The village of Gatundu stirred awake under a sky split by color, streaks of orange pulling across the horizon like worn fabric. It was 1960, and Kenya was not yet free. Along the dirt paths that twisted through banana groves and clustered mud huts, men moved with machetes tucked under their garments, their faces unreadable. Some wore the beads of the Kikuyu, others the simple cloth of rival tribes. In the hills beyond, British soldiers prepared for another sweep. Inside the village, neighbors who had once shared bread now counted each other as enemies. Mau Mau had divided them, but the truth was older and more patient than any rebellion. It was a truth carried in blood, in the long memory of clan and name.
Before the ships came, before maps were drawn by hands that had never touched the soil, tribes across Africa lived in a balance that was more complicated and more human than the stories later told. Conflict existed, but so did peace. Across the Sahel, kingdoms of different peoples traded salt and gold, sending caravans across dangerous distances guarded by agreements of safe passage. In East Africa, Bantu-speaking communities farmed beside Nilotic pastoralists, occasionally clashing but often intermarrying, weaving kinship lines that tied cattle to crops, river to plain. In the forests of Central Africa, clans with different dialects built alliances through marriage, exchanging daughters and sons not as trophies, but as bridges between communities. Among the Yoruba, city-states were bound by shared markets and sacred festivals, drawing people from different lineages into a common life.
Africa’s tribes were not isolated or static. They traded iron, cloth, beads, and ideas. They built empires like Mali, Songhai, and Benin that ruled over diverse peoples, balancing loyalty and autonomy through careful negotiation rather than brute domination. When conflicts arose, rituals and councils often sought to contain them, understanding that the survival of all depended on a fragile equilibrium. War was part of life, but so was alliance. Competition coexisted with cooperation, suspicion with diplomacy.
When Europe arrived on African shores, it found no single Africa. It found kingdoms and chiefdoms, languages that shifted from valley to valley, peoples whose loyalty rarely traveled farther than the bend of a river. Tribal identities had shaped alliances and wars long before the first Portuguese caravel brushed the coast of Senegal. The Ashanti fought the Fante in the forests of what would become Ghana. The Zulu crushed neighboring tribes in the rolling hills of Natal. The Hausa waged wars of succession across the Sahel. These divisions were not created by Europeans, but they were recognized, studied, and turned into tools sharper than any blade.
At the Berlin Conference of 1884, men in pressed coats and polished shoes sat around a table and drew lines across a map that none of them had walked. They parceled out entire peoples like coinage, unaware or uninterested in the boundaries that already existed. The Somali were split between Britain and Italy. The Ewe were severed across Togo and Ghana. The Shona and Ndebele were thrust under the same colonial yoke in Rhodesia. Colonialism did not invent tribalism, but it institutionalized it, hardening identities into administrative categories. Chiefs who had once been local leaders became colonial intermediaries, rewarded for their loyalty with power over others. Ethnic favoritism became a governance strategy, sowing resentment in fields already fertile with mistrust.
In Rwanda, the Germans and later the Belgians deepened the line between Hutu and Tutsi, two groups who had once shared language, culture, and history. European rulers issued identity cards, measuring noses and skulls to decide who belonged to which group. Tutsis, deemed more “Caucasoid” by colonial pseudoscience, were elevated to administrative positions. Hutus were relegated to the margins. When independence came, the bitterness was primed. The 1994 genocide was not a spontaneous eruption of hatred, but the consequence of decades of engineered division.
In Nigeria, Britain stitched together over 250 ethnic groups into one fragile colony. The Igbo, Yoruba, and Hausa-Fulani were the largest, but countless others jostled for place and recognition. British colonial administrators played them against each other, granting economic advantages to the south while leaving the north relatively isolated. When Nigeria achieved independence in 1960, the fractures were immediate. The Biafran War, which raged from 1967 to 1970, was a brutal lesson in how tribal loyalties could pull a nation apart. Over one million civilians died, many from starvation, in a war that revealed how thin the veneer of national unity truly was.
Even after colonial flags were lowered, the deeper work of disintegration continued. Politicians learned to harness tribal identity as a source of power, forging ethnic coalitions that could be mobilized at the ballot box or on the battlefield. In Kenya, Jomo Kenyatta rose to power through the Kikuyu, and Daniel arap Moi later through the Kalenjin. In Ivory Coast, Félix Houphouët-Boigny managed to suppress tribal divisions during his long rule, but after his death, the country plunged into a civil war marked by ethnic violence between north and south. In Sudan, divisions between Arabized northerners and sub-Saharan southerners erupted into one of Africa’s longest and deadliest civil wars, ending only with the secession of South Sudan in 2011. Yet even then, tribal rivalries within the new nation soon ignited fresh conflict.
Modern Africa bears the deep scars of this history. In South Sudan, the civil war between the Dinka and Nuer has claimed over 400,000 lives since 2013. Leaders like Salva Kiir and Riek Machar, each representing their respective ethnic groups, have led a cycle of betrayal and violence that no peace accord has yet broken. In Ethiopia, the federal system built around ethnic regions has turned once hopeful governance into a tinderbox. The war in Tigray, which erupted in 2020, has drawn in militias from neighboring ethnic groups, unleashing atrocities that echo the worst episodes of Africa’s past.
In the Democratic Republic of Congo, tribal militias such as the Mai-Mai and various Hutu and Tutsi factions continue to fight for land, minerals, and survival. Despite the country’s immense wealth in resources, tribal rivalries have ensured that progress remains elusive. In Nigeria, Boko Haram exploits ethnic divisions to sustain its insurgency, while farmer-herder conflicts between Fulani and various ethnic communities continue to kill thousands each year.
The persistence of tribalism is not merely a legacy of colonialism. It is renewed each generation by political leaders who find it more convenient to divide than to unite, by communities that have learned to trust only those who share their tongue, by histories of grievance that are retold around fires and in homes. In many African countries, national identity remains an ideal rather than a lived reality, fragile and easily shattered when hardship strikes.
In Burundi, after the 2015 political crisis triggered by President Pierre Nkurunziza’s third-term bid, political opponents were hunted down based on perceived ethnic affiliations. In Mali, the collapse of state authority has given rise to ethnic militias such as the Dogon and Fulani armed groups, who battle for supremacy in a landscape of lawlessness. In Cameroon, the anglophone crisis is as much about ethnic identity as it is about language, with communities polarized by years of government neglect and repression.
International interventions often fail to grasp the depth of these divisions. Peace agreements are brokered between leaders who represent ethnic constituencies, but without addressing the underlying grievances, they collapse into renewed violence. Development aid meant to rebuild nations is often siphoned through ethnic networks, breeding corruption and further alienation.
Yet there are moments when the weight of tribalism is challenged. In Ghana, peaceful transfers of power have been achieved despite ethnic rivalries, a testament to the strength of institutions that rise above blood ties. In Rwanda, President Paul Kagame has pursued a policy of national unity that forbids public reference to ethnic identities, though critics argue that this suppression risks driving divisions underground rather than healing them. In South Africa, the post-apartheid constitution emphasized a nonracial, multiethnic national identity, though economic disparities continue to map along ethnic lines.
The struggle against tribalism is slow and often thankless. It demands leadership that refuses to exploit fear, education that teaches history without hatred, and a willingness among ordinary people to see themselves not only as members of a tribe but as citizens bound by common destiny. It requires remembering that Africa’s greatest civilizations, from Great Zimbabwe to Timbuktu, were built by people who transcended local loyalties to create something larger than themselves.
In a dusty courtyard in Kigali, a memorial stands to the victims of genocide. Rows of skulls, each one marked by the violence of neighbor against neighbor, are displayed behind glass. Outside, schoolchildren in blue uniforms gather, their faces solemn. They read plaques that tell of how it happened, not in some distant past but within living memory. They are taught that to name oneself by tribe first is to risk history repeating itself.
The sun falls lower across the memorial, the light catching the edges of the stone. Across Africa, from the Sahel to the Cape, the same lesson struggles to take root. Tribes have given the continent its rich tapestry of culture, language, and identity. But when tribe is weaponized, when it becomes a wall instead of a bridge, it kills. It killed in the past. It kills now. And unless something greater than tribe can be built, it will kill again.