WeeklySA_AdminCOHESION: Tribalism may appear violently traditional or polished and intellectual, but both forms share the same primitive belief: group identity entitles people to power, respect and privilege above others…
By Themba Khumalo
Tribalism is an intellectual surrender disguised as pride, a retreat from the difficult business of proving one’s worth into the comforting fiction that worth is inherited.
It is an evolutionary relic, a toxic residue scraped from the floor of primitive history and repackaged by opportunistic demagogues to poison the contemporary wellspring of social cohesion.
Stripped of its romanticised folklore and ancestral posturing, tribalism is collective narcissism masquerading as heritage — an inward-looking paralysis that trades human progress for the comfort of inherited vanity.
There is nothing wrong with loving one’s culture, speaking one’s language, honouring one’s traditions or taking pride in the history of one’s people. The rot begins when cultural identity is dragged from heritage into political entitlement, when belonging is transformed into a claim of superiority, authority or ownership over others.
That is the point at which culture becomes chauvinism and pride becomes pathology.
We live in a republic constantly menaced by people who mistake the geographical accident of their birth for a divine mandate, as though being born into a particular language, clan or historical community comes with an invisible deed of ownership over the country and its institutions.
This disease is not confined to one language group. It appears across our social and political landscape, sometimes roaring from the back of a crowd and sometimes speaking in the polished language of people who would recoil at the crude tribalism they condemn in others.
There are self-appointed custodians of martial ancestry who invoke historical grievance and traditional authority as though the democratic state were merely an interruption to an older order.
There are also tribal elitists who regard their particular lineage as possessing a natural monopoly on intellect, administrative sophistication, cultural refinement and moral rectitude.
The vocabulary differs, but the conceit is identical: we are entitled to more because of who we are.
The conduct of figures such as Phakelumthakathi Ndabandaba illustrates the danger.
When traditional formations are presented as instruments for enforcing public order, policing communities or reclaiming streets, cultural symbolism has crossed into political intimidation. Their rhetoric has invoked the Zulu nation as the authority to reclaim land and streets and to impose its own laws. At that point, the mask slips.
The underlying proposition is profoundly dangerous: that ethnic belonging itself creates a form of authority independent of, and potentially superior to, the authority established by the constitutional state. It is an attempt to convert tribe into jurisdiction.
The same danger appears when ethnic numbers are presented as a basis for political entitlement. Ngizwe Mchunu has argued that Zulu numerical strength should translate into greater representation in Parliament. That turns democracy into ethnic arithmetic: the largest group claims the largest political prize because it has the largest headcount.
South Africa did not replace one system of racial and ethnic hierarchy with another in which communities compete to establish who has sufficient numbers to dominate everyone else. The constitutional promise was that citizenship would not be reduced to tribe and political rights would not depend upon the ethnic category into which a person happened to be born.
The moment parliamentary representation becomes an ethnic entitlement, the citizen disappears behind the tribe.
Yet this pathology does not belong exclusively to those who express it most loudly.
The tribal landscape is littered with equally arrogant assumptions: that one tribe is the “brain” of the nation, that another’s language is inherently inferior, that competence is transmitted through the bloodstream or that certain surnames carry an invisible certificate of intellectual superiority.
The tribal chauvinist may arrive carrying a spear or, in another setting, carrying a degree, but neither weapon nor qualification makes the prejudice more intelligent or legitimate. A polished accent does not make tribal hierarchy respectable.
History has repeatedly shown where such thinking can lead. Nigeria’s Biafran War demonstrated the devastating consequences of ethnic and political fragmentation. Kenya’s 2007–08 post-election violence showed how quickly political competition could acquire an ethnic charge.
Rwanda remains the most horrifying warning: in 1994, extremist propaganda, political mobilisation and systematic dehumanisation helped turn ethnic identity into an instrument of mass murder.
Ethno-chauvinism is particularly useful to political opportunists because it offers frustrated people an explanation easier than confronting institutional failure. Economic exclusion, corruption, administrative decay and political incompetence are complicated problems; an ethnic enemy is much easier to identify.
The so-called ‘outsider’ becomes the convenient explanation for economic frustration, the rival tribe the repository for political resentment, and the immigrant an easy target for social anxiety.
In this way, legitimate anger is redirected towards an ethnic target, allowing those who should answer difficult questions about governance and accountability to escape scrutiny while ordinary citizens quarrel over ancestry.
The poor can be persuaded to fight over which tribe owns the country while those with political and economic power continue accumulating both.
Whenever a contemporary failure is explained through an ancient ethnic grievance, there is a danger that the public is being encouraged to examine the graves of the ancestors rather than the records of the living.
The questions that matter are who failed to govern, who failed to build, who mismanaged public resources, who benefited from that failure and who should be held accountable for its consequences.
No amount of tribal posturing can repair a collapsing sewer, and no invocation of warrior blood can balance a municipal budget. The modern world remains stubbornly indifferent to tribal mythology. Roads require engineering, hospitals require competence, businesses require productivity and governments require people capable of doing the work for which they are paid.
That is the intellectual dead end at the heart of ethno-chauvinism. It offers the dignity of ancestry in place of the dignity of achievement, allowing people to inherit the language of greatness without undertaking the difficult work of becoming great.
It treats the accomplishments of ancestors as personal credentials, as though history has deposited inherited merit into the bloodstream and exempted the living from producing anything worthy of the future.
It can also become an instrument of political misdirection, encouraging citizens to interpret their frustrations through ethnic identity rather than institutional performance. Administrative failure becomes somebody else’s fault. Economic exclusion acquires an ethnic explanation. Political incompetence is converted into grievance. Corruption becomes secondary to the question of who supposedly belongs.
The public anger remains real, but its destination has been changed; instead of demanding answers from those who govern, people are encouraged to demand territory from one another, instead of asking why institutions fail, they are encouraged to ask which tribe has the right to control them, and instead of measuring leadership by delivery, they are invited to measure it by ethnic loyalty. This is how tribal politics becomes useful to people who have no useful answers.
The answer is not to destroy culture. Culture should be a fountain from which we draw identity, not a fortress from which we launch arrows at those across the river.
Our ancestors gave us histories and traditions; they did not give us sovereignty over fellow citizens or a constitutional exemption from the obligations of citizenship.
The challenge is therefore not to make South Africans ashamed of where they come from, but to prevent ancestry from becoming an excuse for where they believe others should stand.
That is the final obscenity of ethno-chauvinism: it takes something as accidental as birth and elevates it into a theory of human worth, then takes something as necessary as citizenship and reduces it to a tribal bargaining chip.
A citizen should not need the correct ancestry to belong. A leader should not need the correct tribe to command respect. Parliament should not be an ethnic trophy cabinet.
The future should not be held hostage by people who believe the dead have already decided which of the living deserve more.
A nation is not a family tree. It is a common inheritance whose value depends upon what the living choose to do with it.
We should be deeply suspicious of anyone standing on a rotten pulpit of blood and belonging, preaching that his people were born to rule, possess, dominate or think better than everyone else.
Behind the tribal costume, the political slogan and the manufactured grievance lies an idea as old as civilisation itself: that some human beings are entitled to more because they were born on the right side of an imaginary line.
We have no obligation to wait for the ashes before admitting that there was fire.
