Tribalism

Things are okay at post since I last posted.  No bribing or anything like that. I've had some mystery illness.  I would love to go into the gritty details with you (PCVs love giving details about their stomach ailments), but I'll just say that some days are worse than others.  Next time I have a bad day, I'll get it checked out.  And CARE, the NGO I'm assigned to, is driving me up the wall.  I'm not really sure how in detail I should go into here on the blog because the PC (and probably CARE, too) are Big Brother-ish about them. So I'm going to talk about something kinda boring and not emphasized enough by the Peace Corps: Tribes.

 

There are literally hundreds of tribes in Cameroon, and over 50 in Lagdo alone (when the dam was built, the government encouraged all these groups to migrate to Lagdo).  During training, one our language teachers said the two biggest problems impeding Cameroon's development are Corruption and Tribalism.  People are very proud of their tribes and family history, and it is one of the major sources of tension in Africa because of the arbitrary colonial boundaries.

 

Now I bring this up because I took an African history class second semester junior year at Wooster with Alphine Jefferson, a crazy-ass middle-aged black professor.  I think Alphine forgot what he was teaching (anyone who had him wouldn't be surprised that happened) and decided to just give us a general lesson in the effects of colonialism instead of actual history.  The class boiled down to this statement: First they bring the Bible, then they bring the guns.

 

When I wrote a paper on the novel Things Falls Apart, I wrote the word "tribe" a bunch of times, and Alphine circled the word over and over again, apparently disagreeing with the use of the word. This is a very well-educated man, has been to Africa, and he's disagreeing with the word tribe? Everyone here uses the word tribe, it's how people identify themselves.  I can see where it does have a negative connotation, but Christianity and Islam have created more wars than tribes in Africa, why isn't it politically incorrect to say those?

 

This is all I really have on this subject. I'm going to a Catholic Cameroonian wedding tomorrow morning, should be good times!