Early 20th Century: (The Tribe as Colonial Invention and African Investment — The European Assumption That Africans Did Not Live in Nation-States, Indirect R…

Early 20th Century: (The Tribe as Colonial Invention and African Investment — The European Assumption That Africans Did Not Live in Nation-States, Indirect Rule Requiring Rigid Tribal Categories with Attributed Characteristics, African Agency in Building Tribal Solidarity as Political and Economic Muscle, and the Coalition of Interests Between Colonial States Desiring Governable Units and Africans Creating Identities for Competitive Advantage): The tribe was in large part a European invention, resting on the assumption that Africans did not inhabit anything as sophisticated as nation-states. Colonial states strove to develop tribes as rigid categories — peoples were classified, given territorially demarcated areas, and assigned particular characteristics drawn from nineteenth-century stereotyping: pastoral or agricultural, subservient or dominant, warlike or peace-loving, intelligent or docile. Yet African agency in this process was paramount. Africans themselves discovered that investing in the tribal idea strengthened the group and enabled more vigorous competition within the colonial system — tribal solidarity became a source of political and economic muscle, while elites found that strengthening tribal identities opened access to resources and power. The building of the tribe thus represented what can be called a coalition of interests: the state desired governable tribal units, and Africans built tribes to belong to and created identities to share within defined groups. In the first decades of the twentieth century, Africans remained essentially local in outlook, and localism increasingly took the form of tribalism — a process as old as human society itself, though now operating within the distorting pressures of colonial extraction.