First Peoples of Africa?
Now that I teach in a department of “Indigenous Cultures” I have become increasingly concerned with how people come to be defined as “indigenous” and what that means. Most recently, I took a quick look at the question of whether or not people in Africa have effectively claimed the status of “First Peoples” as indigenous peoples elsewhere have done. After all, most Africans are indigenous to the continent, even if there have been internal migrations.
The web site of IPACC, the Indigenous Peoples of Africa Coordinating Committee has this to say:
Today, groups claiming to be ‘indigenous’ in Africa are mostly those who have been living by hunting and gathering or by transhumant (migratory nomadic) pastoralism. These are different peoples who have followed particular trajectories of cultural and economic evolution in specific environmental conditions such as the equatorial rainforests, the Atlas, Hoggar and Tibesti mountain ranges, the Rift Valley and the deserts of the Sahara and the Kalahari.
Some Africans may be offended by the idea that one ethnic group should be called ‘indigenous’ and others not. IPACC recognises that all Africans should enjoy equal rights and respect. All of Africa’s diversity is to be valued. Particular communities, due to historical and environmental circumstances, have found themselves outside the state-system and underrepresented in governance. These ‘first-peoples’ or ‘autochthonous peoples’ have associated themselves with the United Nations’ standards on the rights of indigenous peoples. This is not to deny other Africans their status; it is to emphasise that affirmative recognition is necessary for hunter-gatherers and herding peoples to ensure their survival.
This is clearly a fairly defensive position for what must be a rather controversial topic, yet it seems intuitively obvious that the people who fall within this category do share certain characteristics with other indigenous communities around the world.
However, looking in AnthroSource I found two articles which address these issues, both from a special American Anthropologist issue on Indigenous Rights Movements from 2002:
- “‘Land, Water, and Truth’: San Identity and Global Indigenism”
- “Precarious Alliances: The Cultural Politics and Structural Predicaments of the Indigenous Rights Movement in Tanzania”
These articles were much more sanguine about the utility of indigenous identities in the African context. The first article, by Renée Sylvain, highlights one of the problem of place-based rights movements. Those San1 who continue to live in remote segregated homelands share many features with other indigenous communities, but those who have integrated into urban society face a very different set of issues. The author also expresses concern over the essentialized notions of culture that come with identification as an “indigenous” people. The second article, by Dorothy L. Hodgson, looks at hunter-gatherer and pastoralists who find themselves caught between the competing discourses of state sponsors and those of international indigenous rights activist groups, contradictions which were seen by activists as ultimately undermining their political effectiveness.
If anyone has direct experience working with these issues in the African context I’d love to know more.
1 I know, I know, some say that term is now out of favor – but as far as I can tell it is still being used in the South African literature.
P. Kerim Friedman is an assistant professor in the Department of Ethnic Relations and Cultures at National Dong Hwa University, in Taiwan, where he teaches linguistic and visual anthropology. He is co-director of the film Please Don't Beat Me, Sir!, winner of the 2011 Jean Rouch Award from the Society of Visual Anthropology. Follow Kerim on Twitter.
Whether you are a “first nation” “indigenous” or “native” is an issue in Hawai’i, where the colonial situation could fit any of these terms. Here are some other articles that spring to mind on indigeneity:
Conklin and Graham, AA 1995 “The Shifting Middle Ground” (as well as their 1997 AE article on Body Paint, Feathers, and VCRs).
Manuela Carneiro da Cunha and Mauro Almeida in Daedalus, “Indigenous People, Traditional People, and Conservation in the Amazon”
Andre Beteille “The Idea of Indigenous People” in Current Anthropology 1998
Tanya Murray Lee “Articulating Indigenous Identity in Indonesia” in Comparative Studies in Society and History 2000 (I am a *big* fan of her work in particular)
The thing about Africa (which makes it like PNG but South America etc.) is that there is no large settler population against whom one can be ‘indigenous.’ Even in countries where there is a clear ethnic majority that runs things the situation is one of ‘majority’ versus ‘minority’ (a la Dru Gladney’s 1998 edited volume ‘Making Majorities’) rather than indigeneity.
It’s interesting to think about the position of Taiwanese ‘indigenes’ since in China similar people are part of the Approved Ethnic Minority System and haven’t really been labeled ‘indigenous’ afaik (this is similar to Indonesia, where ‘indigneous’ is only now gaining traction).
The up point of ‘indigenous’ is that it brings a lot of attention (and $$) from ‘global civil society.’ The downside is that you have to hide all the TVs in the village if you want the EU to build water tanks there.
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Thanks, those look like great articles.
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I think you would find that there is quite a bit of variation actually – certainly South Africa, Zimbabwe etc. wouldn’t fit that claim. I am pretty sure in Rwanda after independence that the majority Hutu took to claiming that the Tutsi were foreign invaders (after years of Belgian support for the Tutsi according to the racial classifications of Rwanda’s colonial history) which, of course, built up to the violence in the 90s. There is a pretty vast literature on the latter case.
I actually think the role of Anthropology in defining ‘indigineity’ or ‘nativism’ is a moral quagmire that we have never really confronted.
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Sorry if this is confusing — by ‘settler’ I mean ‘people from Europe and its settler colonies’. Obvioulsy within Africa there have always been migrations, conquests etc (i.e. they are not people without history).
Today there’s a wide literature on how people have to ‘perform indigeneity’ in the courtroom or whatever in order to get into the indigenous slot, and of course in some situations (especially Australia) anthropologists are made to testify about who is and isn’t indigenous. But I think the terms ‘native’ ‘first nation’ ‘indigenous’ came about are the results of really nasty historical processes that occurred well before the rise of anthropology as a discipline. If Pagden’s argument in _The Fall of Natural Man_ is correct, the label of ‘indigenous’ probably owes more to Catholic clergy and military forces reading Aristotle in light of the new world than anything else.
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Well Mugabe kicked the white farmers out of Zimbabwe using the precise excuse that they were not Indigenous, they were settlers from Europe. Sth Africa has a similar settler population. My point about Rwanda was not to describe ‘indigenous’ migrations etc but to point to an obvious case where the colonial era directly constructed ideas about Indigineity without there necessarily being large numbers of settlers. In the 1920s the academic community had developed the ‘Hamitic hypothesis’ about more complex African societies – a wave of ‘caucasoid’ settlers was presumed to have been responsible for all signs of ‘civilization’ in black Africa. In Rwanda this led to an erroneous history of ethnic migration/replacement: first there were the backward hunter-gatherer Twa, who were invaded by the Hutu cultivators, and then later came the civilized Tutsi (the ‘Hamitics’). The Belgian authorities imported this story and its ethnic classification back to Rwandan classrooms, and it became the basis for social divisions. When the colonial era ended the allegedly ‘indigenous’ Hutu rebelleled against the Tutsi (who had been nurtured as civilizied by the Belgians, leading to economic domination). The history that these people were given by Europeans is now recognised academically as false.
This was the source of my wider claim about Anthropological culpability. I don’t doubt the early origins of the concept of indigineity, but I think you would have to recognise that Anthropology as a disciplibe grew up with those same “really nasty historical processes” that you mention. Anthropology gives legitimacy to the concept because it in many ways developed as the ‘Science of the Indigenous’. And this plays out in everything from telling people their history, to hiding the TVs as you mention. What I was really thinking about though was the way we have unreflexively accepted the truth of the concept, or accepted it as a ‘political’ or ‘social’ truth and let it go. I suppose I am thinking of Ingold’s critique in Perception of the Environment, or Kuper’s recent Current Anth piece.
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Well I think we can avoid rehashing the usual debates about whether or not anthropology was a handmaiden to colonialism. To narrow the point somewhat: I agree that academics were involved in disseminating information about non-Europeans, but I’m not sure that anthropology — which really didn’t get well and truly under way as a discipline until after WWI — should get the lion’s share of the blame for colonialism’s knowledge of its subject, since this happened well before anthropologists had any institutional power or existed as a discipline.
The example of Rwanda and the Hamitic hypothesis is a good case in point — is nineteenth century diffusionist theory ‘anthropology’? Particularly the stuff that is spun-out from a reading of Genesis? Or that Radcliffe-Brown built British anthropology as a reaction _against_ diffusionism? We know that story is wrong today BECAUSE OF anthropology, not despite it.
There were a lot of disciplines in play during this period which shaped Europe’s knowledge of its colonies — church apologetics, orientalism, classics, history, eugenics, historicial jurisprudence, philology, racial science, and others. Anthropology might claim some as ancestors. But the discipline as we know it now wasn’t around — all of OUR sins (and there are many) are of much more recent vintage.
Obviously anthropology (like the agricultural sciences) came of age during the colonial era. But that is a mucb broader (and less interesting) claim from saying that it “defined” rather than “inherited” morally quagmiric definitions of ‘native’ and ‘indigenous.’ Although to be fair I bet that anthropology did create in some distinct way a notion of culture and ethnicity that was connected with third worldism, elite reethnicization, and decolonization.
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These are all good points and I don’t really disagree with any of them (although I might quibble about the implications of defining when anthropology ‘well and truly’ got under way).
When I referred to the role of anthropology in defining indigeneity, I certainly didn’t mean that anthro was solely responsible, or that it should take the lion’s share of the blame. I just meant to suggest our role has been important in this process, and whatever that role has been it is worth thinking about. To quibble about ‘defining’ versus ‘inheriting’ is futile since the concepts are continually reworked, rediscovered and redefined in practice by academics and their subjects – my point isnt ‘who came up with the idea’ but ‘what is our role in the process by which indigeneity is created/imagined’.
The morally quagmiric bit comes in this formation and tacit acceptance of the concept, not erroneous usages of it. Yes, the Hamitic hypothesis in Rwanda was first formed by Speke in the 1800s. But the present-day anthropo-linguistic replacement of that story is just another account of indigeneity: The hunter-gatherer Twa were there first, then came the invading agriculturalist Bantu-speaking peoples. It’s the underlying genealogical assumptions that I worry about. How do people partake in the ‘aboriginality’ of their predecessors? What substance is passed on? How does this connect them to land? Anthropology has imported this ‘genealogical model’ (sensu Ingold) into the notions of culture and ethnicity that you refer to in your last sentence. Ingold provides a pretty decent critique of these ideas, and so in a tangental way does James Leach in ‘Creative Land’ (which I think you have read) – in fact Ingold cites Leach’s PhD. But both of them are interested in the matter theoretically – Ingold has a footnote where he evades the question of how his critque of the ‘indigenous’ concept might relate to the political struggles of groups in contemporary post-colonial societies who claim that status. He is too PC to tell them he thinks they are wrong!
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I mean clearly the HISTORIANS are the ones who are really to blame :P
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cool. I blame the scientists.
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This kind of struggle can get pretty hairy for an anthropologist. Rick Wilk (U. of Indiana) once mentioned in personal conversation that he had been caught in a situation where the people he worked with (descendants of black African slaves) would be dispossessed of land on which they had lived for more than two centuries if he testified correctly that Native Americans who were claiming to be “indigenous” were right if you went back far enough.
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Ingold is quite elusive on this kind of issue. One reading of the implications of his critique is that the African Americans would have as much (actually more) right to stay on the land, having dwelt and grown there all their lives. But he avoids this kind of choice. So the footnote I referred to (which as it turns out isn’t a footnote! oops) says this:
But he does try to explain how such thinking came about. The conclusion of this section (p.151) contains an argument that the opposition between indigenous and non-indigenous is a product of colonial history, and a definition rendered from the viewpoint of colonial authorities. The genealogical model is a colonial model – land is a surface to be occupied, with settlers bringing endowments of heritable substance and knowledge with them. The idea of belonging as inherited was not originally part of indigenous people’s worldview but has come to be adopted by them due to the exigencies of finding themselves citizens of nation-states. In order to express difference within predominant discourses of homogeneity (i.e. citizenship) they have to create representations of identity; a series of properties or attributes that belong to them alone. So relational experience becomes attributional definition.
So although Ingold can help explain how the genealogical model creates dilemmas like the one Wilk found himself in, how to extricate oneself is a much bigger ask.
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