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How Do We Talk About Identity?: A Review Essay
Meredeth Turshen
This essay started as a review of Amy Chua’s World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability (New York: Anchor Books, 2004). In World on Fire, Chua argues that under market conditions certain ethnic minorities tend to dominate the indigenous majorities around them. And under democratic conditions, indigenous majorities are empowered to confront economically dominant ethnic minorities, leading to hatred and instability.
In societies with a market-dominant ethnic minority, markets and democracy favor not just different people, or different classes, but different ethnic groups. Markets concentrate wealth, often spectacular wealth, in the hands of the market dominant ethnic minority, while democracy increases the political power of the impoverished majority. In these circumstances the pursuit of free-market democracy becomes an engine of potentially catastrophic ethnonationalism, pitting a frustrated ‘indigenous’ majority, easily aroused by opportunistic vote-seeking politicians, against a resented wealthy ethnic minority. (pp.6-7)
Chua maintains that “globalization consists of, and is fueled by, the unprecedented worldwide spread of markets and democracy” (p.7). With Thomas Friedman, Chua believes that America leads this global spread of markets and democracy, radically transforming the world to “bring capitalism and democratic elections to literally billions of people” (p.8). “Market capitalism is the most efficient economic system the world has ever known” and “democracy is the fairest political system the world has ever known” (p.8). She departs from Friedman in her assessment of the consequences: Chua writes that “the global spread of markets and democracy is a principal, aggravating cause of group hatred and ethnic violence throughout the non-western world” (p.8).
Chua uses the concept of globalization instrumentally: she needs it to tie democracy to markets in order to argue that democracy has liberated indigenous majorities to attack market dominant minorities. One wonders what the ANC or the FLN would make of this argument? European colonizers were indeed numerical minorities in their colonial possessions, but to reduce wars of liberation to explosions of ethnic hatred seems inaccurate and demeaning. Then there is the problem of dating globalization: most of us understand this as a recent phenomenon starting in the 1970s or 1980s, marked by new roles for financial capital and new forms of manufacturing; we distinguish it from the movement of other ideas and institutions around the world (like Islam in the 7th century or Chinese emigration in the 19th century). Globalization today encompasses the shift made by multinational corporations from companies with separate businesses in many countries to worldwide operations that divide and parcel out work to the most “efficient” locations. Further, Chua equates entrepreneurial behavior with the operations of multinational corporations—but how can Zimbabwe’s white farmers be bracketed with US multinationals?
Chua’s examples of market-dominant ethnic minorities range from the obvious—overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia—to the obscure—Koreans in US inner cities. Chua defines ethnicity as group identity, a definition that conflates ethnicity and nationality (a trend noticeable in reporting on the Yugoslav wars in which we became familiar with references to “ethnic Albanians” in Kosovo, for example). When I came to Chua’s use of this definition in Africa, my review turned into this essay on how we talk about identity.
In describing ethnicity in Africa, Chua confuses centuries of European domination, the colonial manipulation of minorities and identities to maintain control, the importation of Asian labor, the immigration of traders from the Levant, and the status and identity of peoples indigenous to the continent. Chua names all of the following as market-dominant ethnic minorities: South African whites are “starkly market dominant” vis-à-vis the Black majority (p.97); ditto for whites in Namibia and Zimbabwe (pp.100, 101); the Kikuyu, 22% of the Kenyan population, are a “distinctly successful minority” (p.105); the Ibo, “the Jews of Nigeria”, dominate key economic sectors (p.108); Kenya’s roughly 70,000 Indians, “the Jews of East Africa”, who comprise less than 2% of the population, are “dramatically more affluent as a group than the vastly more numerous black Kenyans around them” (p.113); “the Lebanese are the preeminent market-dominant minority in West Africa” (p.115); Eritreans in Ethiopia “have long dominated business” (p.164); in Burundi, “the Tutsi still control approximately 70% of the country’s wealth” (p.111); in Rwanda, the Tutsi were a “starkly privileged, ‘arrogant’, economically dominant ethnic minority” (p.166); in Togo, the Ewe, in Guinea, the Susu, in Uganda, the Baganda, in Tanzania, the Chagga, in Cameroon, the Bamiléké (pp.111,112).
Chua’s confusions are illustrative of the muddled discussions of identity in subSaharan Africa. How are we to distinguish between ethnicity, nationality, minority status, and indigenism? In UN human rights declarations, these terms are not used interchangeably, and the demands of minorities are different from those of indigenous peoples. In 1997, the Africa Policy Information Center published a background paper, “Talking about ‘Tribe’: Moving from Stereotypes to Analysis”. It is a useful starting point, and the objections voiced against the use of “tribe” are still pertinent. “Tribe has no coherent meaning”; “tribe promotes a myth of primitive African timelessness, obscuring history and change”; “tribe reflects once widespread but outdated 19th century social theory” resonating with classical and biblical education and becoming a cornerstone of European colonial rule. After reading Chua it seems clear that we need to have a similar discussion of “ethnicity”, and “ethnonationalism” today.
The Zulu in South Africa, whose name and common identity was forged by the creation of a powerful sate less than two centuries ago, who are a bigger group than French Canadians, are called a tribe. So are the !Kung hunter-gatherers of Botswana and Namibia, who number in the hundreds…Tribe is used for groups who trace their heritage to great kingdoms. It is applied to Nigeria’s Igbo and other peoples who organized orderly societies composed of hundreds of local communities and highly developed trade networks without recourse to elaborate states. (APIC 1997:1)
Does the substitution of “ethnicity” for “tribe” resolve any but the problem of stereotyping primitive savagery? Is “ethnicity” used with any more specificity than “tribe”? What does the new movement of indigenism bring to this discussion? Ronald Niezen, in The Origins of Indigenism (UC Berkeley Press, 2003), writes that indigenous people have primary attachments to land and culture; they maintain their own languages, which normally differ from those spoken by mainstream populations. The indigenous include such categories as natives, aboriginals, and First Nations. Their demands are usually for recognition rather than autonomy. Indigenous rights invoke collective rather than individual rights. Niezen sees a continuum from indigenous/tribal people (who live in isolated, small-scale pre-industrial societies) to indigenous/not tribal people, to people stigmatized as tribal, to people considered ethnic minorities, to people considered ethnic nationalities. Ethnonationalism, in Niezen’s vocab-ulary, describes people who define their collective identities with clear cultural and linguistic contours and who express their goals of autonomy from the state with conviction that borders on violence.
In the era of nation building immediately after independence, many new African nations set about repairing the ravages of colonial divide-and-rule strategies by attempting to create a sense of nationality and, in some cases, by suppressing the expression of separate ethnicities. It is worth reflecting on the political and economic developments that have brought us back to the ethnic competition that characterized the late colonial period. African dictatorships, cultivated and maintained by the western democracies (and competing eastern totalitarian regimes), have certainly played on social divisions. But it is neoliberal economics, imposed on subSaharan Africa without regard to political and social history, which has fomented social fragmentation. We need a new language to describe the retreat into bloodlines, perhaps the kind of vocabulary developed by Jock Young in The Exclusive Society (London: Sage, 1999), to describe the process of social exclusion that has occurred with the progress of globalization.