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The world undoubtedly expected too much of the Africans: invaded by foreigners as different from themselves as Martians would be from Americans, they were governed like Helots for less than a century, then abruptly cast aside. Africans were roughly in the late Iron Age when the 19th century European colonizers arrived; yet they have been expected to do in a decade or two what took the U.S. and Europe, with far more natural and human resources, several centuries to accomplish. Compared with the West's bloody record of religious and world wars, the Africans have been surprisingly restrained.
The future is another matter. In recent years, some African nations have coped with tribalism rather well—notably Kenya, where Jomo Kenyatta, the charismatic Kikuyu, is so surely in the saddle that he long seeded his government with other tribes and allowed Kenya a two-party system. Unfortunately, Jomo has just banished the opposition party from the current local elections on the ground that its candidates filed the wrong papers.
By contrast, Kenya's neighbors, Zambia, Malawi and Tanzania, have governed themselves better than anyone expected. One paradoxical reason is the very profusion of East African tribes; no one tribe dominates the rest. Moreover, it is one of Africa's many ironies that tribalism can be used to create national unity as well as shred it. In Zambia last year, for example, the country's angry young university graduates pressured older politicians to step aside, and typically inflated assorted tribal claims to clothe their ambitions. Seizing the tribal issues, President Kenneth Kaunda created a unifying nationalist ideology—a supratribal humanism based on what he called the old tribal concept of "a mutual aid society." With that New Dealish theme, Kaunda remains firmly in power.
What Africa needs is precisely such transmutations of tribal loyalties to the larger loyalties of nationhood. The task is formidable, and not only because of the weight of tradition. In many ways, as M.I.T. Professor Harold Isaacs points out, "Africa is the most inhospitable of the major continents to human existence." For all the image of a banana-tree civilization, with food for the reaching, most Africans are permanently undernourished and physically below par or diseased. Life expectancy is barely 40 years at best. Illiteracy is the highest in the world.
For the foreseeable future, African expectations must constantly outrace gratification—a spur that gives hope for ultimate progress but also inevitably promises more civil wars and revolutions. Unfortunately, a new order and a new map of Africa may eventually emerge only after tribes and the would-be nations have gone through many violent tests of strength. If Africa does surmount its troubles, it will have to find substitutes for tribalism, with its emphasis on order, authority and belonging. To harness those values in peaceful ways is Africa's challenge—and a great drama.
*The word is derived from the the Latin tribus, meaning "one-third" of the Roman people, and originally referred to any of the three ethnic communities (Luceres, Ramnes, Tides) perched on the hills of Rome when the city was founded in 700 B.C.