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Ethnic Pluralism and National Governance in Africa: A Survey Michael Chege Introduction At the height of the post-conflict violence in Kenya early in 2008, the noted New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof visited Kenya and described (in the Times issue of February 21, 2008) the most gruesome human butchery in what he referred to as savage “primeval tribal tensions that threaten Kenya’s future”. Like many others before him, he concluded that tribalism is the curse of Africa. Prior to that, the Los Angeles Times in its issue of 2nd January, 2008 had reported “savage tribal killings” in Kenya, while in the New York Times issue of December 31, 2008, its Nairobi correspondent, in an article that provoked an outrage inAfrica, the US and Europe, wrote that the killings in Kenya had “tapped into an atavistic vein of tribal tensions that always lay beneath the surface…but until now had not produced widespread mayhem”. With few exceptions, western press coverage of the Kenyan crisis took similar lines. All of this cruel, gratuitous violence was taking place in Kenya, the readers were informed, in a country which was previously considered one of the most stable and promising countries in Africa. Reading this soon after the human disasters in once-promising Zimbabwe and Cote d’Ivoire, even Western readers who would be normally well-disposed to Africa would have been inclined to think that the banner heading of The Economist magazine’s issue of 20th May 2000 proclaiming Africa “The Hopeless Continent” may not have been wrong altogether. And it is not just western readers and journalists who may have been inclined to feel that way. For the record, I have heard and read many times the same sentiments conveyed by many educatedAfricans in their lament on violence and political instability in Africa.Almost in unison,African political leaders and intellectuals denounce “tribalism” in Africa (or what some in this volume refer to as “negative ethnicity”) as the root source of Africa’s political problems. Invested with this negative connotation, what is commonly called “tribalism” is viewed as an introverted moral corruption on the part of a social group (or its leaders) and failure to rise up to the higher standards of nationalism and ethnic impartiality in making important political decisions. Logically then, the solution to the problem becomes a Ethnic Pluralism and National Governance in Africa 3 4 ETHNIC DIVERSITY IN EASTERN AFRICA wholesale moral regeneration of a nation’s communities to transcend tribalism, which is why African political leaders literally “preach” against tribalism. Abolishing tribalism, overcoming ethnic parochialism with an allembracing nationalism is seen as the overriding nation-building test, in which so many African countries have failed. In this chapter, we take a different perspective. We take ethnic (or what is derisively called tribal) identity in Africa as a universal phenomenon under which political mobilization is done using primary human characteristics like region of one’s origin, skin colour, mother tongue, culture, and—above all—putative ancestral origins. It bears most if not all the traits that are conventionally associated with nationalism. Furthermore, we seek to demonstrate that the first step towards dealing with conflict based on ethnic identities is not national uniformity, rather it is found in toleration and respect of cultural differences (see, Schipper, this volume), combined with placement of national interests above the parochial. It is largely a matter of peaceful coexistence of many diverse interests, combined with great deference to shared national values and institutions by all of them, rather than an elimination of any group’s ambitions. In addition there are now tested political and institutional arrangements that African countries should adopt in order to remove the negative sting associated with ethnic identity without losing some of the benefits that come along with cultural diversity (see Kimonye, this volume). In fact, some of best suited institutional arrangements are those commonly abjured by simplistic moral analysis and prescriptions of the kind mentioned above. Global resurgence of ethnic claims Contrary to the racist claims from the international press (and elsewhere) that attributeAfrican political conflicts and mass murder to the uniqueAfrican psychological attachment to “tribalism”, the problem of conflicting ethnic claims is a universal one, a resurgence of which we have seen particularly after the collapse of global communism in 1989. What varies most is its intensity from country to country over time, and the local capacity to devise lasting governance institutions to manage it in the interests of the common good. In one of the...

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