African Social Thought - Ubuntu, the Invented Tribe and the Bifurcated State

African social thought presents this Part's problem in its most acute form. The continent experienced the most complete colonial disruption of any region covered here; its academic institutions were built latest and under the tightest constraints; and its scholars have had to argue about whether their own core concepts are recoverable traditions or colonial inventions.

It has also produced the sharpest single analysis of how colonial rule constructed the categories through which African societies are still governed — an argument that applies well beyond Africa and that this course has already used twice.

Rwanda, April 1994.

At roadblocks across the country, people are stopped and asked to produce an identity card. The card carries an ethnic designation: Hutu, Tutsi or Twa. Those designated Tutsi are killed.

Around eight hundred thousand people die in a hundred days, most of them killed by neighbours, with machetes, in daylight.

Now trace the card.

The identity card system was introduced by the Belgian colonial administration in 1933. Each Rwandan was registered with a fixed ethnic category, determined by administrative criteria that included, in some accounts, the number of cattle owned — the threshold commonly cited being ten.

Before that, the Hutu/Tutsi distinction had been real and had been something else: a distinction with occupational, economic and status content, in which movement between categories occurred, in which intermarriage occurred, and in which the boundary was not fixed by law. Kinyarwanda was and is spoken by all of them; the religion was shared; the territory was shared.

The Belgians, working from a theory imported from European racial science — the "Hamitic hypothesis," which held that the Tutsi were a superior race of Nilotic origin who had arrived from the north to rule an indigenous Bantu population — made the distinction racial, permanent, documented and administratively consequential. Tutsi were favoured in appointments, education and administration for decades; the balance was reversed near independence; and the categories, by then fixed on paper, became the terms of a politics of grievance.

Mahmood Mamdani's When Victims Become Killers (2001) traces this in detail, and his central claim is precise: the genocide was not the eruption of ancient tribal hatred. It was the outcome of a political process in which a colonial state racialised a social distinction, made it legal and hereditary, and thereby created the categories in which a modern political conflict was conducted.

The card was a piece of paper produced by an administrative decision in 1933. Sixty-one years later it determined who was killed.

That is what "categories outlive the arrangement that produced them" means (6.1.1), and it is why this Part exists.

The problem African social thought has had to work on is stated most clearly by asking what "traditional African society" means.

The available answers are all unsatisfactory in different ways.

The colonial answer: a mosaic of tribes, each with a chief, a customary law, a territory and a culture. This is the administrative map, and Mamdani's argument is that it was substantially produced by the administration.

The nationalist answer: a set of civilisations with their own political forms, philosophies and achievements, obscured by colonial denigration and recoverable through scholarship. This is Cheikh Anta Diop and the recovery tradition, and it produced real historical work and some overreach.

The philosophical answer: an underlying African conception of personhood, community and reality, distinct from the Western, and expressible in concepts like ubuntu. This is the ethnophilosophy tradition, and it has been attacked from within African philosophy as hard as from outside.

And the sceptical answer: that "traditional African society" names nothing, because the continent contains a thousand languages and a vast range of political forms — from stateless societies to centralised kingdoms — and any generalisation across it is doing what Orientalism did (6.1.1).

The last is analytically strongest and politically hardest, because it leaves scholars from formerly colonised societies with no positive account to set against the one they are contesting.

This lesson takes the argument seriously rather than resolving it, because the argument is the tradition's most interesting feature.

The invention of the tribe

The strongest and best-evidenced argument in African social science, and it is Mamdani's.

Citizen and Subject (1996) analyses colonial rule in Africa and finds a common structure across British indirect rule, French assimilation and South African segregation: a bifurcated state.

Two forms of rule, for two populations:

Civil society — urban, governed by civil law, with rights, courts and (for settlers and a small assimilated elite) citizenship.

And the rural areas — governed by "customary law," administered by chiefs appointed or confirmed by the colonial state, with the chief combining executive, legislative, judicial and administrative authority in a single office.

Mamdani's term for the rural form is "decentralised despotism." The chief was not a traditional ruler operating traditional authority. He was a colonial official with unusually concentrated powers, legitimated as customary.

And the crucial analytical point: "customary law" was not the codification of pre-existing custom. It was produced — through inquiries, chiefs' testimony, administrators' compilations and courts' rulings — and what was produced was systematically more rigid, more patriarchal and more favourable to elders and chiefs than the practices it claimed to record.

The tribe was the unit of this system. Rural populations were assigned to tribes; tribes had territories; territories had chiefs; chiefs administered customary law. Where the map did not fit, the map won.

Mamdani's central claim: colonial rule did not simply divide colonised populations. It divided them by two different principles at once.

Race governed the division between citizens and subjects — who was ruled by civil law and who by customary.

Ethnicity (tribe) governed the division among subjects — which customary law applied to whom.

And the postcolonial consequence is his sharpest point. Independence deracialised the state — Africans became citizens — without detribalising the rural areas, where the chiefly apparatus, the customary law and the tribal categories largely remained.

Which produces the characteristic postcolonial pattern: an urban politics of citizenship and a rural politics of ethnicity, with the state's legitimacy resting on the first and its administration on the second. The unfinished business of decolonisation, on this account, is not the state but the countryside.

Mamdani's argument sits within a broader body of work, and the founding statement is worth having.

Terence Ranger's chapter "The Invention of Tradition in Colonial Africa", in Hobsbawm and Ranger's The Invention of Tradition (1983), makes the case in detail.

His argument: much of what came to be regarded as timeless African tradition was codified, systematised or created between roughly 1870 and 1930, and Europeans and Africans participated together in its production.

The mechanisms he identifies:

Codification. Flexible, negotiated, locally varying practices were written down as fixed rules, because administrators needed rules. Writing removes the negotiation.

Systematisation. Ambiguities were resolved and exceptions eliminated to produce something that could be applied.

The importation of European models. Ranger's most striking finding: British administrators brought with them a set of "invented traditions" of their own — the neo-traditional ceremonial of the Victorian monarchy, the public school, the regiment and the church — and used them as templates for what African tradition should look like. The chief's court was modelled partly on the magistrate's; chiefly ceremonial partly on royal ceremonial.

And African participation. Elders, chiefs and men had interests in versions of custom that strengthened their positions. Ranger and subsequent scholarship — Martin Chanock's work on customary law is the best — document this repeatedly: the codified custom is systematically harder on women and on the young than the practices it replaced.

Chanock's finding is worth stating precisely. In colonial courts, senior men gave evidence about custom; administrators recorded it; and the resulting body of law restricted women's property rights, marriage choices and access to divorce more than pre-colonial practice had. "Custom" became a resource in an ongoing internal argument, and one side had the ear of the recording state.

And the necessary qualification, which Ranger himself made in a later self-criticism: "invention" is too strong. The materials were real; the practices had histories; and the process was better described as "imagination" or reworking than as fabrication. Africans were not handed a fictitious past; existing traditions were selected, hardened and put to new use.

That correction matters, because the strong version of the invention thesis lends itself to a reading in which colonised societies had no history of their own before the colonisers gave them one — which is the Orientalist claim (6.1.1) in inverted form.

Ubuntu, and the ethnophilosophy argument

Ubuntu is the most widely known concept in African social thought and the most contested.

The Nguni maxim: umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu — "a person is a person through other persons." Its Sotho-Tswana equivalent, motho ke motho ka batho, and cognates across a wide range of Bantu languages.

The claim: personhood is not prior to relationship but constituted by it. One becomes a person through recognition by and participation in a community, and the qualities the term names — humaneness, compassion, hospitality, reciprocity — follow from that constitution.

Its sociological interest is real. It is a relational ontology of the person, comparable to Mead's social self (2.3.3) and to chaxugeju (6.3.1), and arrived at independently.

Its public career: it became central to post-apartheid South African discourse, appeared in the interim constitution's postamble, and was the stated framework of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission — Desmond Tutu's No Future Without Forgiveness (1999) presents restorative rather than retributive justice as an ubuntu principle.

And the criticisms are substantial, and they come from African scholars.

The ethnophilosophy objection. Paulin Hountondji's African Philosophy: Myth and Reality (1976) is the standard attack. His target is Placide Tempels's Bantu Philosophy (1945) — a Belgian missionary's account of a unified Bantu worldview based on "vital force" — and the tradition that followed it.

Hountondji's argument: ethnophilosophy attributes to a whole people a collective, unanimous, unauthored philosophy. This is not how philosophy works anywhere. European philosophy is a record of individuals disagreeing; presenting African thought as a consensual worldview held by everyone denies Africans the individuality and the disagreement that constitute intellectual life.

And it was produced largely by Europeans, or by Africans writing for European audiences, and it flatters exactly the expectation that Africa is communal where Europe is individual.

Kwasi Wiredu and Kwame Anthony Appiah have made related arguments: that "African philosophy" should mean philosophy done by Africans, argumentatively and individually, not the reconstruction of a folk worldview.

The instrumentalisation objection. Ubuntu has been invoked in South African corporate management literature, in political rhetoric and in nation-building discourse in ways that critics — including Christian Gade and others working on its conceptual history — have documented as recent and strategic. Gade's historical work found that the term's use as a philosophical concept in written sources is substantially a twentieth-century development, with its political prominence dating from the 1990s.

And the political objection: an emphasis on reconciliation, harmony and communal restoration can operate to suppress claims for redistribution and accountability. South African critics have made exactly this argument about the TRC: that amnesty for perpetrators and reconciliation as a national project displaced questions of property, land and reparation which remain unresolved.

The honest position: ubuntu names something real in the relational conception of personhood across a wide range of societies; its status as a unified philosophy is a construction with a datable history; and its political deployment has done identifiable work, some of it good and some of it convenient.

Go deeper

The recovery tradition and its problems

Cheikh Anta Diop (1923–1986), Senegalese, trained in Paris in history, physics and Egyptology, argued that ancient Egypt was a Black African civilisation, culturally and linguistically continuous with the rest of the continent, and that African history had been systematically severed from its most prestigious achievement.

His political purpose was explicit: a people denied a history can be denied a future.

The scholarly assessment is mixed and should be stated fairly. The strong claims about Egyptian population origins and about linguistic continuity are not supported by the current evidence, and the general thesis of a unified African cultural matrix is not accepted. What Diop achieved was different and substantial: he forced the question of African historical agency onto an academic agenda that had assumed the continent had no history worth the name, and he did it with technical work in several disciplines at a time when almost nobody was doing it.

The Ibadan and Dar es Salaam schools of the 1960s and 70s did the durable work: reconstructing precolonial African history from oral tradition, archaeology and Arabic sources, and establishing the existence and complexity of states, trade networks and intellectual traditions that colonial historiography had denied.

Walter Rodney's How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972), written at Dar es Salaam, is the best-known product — a dependency argument (4.6.3) applied to the continent, and it remains widely read and widely criticised for underweighting internal factors.

The institutional problem

African universities were built late and have been under sustained pressure.

Most were founded in the 1950s and 60s, at or after independence, with the first generation trained abroad.

The structural adjustment programmes of the 1980s and 90s reduced higher education funding across much of the continent, on the argument that primary education offered higher returns. The effect on research capacity, libraries, journals and salaries was severe, and it produced the emigration commonly called the brain drain.

CODESRIA — the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa, founded in Dakar in 1973 — is the principal institutional response: a pan-African research council supporting African-based scholarship, publishing in English and French, and explicitly aimed at reducing dependence on external funding agendas.

And the dependency problem is the one Alatas named (4.6.3): research funded by external donors tends to answer external questions, on external timetables, in external formats. CODESRIA's founding purpose was to build the capacity to set the questions, and its own assessment of how far this has succeeded is candid.

What the tradition gives the discipline

The bifurcated state — the best available analysis of how colonial rule structured the postcolonial one, and it applies well beyond Africa. Any state that governs some populations by general law and others by special customary or traditional arrangements is a case, and India's Scheduled Areas (6.2.5) are one.

The invention/imagination of tradition — the demonstration that codification is not description, that written custom is harder than practised custom, and that the process of recording gives one party's version legal force. This is 6.2.1's book view, with an archive of how the book got written.

Decentralised despotism — the specific mechanism by which authority is concentrated in a local office and legitimated as traditional.

A relational ontology of the person, which — with Mead and Fei — gives the discipline three independent versions of the same insight and no excuse for treating the bounded individual as natural.

And a live methodological argument about whether the recovery of a tradition is scholarship or construction, conducted with unusual honesty by scholars who have a stake in the answer.

"Tribes are ancient African social units." The populations and their distinctions are real; the fixed, territorialised, chief-administered "tribe" of the colonial map is substantially an administrative product (Mamdani, Ranger).

"Customary law records African custom." It was produced through inquiries in which senior men testified and administrators recorded — and Chanock's work shows the result was systematically harder on women and the young than the practice it replaced.

"Ranger showed African tradition was invented." He said so and later corrected himself: "imagination" and reworking are more accurate than fabrication, and the strong version reproduces the claim that colonised societies had no history.

"Ubuntu is ancient African philosophy." The relational conception of personhood is widely attested; its formulation as a unified philosophy has a datable twentieth-century history, and its political prominence dates from the 1990s.

"Ethnophilosophy recovers African thought." Hountondji's objection is that attributing a unanimous unauthored worldview to a people denies them the disagreement that constitutes intellectual life — and that the tradition was produced substantially for European audiences.

"The Rwandan genocide was ancient tribal hatred." Mamdani's analysis traces a colonial racialisation of a social distinction, fixed by identity card in 1933, that became the terms of a modern political conflict.

Why it matters

It supplies the mechanism by which colonial categories became postcolonial politics, with an archive. The bifurcated state, decentralised despotism and the codification of custom together explain more about how formerly colonised states actually work than any general theory of development.

It documents a category killing people. The 1933 identity card and 1994. This course has said repeatedly that categories outlive the arrangements that produce them; Rwanda is where the claim stops being an academic observation.

It contains the discipline's most honest argument about recovering a tradition. Hountondji attacking ethnophilosophy from inside African philosophy, and Ranger correcting his own thesis, are both examples of scholars declining the easier position available to them. That is worth more than either conclusion.

And it gives a third independent relational ontology of the person. Mead in Chicago, Fei in Wujiang, and the umuntu maxim across Bantu-speaking Africa. Three traditions with no contact arriving at the claim that the person is constituted by relationship — which is either a striking convergence or evidence that the bounded individual was always the odd assumption.

Rwanda 1994: Belgian identity cards from 1933, built on the imported Hamitic hypothesis, fixed a social distinction as a racial one — and sixty-one years later determined who was killed. Mamdani: not ancient hatred but a colonial racialisation that supplied the categories of a modern political conflict.

Citizen and Subject (1996): the bifurcated state — urban civil society under civil law, rural subjects under "customary law" administered by chiefs holding executive, legislative and judicial power in one office. Decentralised despotism. And the postcolonial consequence: independence deracialised the state without detribalising the countryside, leaving an urban politics of citizenship and a rural politics of ethnicity.

Race divided citizens from subjects; ethnicity divided subjects from each other.

Ranger's invention of tradition: codification removing negotiation; systematisation removing exception; European invented traditions used as templates; and African participation, with Chanock showing that recorded custom was systematically harder on women and the young. Ranger later corrected "invention" to "imagination" — the strong version reproduces the claim that colonised societies had no history.

Ubuntu — umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu, "a person is a person through other persons" — is a genuine relational ontology of the person, alongside Mead and Fei. Its criticisms come from African scholars: Hountondji's attack on ethnophilosophy for attributing a unanimous unauthored worldview to a people and thereby denying them disagreement; Gade's conceptual history dating its philosophical formulation to the twentieth century; and the political objection that reconciliation displaced redistribution in the TRC settlement.

The recovery tradition: Diop, whose strong claims are unsupported and who forced African historical agency onto the agenda; the Ibadan and Dar es Salaam schools; and Rodney.

And the institutional problem: universities founded in the 1950s–60s, structural adjustment cutting higher education funding, and CODESRIA founded in 1973 to build the capacity to set the questions.

Bifurcated state — colonial rule dividing urban citizens under civil law from rural subjects under customary law.

Decentralised despotism — the concentration of executive, legislative and judicial authority in the colonial chief, legitimated as customary.

Customary law — law produced through colonial inquiry and codification, systematically more rigid and patriarchal than the practice it claimed to record.

Deracialisation without detribalisation — Mamdani's account of what independence achieved and left undone.

Invention (or imagination) of tradition — the codification, systematisation and reworking of practices into fixed tradition.

Hamitic hypothesis — the imported racial theory used to explain the Hutu/Tutsi distinction as a difference of origin.

Ubuntu — the relational conception of personhood: a person is a person through other persons.

Ethnophilosophy — the reconstruction of a collective African worldview; attacked by Hountondji for denying individual authorship and disagreement.

CODESRIA — the pan-African social science research council founded in Dakar in 1973.

One — trace an identity document. Find a state-issued category in any country that fixes an ascriptive identity. Ask when it was introduced, by whom, for what purpose, and what it now does.

Two — test the bifurcation. Identify a state that governs some populations under general law and others under special or customary arrangements. Ask who is in each category and what the difference produces.

Three — check a codification. Take any body of "traditional" or "customary" rules and find out when it was written down, by whom, and on whose testimony. The answer is usually recent and usually one-sided.

Four — hold the ethnophilosophy dilemma. Write the case for recovering a suppressed tradition and the case that unified traditions are constructions. Both are strong; that is the tradition's central argument.

Five — collect the third convergence. Compare Mead's social self, Fei's chaxugeju and the umuntu maxim. Three traditions, no contact, one claim. Ask what that suggests about the bounded individual.