Understanding ethnic conflict in post- Independence Africa

By Kirubel Tadesse

Visiting Ethiopia last week, Professor Mahmood Mandani, Hebert Lehman Professor of Government, Department of Anthropology of the Columbia University in New York City, gave three lectures over three days. In his first lecture in Addis Ababa, Professor Mahmood spoke on Understanding Ethnic Conflict in Post –Independence Africa, in a program organized by InterAfrica Group at Sheraton Addis on February 19, 2008. The lecture was attended by the international diplomatic community, academic and civil society organization representatives and a number of Members of Parliament. Below is his comprehensive lecture and some replies to questions raised by participants during the lecture.
“In 1986 Museveni came to power and he asked me to chair the Local Government Commission. Basically, the Commission was about a relationship between state and peasants. The idea was that we could make all the recommendations we wanted about the system of governance but not very much about the political economy. In that experience, as we spent two years going around the country interviewing peasants, chiefs, and officials in different districts set me thinking of the system of governance. It made me realize that it wasn’t enough to assume that we could divide the system of rule simply from the system of production. The system of rule had to be autonomous.
If you are a political economist and you want a diagram about the political economy of your country, then you look at the table of national products or income distribution and it would give you different income groups. It would tell how the society stands in terms of the system of production and distribution. But it wouldn’t tell you anything about how this population is ruled. If you really want to know how this population is ruled, I would suggest to you look at the census.
The census is basically where the state classifies the population. And the way it classifies the population is the first important rule in how it goes about administrating and ruling its population. Let me give you an example and take colonial census. It had two categories; one was called race and the other was called tribe. The senses enter any person who lives in that country as a member of a race or tribe, but not both. So the question is where do you belong to? You would realize that the answer is very simple; it was that those who are considered to be indigenous from the country were supposed to belong to tribes. And those who are considered to be not indigenous belong to races. Races and tribes were identities; race for no not indigenous and tribe for those who are indigenous. So if you look at British colonial census, under colonized races, you would find Arabs, Tutsi, and others. It doesn’t mean that they all came from outside, it means that’s how the state considered them. The state considered them not to be indigenous. There were subject races.
Now what difference did it make? The first and most important difference it made was that it made difference in law. All the races were governed under the single law called civil law where as tribes were governed in what was called customary law. There are several differences between these two kinds of laws. The language of civil law is the language of rights. A right in a sense that civil law claims to set limits to power and rights are supposedly the limits of power. But the language of custom was not rights, it was tradition. And tradition was not claim to set limits to power. It is the right of power to enforce tradition. There is a difference in how the two are organized. When I was in this local government commission and we go to the village and talk to the peasant and realized that the chief was official government representative. The chief comes at the beginning of the year and enumerates the peasant’s land, cows, goats and all belongings. On the basis of numeration, he will necessitate the graduated tax. The peasant has to pay the graduated tax and if he feels he has been unfairly assessed, the same chief listens to the appeal and decides whether the peasant had been fairly assessed or not. After his decision, if the peasant fails to pay the tax in time, the same chief fines or jails him. Since there is no jail in villages, the peasant stays home but works for the chief or one of his friends for free. The chief has a right to pass by laws provided that it doesn’t contradict with the national law. What I am saying is all moments of power; the legislative, the executive, administrative and the judicative are combined in a single force, the chief. In civil power the moments of power are differentiated. The courts are separated from the administration; the administration is separated from the legislation which is separate from the executive. You don’t have democracy if you don’t have legislation, ok. But in this village where I was, there can be democracy and peasants are involved for their representative in parliament but the authority the peasant faces is the chief.
Part of the traditional right of the chief is to hand of corporal punishment. After the First World War the British banned corporal punishment in colonies except for customary authorities. Same thing with the French, they banned the corporal punishment after the Second World War except for customary authorities. Why this difference between how the tribes and rules are ruled? If you recon Brtish, Portuguese, French or South African official literature, they will tell that these differences reflect a difference in culture. Does it? Think of it! Those who were defined in races; Europeans, Asians, Arabs, Tutsi, and others came from different parts of the world, so naturally, with very different historical background, but yet live under the same law where as the tribes who are all neighbors ever since eternity; with so much relations like similar languages, live in different laws. My suggestion to you is that the reason was not culture. Races were meant to live in a single political community, tribes were not. Races were not just tribes without rights; races were paned to locality, homeland, to a custom and authority. The basic rule was if you are supposed to live in a single community you must live under a single law. If they make you live under separate laws, because you are culturally different that means you are not supposed to be from a single country in the future.
The target was how you fragment the majorities into minorities. The project to fragment the majorities into minorities was a legal project. In 1857 Queen Victoria made a statement that they won’t interfere with religion. But what was the boundary of religions and who had the authority to decide that boundary? But the British have been engaged in maximum interference and decided what are the authentic religious laws and religious leaders.
This was a program to fragment native into so many tribes and it was created by colonials. It was the colonial’s tradition. This colonial tradition claims that tradition was a single and there was single traditional authority. None of that is true in the history of any independent country.