Race, Ethnicity, and Postcolonial Identity: The East African Perspective

Abstract

The people of Eastern Africa suffer identity maladies related to the establishment of colonial states. Competing European powers had destroyed African beliefs and institutions, sovereignty, freedoms, and sense of legitimacy. They transferred the source of legitimacy to agreements in European capitals, imposed layers of new identities to make people subservient to external wishes. Africans became European subjects and property labeled ‘natives’ when serving colonial interests. They were also reduced to ‘warring tribes’ in need of European pacification when they tried to challenge the colonial state. They were not citizens; just slaves in situ.

At independence, the effort to create new identities ran into challenges of acceptability within and outside the new states. Did the people accept they were part of the new state ruled by people who were not European? The challenges, connected to colonial conditioning, were both internal and external and had religious, ethnic, racial, language, and ideological attributes. Neighbouring states shared border people who wondered what they were or why they had to choose between two or more states. Then there were extra-continental powers, seemingly determined to ensure that the African post-colonial state failed.

Extra-continental forces supervised the transition from colonialism to independence. They largely succeeded in placing their chosen African leaders, as ‘neo-colonial’ agents, in critical governance and economic positions. These were to protect external interests against internal challenges and became good at denigrating anything African, and some regretted they were born black. In their mental subservience, they tended to glorify the colonial past and allowed imperial interpreters of Africa perpetually to interpret what is good for Africans. They became sources of identity friction and collided with those trying to distance themselves from colonial evils. The ensuing struggle to recreate identities that promote the essence of being African and sense of Pan-Africanism in the midst of hostile imperial designs affects one’s perspective on belonging.