African Tribalism, European Nationalists, and The Quest For New States in Africa

Whenever an African agitates for self-determination in Africa , he is quickly jumped on by critics and dismissed as a tribalist. He is ridiculed as a backward ethnic chauvinist, whose sole-purpose in agitating for a new state is a desire for a fiefdom where he can lord it over others whose only crime is belonging to a different ethnic group.

He is reviled as a throw-back to a backward African past, an aberration, an intellectual dwarf who is incapable of grasping and living by higher ideals that other more educated, progressive African people live by. He becomes an object of pity. He is perceived as having failed to conform to modernity, and has decided to cover up his failures by romanticizing about a distant, backward past. If only he were a little bit more modern looking, ideological, and a little bit more intellectually refined, he would see how backward it is to agitate for separation, especially something as backward as an ethnic-based state in Africa.

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