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African Society: Tradition and Change

Many factors in African life influence the growth of the Church there. These include tribalism, the undervaluing of women, the power of the extended family unit, the hunger for education, the African zest for business, and a natural spirituality and love of religion. It is not possible in a work such as this to go into great detail concerning these factors, but an overview should help give some perspective to the challenges we face.

Tribalism

Tribalism is one of the most potent forces in African life. It pervades every aspect of African society, is a major factor in wars and power struggles, and at the day-to-day level determines who is hired or fired, who receives government largesse, who goes to university, who "looks down" on whom. Publicly, it is deplored by African politicians, but all of them, from top to bottom, practice it.

To most Africans, loyalty to the extended family-making sure that you and yours are looked after first-is far more important than any nebulous loyalty to the nation. That primary loyalty is expressed in a myriad of ways. Given the antipathy-often hatred-between tribes located within national boundaries, it is no wonder, for example, that national leaders choose their close advisers and trusted confidants from their own tribes, and make certain that those from other groups are deliberately kept away from the levers of power.

The contempt with which African tribesmen hold those who are "strangers and foreigners" is elegantly summed up in the creed of the Maasai herdsmen of Kenya and Tanzania. Their legends say they came from the north where, writes author Dino Sassi, "the earth is sand over which a great river flows, and no-one knows where this river ends. There was no grass for the cattle in that land, and no food for the people, so the Maasai had to look for another place, further south." (Dino Sassi, Maasai, Keasta, Nairobi, 1979, p. 4.) In the sixteenth century they found their home in the plateaus of the Rift Valley between Lake Victoria and Mount Kilimanjaro, which they revere as the home of the gods. There they warred against their farmer neighbors, despised creatures who owned no cattle, and thus, to Maasai eyes, beings beyond contempt. The Maasai enjoy the certain assurance that they are favored above all others. "God has entrusted the cattle of the earth to us because the Maasai are the best and the strongest people. Only the Maasai can live off cattle, which is the greatest form of wealth, and the others must content themselves with the fruits of the earth, because they do not know how to raise cattle like the Maasai. It is a sin to cultivate the earth and an offence to God." (Ibid., p. 7.)

Mistrust and suspicion between neighbors in Africa is not limited to competing black tribes. If anything, the antipathy across racial groups is even greater, as illustrated by the troubled relationships between blacks and Asians in East Africa.