the size of Poland in population, and was Africa's most populous country.
Lech Walesa became a household name in the West, and he won the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1983. Who knew the names of Nigeria's trade union leaders outside Nigeria? Were any of them likely to win the Nobel Prize for Peace?
The double standards of the world persisted, distorted by Western hegemony. What passed for heroism in Europe (i.e. Solidarity in Poland) passed for instability in Africa (i.e. the strike of Nigeria's oil workers). What was seen as martyrdom in Eastern Europe (harassment of Lech Walesa) was seen as another example of African tyranny when African democrats were victimized. The Western focus was disproportionately on who was killing democracy in Africa, and inadequately focused on who was fighting for democracy on the continent. African villains got more coverage than African heroes.
The "nation" part of the "nation state" was interpreted to mean considerable cultural homogeneity. The "state" part of the "nation state" was interpreted to mean considerable political centralization. The two forces of national homogenization and statist centralization played havoc with ethnic identities. The state institutions regarded ethnic groups as a danger to the centralizing authority of the state. The new national consciousness regarded ethnic consciousness as a danger to national cohesion. A national language was encouraged at the expense of ethnic languages. In some cases the promotion of the national language was itself a form of oppression. Afrikaans in South Africa continued to be regarded as not only the language of the oppressor but also the instrument of oppression.
Curiously enough, the Hutu and the Tutsi spoke virtually the same verbal language and were engaged in very different non-verbal communication. Perhaps nowhere outside Rwanda and Burundi is there such a dramatic distinction between verbal convergence of Hutu-Tutsi communication and non-verbal divergence in Hutu-Tutsi communication. In Rwanda and Burundi they have a shared language but not shared communication. These are people divided by culture but not by language.
And yet which countries in Africa are giving ethnic languages recognition as the twentieth century comes to an end? By a strange twist of destiny, it is the most ancient of sub-Saharan African states - Ethiopia - and the most modern of the sub-Saharan states - South Africa.
Apartheid had tried to create homelands justified on the basis of racial characteristics. These were the bantustans.
In spite of these tendencies, linguistic nationalism in most of sub-Saharan Africa is exceptionally weak. Linguistic nationalism is the version of nationalism that is concerned about the value of its own language, that seeks to defend it against other languages, and that encourages its use and enrichment.
Africans south of the Sahara are nationalistic about their race, often about their land, and many are nationalistic about their particular "tribe". But nationalism about African languages is relatively weak as compared with India, the Middle East or France. In this generalization I include Africans in South Africa - I will elaborate on South Africa a little later.
If I am right that nationalism about languages is weak in sub-Saharan Africa, as compared with, say, India, what are the reasons? It is indeed relevant, but not adequate, to point out that most sub-Saharan countries are multilingual. Deciding which indigenous language to promote as a national language carries the danger of ethnic rivalries. This is perfectly true. Any move to make Hausa the national language of Nigeria could precipitate a national crisis in Yorubaland and Igboland. Luganda would be strongly resisted outside Buganda in Uganda.
But India, too, is a multilingual country. And language policies have sometimes provoked riots. The original constitutional ambition to make Hindi (a northern language) the language of all India has understandably met stiff resistance in the South. Compromises have had to be made. In spite of the presence of so many languages in India - and sometimes because of it - linguistic nationalism is one of the political forces in the land.
Where Africa's languages differ from India's is partly a matter of scale. While the three major Nigerian languages (Hausa, Yoruba and Igbo) are spoken by some 20 million people each (Hausa more, others less), most African languages are spoken by far smaller numbers. In contrast, some Indian languages are spoken by up to one hundred million people. Hindi is spoken by several hundred million. In a multilingual society, does the scale of the linguistic constituency contribute to nationalistic sensitivity in defence of the language?
In addition to linguistic diversity and linguistic scale, there is the distinction between the oral tradition and the written. The overwhelming majority of sub-Saharan African languages belonged to the oral tradition until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. There is no ancient written literature outside Ethiopia and the Islamized city states of East and West Africa. Without a substantial written tradition, linguistic nationalism is slow to emerge - although there are exceptions, such as the linguistic nationalism of the Somali based mainly on the oral tradition.
The main Indian languages have a long written tradition, with ancient poets and many written philosophical treatises. These help to deepen a propensity for linguistic nationalism.
But the written tradition can include one additional element - sacred literature. Because most African languages were unwritten until relatively recently, those oral languages do not have sacred scripture. Sacred scripture is itself an additional fertilizer for linguistic nationalism. Linguistic nationalism among the Arabs has been greatly influenced by the Holy Book, the Koran, as well as by great Arab poets of the past.
Finally, we must bear in mind that the humiliation of black people has been much more on the basis of their race than on the basis of their languages. African nationalism is therefore much more inspired by a quest for racial dignity than by a desire to defend African languages.
All these are massive generalizations with a lot of exceptions. Some Ethiopians were literate and sophisticated long before the written word was a common currency among the Anglo-Saxons on the British isles. Large sections of the Tanzanian population today have shown nationalistic attachment to the Swahili language. They write not just letters but poems to the editor as a matter of course.
And yet Africans describe their countries as being "English-speaking" and "French-speaking" in a manner in which ex-colonial Asia never does. Whoever speaks of "English-speaking Asian countries", like India, or "French-speaking Asian countries", like Viet Nam? Because sub-Saharan Africans are rarely linguistic nationalists, they are seldom resentful of their massive dependence on the imported imperial languages.
A politician may speak six indigenous languages fluently. If he or she does not speak the relevant European language, he or she cannot be a member of parliament in the great majority of sub-Saharan African countries.
To be head of state in Kenya, a candidate needs to be trilingual - competence in Swahili, in English and in one of the major ethnic languages of Kenya. Swahili is the trans-ethnic lingua franca at the grassroots level and the primary language of oral speeches at the national level. English is still the official language of documentation, the constitution, the judiciary and most of the debate in parliament. The most influential newspapers are also those in the English language. But, on the basis of experience so far, a Kenyan president has also needed a major ethnic constituency as the foundation of his political support. It is because of these considerations that a Kenyan president has so far needed to be trilingual.
A president of Tanzania, on the other hand, has only needed to be bilingual - with competence in Swahili and the English language. Proficiency in an ethnic language for a major politician in Tanzania has sometimes been more of a liability that an asset. At the very least neither Julius K. Nyerere nor Ali Hassan Mwinyi has needed ethnic languages for his ascent to the pinnacle of the political system.
Technically, a president of Uganda could be unilingual in the English language and get away with it. The country is so linguistically fragmented that many Ugandans are in any case multilingual as citizens - but would be quite prepared to accept a head of state who was unilingual in the imperial language of English, much as the people of Malawi once accepted Hastings Banda as their leader although he had lost competence in his native language and could only speak to the people in English.
In Kenya the official language of the constitution is English but the de facto language of electoral politics is Swahili. In Kenyatta's last years, legislation came before parliament in English and was debated in Swahili because the president insisted that Swahili was the parliamentary language of Kenya at the oral level. In today's parliament in Kenya, legislation still comes in English - but there is the flexibility of debating it in either English or Swahili.
Constitutions all over sub-Saharan Africa are written in a European language, making them unintelligible to the majority of the population. In the great majority of African countries the constitution has not been translated into an African language.
It is difficult to build a culture of constitutionalism in Africa if concepts like "civil liberties", "due process", "independence of the judiciary" and "habeas corpus" are never translated into the indigenous languages accessible to ordinary citizens. Constitutionalism becomes foreign as a system partly because it is completely alien linguistically. Banda spoke only English and became president of Malawi; there is no example in sub-Saharan Africa of a president who is elected to the presidency without a European language.
Yes, linguistic nationalism is weak in Africa south of the Sahara. Surprisingly, the two greatest exceptions are two peoples that are otherwise vastly different from each other - the Somali and the Afrikaners. It is arguable that they are the only ones who are true linguistic nationalists in sub-Saharan Africa. They are very possessive, defensive and proud of their languages and have regarded them as central to their cultural identity.
Do the similarities end there? The Somali are pre-eminently a people of the oral tradition, who did not even have an official orthography for the Somali language until 1972 when Siad Barre finally chose the Roman alphabet. The Afrikaners have had three hundred years of the written tradition, beginning paradoxically with texts written in the Arabic alphabet (which Siad Barre rejected in 1972). But this Afrikaans written tradition has been very limited. In reality Afrikaans was mainly an oral tradition until the nineteenth century.
The Somali have never attempted to impose their language on anybody else over the centuries. Afrikaans, on the other hand, is widely perceived by many South Africans not only as the language of the former oppressor but also as the actual instrument of oppression. Many South Africans believe that Afrikaans was forced not only on millions of school children but also on rural workers, peasants, broadcasting media, domestic employees and simple neighbours in Afrikaans-speaking areas. Unlike the Somali language, Afrikaans was not simply defended against outsiders - it was imposed upon outsiders. Did Afrikaners carry linguistic nationalism too far?
But this issue of language is tied to that other force hostile to ethnicity - the triumph of Western culture as a globalizing experience.
Western liberalism may be doctrinally in favour of pluralism - but Western culture destroyed the civilizations of the Western hemisphere and has put the civilizations of Africa and Asia under siege. The world is getting less diverse because it is getting Westernized. The future may be post-modern but can it ever be post-Western?
What is happening in the 1990s is a decline in the nation state with a temporary strengthening of Western hegemony. The two forces that have militated against ethnicity are themselves diverging - the nation state is under stress while Western hegemony is temporarily enjoying the fruits of a world with only one super power.
The nation state is being challenged at the sub-national level by such forces as religious militancy and ethnic assertiveness. But the nation state is also being challenged at the supra-national level by such developments as the European Union, the North American Free Trade Agreement, the Association of South East Asian Nations and other regional groupings in search of ways of pooling national sovereignties.
On the other hand, the West is triumphant because the Soviet Union has disintegrated, the Warsaw Pact has collapsed, China and Viet Nam are flirting with the market economy, India has returned to the fold of liberal capitalism, the United Nations is under Western domination, Africa is in disarray, and Latin America has returned to the cultural fold of Western civilization. (Latin America has always been culturally part of the First World but economically part of the Third World.)
The two enemies of ethnicity are pulling in different directions - the nation state is growing weaker, Western hegemony is temporarily more triumphant.
Is ethnicity better off or worse off as a result? Ideally ethnic forces should have been released when both the nation state and Western globalization were on the decline. And yet ethnic forces are being released midstream. It is in that sense that the emancipation of ethnicity is, to a certain extent, premature. It should have waited until Western civilization was truly on the decline, simultaneously with the decline of the nation state. Western civilization will decline in the twenty-first century.
And yet that premature emancipation of ethnicity may itself contribute towards the erosion of Western hegemony. What was once a victim of Western hegemony (ethnicity) may reciprocate in kind - a case of the biter bitten. Ethnicity was once diminished by Western globalization. Ethnicity has lived to help diminish the scale of Western globalist pretensions. Islamic militancy may challenge Western supremacy. Tribal identity may challenge the nation state.
The stream of experience meanders on In the vast expanse of the valley to time The new is come and the old is gone And people abide in a changing clime!