Abstract
The particularity of tribal allegiance in SSA is linked to a peculiar feature of the region: its profusion of tribes. SSA has more tribes than North Africa, Asia, and South America—the regions with which SSA is compared. This profusion makes tribes in SSA a special category, which cannot be equated with “ethnicity” or be regarded as a creation of colonial rule. To support this assertion, this chapter makes a comparative and quantitative inventory of tribes in these four regions: SSA, North Africa, Asia, and South America. The quantitative evidence helps to draw the conceptual implications for the distinctiveness of tribal allegiance in SSA.
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Notes
- 1.
R. Collins and J. Burns, A History of Sub-Saharan Africa, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, p. 40 (Collins and Burns 2007).
- 2.
The figures are from and calculated from William Spencer, ed., Global Studies: The Middle East, Guilford, CT: McGraw-Hill/Dushkin, 2004 (Spencer 2004); Paul B. Goodwin, ed., Global Studies: Latin America, Guilford, CT: McGraw-Hill/Dushkin, 2004 (Goodwin 2004); Jeffress Ramsay and Wayne Edge, eds., Global Studies: Africa, Guilford, CT: McGraw-Hill/Dushkin, 2004 (Ramsay and Edge 2004); and Thomas Krabacher, Ezekiel Kalipeni, and Azzedine Layachi, eds., Global Studies: Africa, Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2009, pp. 104–152 (Krabacher et al. 2009); and Hammond, The Ultimate Atlas, vol. 2, Hammond Inc. 1989, p. 48.
- 3.
R. C. Verma, Indian Tribes through the Ages, New Delhi: Publication Division, 1990, p. 1 (Verma 1990).
- 4.
- 5.
Ajit K. Danda, Tribal Ethnography, Indian Council of Social Science, 1996, p. 3. (Danda 1996).
- 6.
Mohamad Z. Yakan, Almanac of African Peoples and Nations, New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1999 (Yakan 1999).
- 7.
By counting smaller tribal groups for each country, and adding them up, I obtained 4290 groups; to this number I added the major/bigger groups, whose number of 364 I reduced to 334 by eliminating 30 cases of double counting in the data. In the case of Nigeria and Congo-Kinshasa, the two countries with the largest number of tribes, I used Yakan’s data for Nigeria and Congo’s own estimate of 400 ethnic groups rather than Yakan’s data.
- 8.
Calculated from Hammond, The Ultimate Atlas, vol. 2, p. 48; Angus Madison, The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective, Paris: OECD, 2001, Table A-C, p. 175 (Madison 2001); and World Bank, Sub-Saharan Africa: From Crisis to Sustainable Growth, Washington, DC, 1989, Table 1, p. 221 (World Bank 1989).
- 9.
See Meyer Fortes, Kinship and the Social Order, Chicago: Aldine Publishing Co., 1963, pp. 276–310 (Fortes 1963); Wyatt MacGaffey, Custom and Government in Lower Congo, Berkeley: UC Press, 1970, p. 86 (MacGaffey 1970); Jacques Maquet, Power and Society in Africa, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971, p. 42 (Maquet 1971).
- 10.
I. Schapera, Government and Politics in Tribal Societies, London: C.A. Watts, 1956, pp. 17–18 (Schapera 1956).
- 11.
I. Schapera, Government and Politics in Tribal Societies, p. 32 and also pp. 11–32.
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Sangmpam, S.N. (2017). The Profusion of Tribes as a Determinant Factor in SSA. In: Ethnicities and Tribes in Sub-Saharan Africa. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50200-7_4
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