How Colonial Rule Created the Myth of Tribalism

Few words are invoked as casually in discussions about Africa as “tribalism.” It appears in headlines, policy briefings, and foreign commentary as a catch-all explanation for political instability and violence. The implication is familiar and damning: Africa’s conflicts are rooted in ancient hatreds, baked into culture itself.
This framing is not only misleading. It is historically wrong.

What is commonly described today as “tribalism” is not an inherited African tradition, but a political construction shaped, hardened, and exploited under colonial rule. Long before European conquest, African societies organised identity in ways that were flexible, layered, and adaptive. Colonialism did not simply encounter these systems. It dismantled them and replaced them with something far more rigid.

Identity before colonial rule was fluid, not primitive

Precolonial African identity rarely functioned as a single, fixed label. People belonged to multiple worlds at once. Lineage mattered, but so did occupation, religion, language, place, and political allegiance. These affiliations shifted depending on circumstance. Identity was something people navigated, not something they were trapped inside.

Across West Africa, empires such as Mali and Songhai governed vast territories that encompassed dozens of linguistic and cultural groups. Political loyalty and participation in trade networks often mattered more than ethnic origin. In Southern Africa, communities like the Khoekhoe and San interacted through trade, shared ecological systems, and intermarriage. In the Horn of Africa, individuals moved comfortably between local, regional, and imperial identities without seeing contradiction.

These societies were not without conflict. But they worked because identity remained negotiable. It allowed newcomers to be absorbed, alliances to shift, and diversity to be managed rather than feared. Difference existed, but it was not frozen into hostile camps.

Colonialism demanded simplicity, and imposed it

European colonial administrations were built on categorisation. Governing from a distance required populations that could be counted, taxed, monitored, and controlled. Fluid identities were inconvenient. They resisted census forms and administrative logic.

The solution was classification.

Colonial officials began dividing African populations into fixed “tribes,” often based on incomplete observations or outright misunderstanding. Complex social realities were flattened into administratively useful categories. What had once been flexible affiliations became permanent identities recorded on paper.

Identity cards, census registers, land laws, and systems of indirect rule locked people into boxes they had not chosen. In many regions, colonial authorities appointed or invented “traditional chiefs” to rule over communities that had never recognised them as legitimate leaders. These figures answered upward to colonial power, not downward to their people.

Difference was no longer something negotiated within society. It became something governed from above.

When classification turns lethal

Rwanda offers the clearest and most tragic illustration of this process. Under Belgian rule, the categories of Hutu and Tutsi, which had previously reflected social and economic status more than ancestry, were racialised and formalised. Identity cards transformed flexible distinctions into permanent hierarchies.

Over time, these rigid classifications became embedded in education, governance, and everyday life. When political crisis erupted decades later, colonial identity systems provided both the language and the tools for genocide. The violence of 1994 did not emerge from ancient tribal hatred. It was the catastrophic outcome of identities engineered to divide.

Similar dynamics unfolded elsewhere. In Nigeria, British divide-and-rule policies deepened ethnic distinctions among Hausa-Fulani, Yoruba, and Igbo populations, reshaping political competition and mistrust. Across the continent, colonial governments governed through difference, then retreated, leaving those divisions institutionalised.

From governance tool to political weapon

Colonialism did more than recognise difference. It weaponised it.

Chiefs became extensions of state authority. Schools and missionary institutions taught ethnic categories as fixed truths. Over generations, people learned to see themselves and others through labels that had once been fluid. Identity became a resource to be mobilised, rewarded, or punished.

Independence did not dissolve this inheritance. New African states emerged within colonial borders, carrying colonial identity frameworks embedded in law, bureaucracy, and political culture. In many cases, postcolonial elites learned to manipulate these divisions for power, using ethnicity to mobilise voters, distribute resources, or marginalise opponents.

What is often called “tribal politics” today is better understood as the afterlife of colonial governance.

Why the myth persists

When contemporary conflicts are described as “tribal wars,” history is quietly erased. Violence is framed as cultural inevitability rather than political failure. Responsibility shifts away from colonial engineering, weak institutions, and economic inequality, and onto supposedly timeless identities.

This narrative is convenient. It lowers expectations for governance. It normalises instability. It justifies external intervention while absolving historical accountability.

It is also deeply misleading. African societies managed diversity long before colonialism disrupted their systems. The idea that the continent is uniquely prone to identity-based conflict says more about the persistence of colonial thinking than about African reality.

Reclaiming a truer story

Across the continent, scholars and thinkers are increasingly rejecting the language of “tribalism” altogether. They argue that identity is not destiny, and that the categories inherited from colonial rule are neither natural nor immutable. Difference, they remind us, has always existed. The question is how it is governed.

The real tragedy is not that Africa is “too tribal.” It is that a narrative designed to divide and control continues to shape how the continent is understood, both from outside and within.

Confronting this myth is not about denying difference. It is about restoring historical accuracy. African societies were politically sophisticated, socially adaptive, and capable of managing complexity long before colonial rule imposed rigid identities.

Only by recognising that truth can the continent begin to loosen the grip of categories that were never meant to serve its people, and reclaim diversity as a source of strength rather than suspicion.