Ethnic Diversity (1)

I’ve hijacked a copy of Understanding Poverty from Gumani house, and some of the articles seem very relevant to the district I’m working in. One in particular, Ethnic Diversity and Poverty Reduction by Edward Miguel, talks about different nation-building policies in Kenya and Tanzania. It presents a case study on similar districts in each country and how their respective nation-building policies have influenced the way ethnic groups in each area relate to one another.

In the case study, you see how Kenya’s public policies and education systems have promoted local identities over one national identity, while in Tanzania the exact opposite has taken place. Tanzanians have made Swahili the national language. The benefit of this is that it is ethnically neutral (people of most tribes speak this) but it is also not closely associated with British colonial rule. In the Tanzania, history lessons begin with the national history and students are taught the local histories as they get older. In Kenya, the local histories are taught first and students do not begin learning about Kenyan national history until level five - by which point many have already dropped out. The essay attributes a lot of the differences here to the first post-independence leaders of each country. Tanzanian leaders adopted a pan-African view and saw tribalism as a challenge to the Tanzanian identity (in the decision making process, arguments related to ethnicity are not admitted). In Kenya, early leaders were tribalists who benefited and even may have supported ethnic conflict in certain regions.

Miguel attributes strong ethnic ties to distrust at the community level and resistance to decisions which would benefit other groups over your own - regardless of relative need. Schools with diverse student populations have a harder time finding funding or getting parental support because there is conflict in the community over which tribe has ownership of control of the school. This problem will extend to any community-level decision making, creating a huge challenge to self-driven development. If a community suffers from a divide like this, how can they collectively take ownership over a project? How can they commit to a behaviour change if there is not trust among all stakeholders? I would love to see if anyone working on CLTS has noticed a difference between working with ethnically diverse communities and relatively homogenous ones.

In Bunkpurugu town, the different tribes seem to get along fairly well. It is in the outlying communities of the district that conflicts have erupted. Houses were burned down, people were killed, and many crops were lost. Luckily it seems to have tamed before the planting season ended, but the delay and damage to the land means that many will have a hard time getting enough food to last the dry season. Also, people are now having to make the trade-off between rebuilding their homes and working the land for food. For these communities, I am realizing that the threat of ethnic conflict is the dominant factor affecting their food security. Before I came, I am not sure I would have automatically linked the two.

Repercussions of this conflict affect even more than general safety and food security. Because the community members are occupied trying to salvage their livelihoods, a local NGO has pulled out its extension services which were aimed at promoting school enrolment for young girls. They were achieving some results but the program stalled during the conflict and they could no longer justify the use of resources in that area. It is particularly disturbing because the community was chosen because it held traditional values that devalued education for girls which served to isolate and disempower them. All governmental involvement is now focused on peacekeeping and issues like this have to be ignored for the time being.

The most important thing that I have learned here is that there is no real coordinated movement of one tribe against another. Avery case of ethnic conflict that I have heard of in the district stems from conflict between individuals. In the 1990s, twenty two people died in an fight that arose when a member of one tribe stole a guinea fowl from a member of the other tribe. When the owner went to complain about the stolen guinea fowl, he was beaten by the burglar’s family. Members of the owner’s family retaliated and the situation escalated into a war between the two tribes. Similarly, two tribes are currently in conflict with each other because one man bought land from another, who then took it back.

A friend of mine explained to me that the tribal identities begin in early childhood. He told me about a football team that was practicing and one boy tackled another. It was clearly a foul and all of the boys on the team knew it. Despite the fact that the boy was wrong, the other boys from his tribe sided with him and a began to fight with the others. In this case, the tribal identity took precedent over the team spirit and even the established rules of the game. He explained that were the same boy to have fouled one from his own tribe, the punishment would have been given and the game would have continued without a problem.

Extending this mentality to adulthood, one can easily see how these individual disputes explode into ethnic conflict. The sense of right and wrong is even trumped by tribal loyalty. So what of self-policing? Miguel talks about a system where tribes punish their own members for wrongs committed against other tribes. It seems like common sense, so why don’t people practice it here?

I am not sure why. Perhaps people don’t make the connection between the offence and the suffering brought on by the conflict. Because it doesn’t seem to them like the offender actually caused the conflict, then there is no need to punish. But if an act which would bring conflict could be seen as a wrong committed against one’s own tribe, then self-policing becomes a natural option. Publicly sanctioning the individual would also give some satisfaction to the other tribe and likely prevent retaliation. Any chapter members (or anyone, really) have any info on places where introducing this system has actually worked? What kind of problems do you see with implementing something like this?