Ethnicity and Race in Africa

While race thus refers to the social construction of difference on the basis of perceived physical or morphological differences, ethnicity is supposed to refer to cultural differences between people. The two obviously intersect in many ways since racists readily use the concept of ethnicity to mask their racism. The apartheid regime, for example, changed its official nomenclature from race and tribe to ethnic group and then to nation in an effort to legitimize its policy of territorial segregation. The term closest to ethnicity and in fact still in use after being systematically discredited for many years is tribalism.

In broad terms there are two main approaches to the study of ethnicity. On the one hand, the primordialist approach sees ethnicity and ethnic diversity as relatively permanent features that are deeply rooted in the essential and particularistic experiences of groups of people. People are thus divided on an enduring basis and in an unchanging manner. In this view ethnic groups are seen as distinctive units usually based on the idea of a common descent, where the commonality of culture is inherited and thus given from the past and people are born into particular ethnic groups. On the other hand, the social constructionist approach sees ethnicity as a modern instrumentalist symbol in advancing the material interests of groups whose composition may change in response to competitive opportunities. In this sense ethnicities are created or "invented" by elites as they seek to manipulate ideas about ethnicity in order to secure their own interests. The primordialist/constructionist divide has had a profound impact on the debate about the significance of ethnicity in Africa. The main terms of this debate concern whether ethnic groups connote real categories of people or whether cultural differences are manipulated by pernicious political leaders for their own reasons of personal aggrandizement and petty ambitions of power. The position of the primordialists on ethnicity comes close to the concept of race as a historical given, and the distinctions between these are quite blurred. However, the constructionists reject these essentialisms and instead allow room for choice and individual agency in the formation of ethnicities.