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[delux_vivens]

Pambazuka has a review up of this really interesting sounding book:

Extreme incidents of violence in post-Colonial Africa have frequently been explained through the discourses of tribalism and ethnic hatred. A variant of this narrative is the obsession with Africa’s ‘failed’ and ‘collapsed’ states that are said to be paralysed by kinship and

Comments

[femmeflame]

I got into a months' long argument with a white swazilander about the state of swaziland, south african apartheid's shadow on surrounding land locked countries. This person wanted to continue to assert that the problematic stuff of the monarchy there had nothing to do with british colonization efforts and connections through kenya to south africa- a country which was infact a white local neo-colonial power with it's money, banks, ports etc.

thanks for posting this....

[gaudysalamander]

Does sound interesting. Thanks for the link.

[fa_ikaika]

The book sounds good. I don't know if she addresses it directly, but I am increasingly of the opinion that the slave trade and both direct AND indirect rule under colonialism facilitated the exponential growth of a kind of predatory notion of leadership and inter-ethnic behavior that lies at the root of many of the cultural modes used to justify neo-colonial behavior and ethnic hatred in Sub-Saharan Africa.

The idea that "others" can be used (literally) to increase your own wealth or influence, without regard to the cost of your own policies towards said others became the default standard of behavior for the slave states and became transposed into elite behavior towards ordinary folks and dominant ethnic groups' attitudes towards marginalized ones.

Colonialism didn't just have economic effects, it had deep philosophical and cultural effects as well - from much earlier than the mid-late 19th century.

h/ts to Frantz Fanon and David Edwards

[mycolorfulheart]

It always really bothered me when people chalk up all African problems to 'tribal feuding' and such. No one ever called the 100 years war a tribal feud, but really what's the difference?