Countries of the World/COUNTRYS.BIN/dp/0416/04167.txt

Text File | 1991-06-25 | 38KB | 602 lines

$Unique_ID{COW04167}
$Pretitle{267}
$Title{Zaire
Chapter 3C.   Ethnic Identification and Politics}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Irving Kaplan}
$Affiliation{HQ, Department of the Army}
$Subject{ethnic
kongo
luba-kasai
group
political
lunda
tetela
groups
part
peoples}
$Date{1978}
$Log{}
Country:     Zaire
Book:        Zaire, A Country Study
Author:      Irving Kaplan
Affiliation: HQ, Department of the Army
Date:        1978

Chapter 3C.   Ethnic Identification and Politics

     Framing the analysis of Zairian politics in the periods just before and
after independence in terms of ethnic or regional conflicts was easy to do.
Most parties and movements either labeled themselves in ethnic or regional
terms or their followers seemed to be of specific groups or areas. Often
underlying this kind of analysis were two questionable assumptions: that the
entities involved were-and had always been-clearly defined rather than having
emerged in response to specific historical experience and concrete situations
and that conflict between any two such entities necessarily reflected
primordial loyalties and fundamental dislikes.

     In time a close look at the peoples and processes involved suggested that
putative ethnic entities were sometimes used by ambitious politicians as
convenient focuses for rallying support and that the political enterprise
helped define the unit rather than vice versa. In the same and other
instances, ethnic boundaries were defined and a degree of solidarity was
established as core elements in one potential ethnic group came to think of
others as advantaged competitors for what were conceived of as scarce
resources-desirable jobs, educational opportunities, and the like. By the
1970s the historically complex and contingent character of ethnicity and its
shifting relation to other social, economic, and political structures and
processes had been noted and analyzed by a number of scholars, perhaps best
summarized and integrated in Crawford Young's work.

     In the very brief period just before independence when the Belgians
permitted political activity, recruitment to political organizations in ethnic
(or regional) terms was the simplest recourse for political activists. There
was no time to develop and communicate an ideology proposing a specific view
of the political universe and of political ends and means that might have had
a chance of mobilizing Zairians.

     An appeal to regionalism or to ethnic identity implies that there is
something to be appealed to. In the case of regionalism it was to apparent
material interest, framed in terms of the "rights" of the native inhabitants
of an area. It was argued that representatives of a group perceived as
intrusive in a region were depriving those inhabitants, whatever their ethnic
identity, of opportunities that ought to have been theirs.

     An appeal to ethnic identity might well have involved implicit or
explicit reference to material interest, but the definition of the relevant
entity was more complex as were the symbols that mobilized specific
communities and individuals. Broadly, those who sought to organize people in
ethnic terms appealed to common culture-a set of related assumptions about
what is (and is not) good, true, and beautiful in the physical and social
worlds and the meaning and significance of what goes on in those worlds. Among
the things to which meaning is assigned are the concrete historical experience
of the group and its current situation. But the culture that gives meaning is
in turn modified by that experience.

     A wide range of people (or set of groups) may share putative ancestry,
language, and much of their culture with respect to forms of the family, the
broad outlines of religious belief and practice, and the like, but the
experience of one segment of a seemingly homogeneous people was often
sufficiently different to have led to the alteration of certain meanings. One
part of the presumed entity may have come to perceive itself as worse off than
other segments with respect to significant resources (or, if better off, then
deserving of the position). These segments then begin to define themselves as
different and in fact become so.

     Just as common is an appeal to putative commonality of language, culture,
and ancestry to bring together groups that have been barely aware of the
commonality and whose political experience had hitherto been one of
fragmentation. Sometimes the emphasis on the commonalities that may in fact be
present (or are alleged to be present by those active in the movement) came
from the outside. That was largely the case with the effort to establish the
notion of a Mongo ethnic group: the commonalities were developed by Flemish
Catholic priests and taught in Roman Catholic schools. In effect, however,
whatever success the idea of Mongohood achieved was the result of the
perception by some members of the many groups making up the larger whole that
other groups were getting together and that their chances of competing seemed
to depend on larger scale organization. In a changing situation not all of the
members of an ethnic group in the making have the same experience or attach
the same meaning to the experience they do have. Thus, in the Mongo case, the
people called the Tetela or Tetela-Kusu were not strongly attracted by the
effort to organize the Mongo (see The Tale of the Tetela-Kusu, this ch.).

     Other factors affecting the response of particular elements in Mongo
groups and probably in others were age and educational experience. Young
people, especially those educated in Roman Catholic schools, tended to accept
the Catholic version of their putative common ancestry and similarity. Elders,
oriented to the particular traditions of the groups to which they belonged,
were not so ready to accept these generalizations.

     To argue that ethnic consciousness emerges and becomes politically
relevant under specific conditions is not to suggest that groups once formed
are easily dissolved or transformed. The experience of ethnically phrased
competition and strife becomes part of the cultural baggage of the members of
these groups and conditions their perceptions of new situations. This is
particularly true of a country like Zaire where opportunities have been scarce
and efforts to overcome the sense of deprivation of specific groups (or of the
regions in which they live) sometimes exacerbate the original sense of
deprivation.

     A description of selected cases provides an indication of the changing
nature of ethnic identity and a picture of the groups thus formed whose
perceptions and actions are likely to affect political, economic, and social
relations in the near future. The explicit effort of the Mobutu regime to
eliminate or at least dampen the role of ethnicity in politics has had some
effect, but even under the best of circumstances it can only be a beginning.

The Luba-Kasai and the Lulua

     Given the numbers and territorial range of the Luba-speaking peoples, the
varied external contacts of different Luba-speaking groups, and the fact that
only a portion of them were ever organized into a single state, a range of
variation of culture and identity was expectable even before Afro-Arabs and
Europeans arrived. The identities and perspectives that eventually became
politically salient began to emerge only in the late nineteenth century,
however.

     Not long before the incursion of the Belgians a section of the Luba, now
called Lulua, were linked with Angolan traders in the quest for slaves and
ivory under a single chief who, with access to firearms, was able to establish
control over these hitherto politically fragmented people. Other Luba, farther
east, were subject to the destructive raids of Afro-Arab slave traders. The
Belgians then arriving followed an early explorer who praised the people he
called Lulua, a name they came to accept-differentiating them from the
demoralized victims of the Afro-Arab raids-and made an alliance with them.

     The other Luba (Luba-Kasai