[throwway390]

They could also knock it off with the tribalism - there's what, 100000000 different tribes?[0] They'd go back to killing each other anyway.

EDIT: read that link and then explain how that is not a problem instead of downvoting:

"The ethnic groups of Africa number in the thousands,"

Wake up boys - it's all the same meat and bones.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_of_Afric...

[shakna]

Instead of spewing a incredibly short-sighted rhetoric that suggests people kill each other if they have a tribe, perhaps you should stop and think.

Let me pose it this way.

You were born a Native American, your tribe is your family, and your history. For all intents, yhey are a nation that raised you.

Around you are strangers. They come from a different nation.

They butchered your ancestors to steal what they had.

Yet, as is the way of your tribe, you try to be peaceful and considerate.

In response, some are kind to you. But, their leaders steal your water.

Not just sustinence, something special to the stories of your people.

You protest peacefully.

They react with violence.

How do you feel?

Tribes aren't something to give up. They're a part of you. Your history. Do you tell an Irishman to forget his kilt? An Englishman his Coat of Arms? Do you tell someone who's grandfather was a slave that its okay to be poor, because he's equal now?

The tribe is family, history, and nation. When your neighbour tried to sell your grandfather out for diamonds, there will be problems.

If anything, Africa shows us problems we ignore... And that with time and effort, relations can be improved. Sometimes it doesn't work. Bill kills Joe, because Joe bragged that his Da used to eat your family.

But forgetting who you are, isn't going to help.

[wordupmaking]

> forgetting who you are

You mean, like overwriting my actual life experiences with some sort of "narrative" that becomes more synthetic the more it becomes generalized and massaged? That's exactly what tribalism and group think are to me. "fools in old-style hats and coats, / Who half the time were soppy-stern / And half at one another’s throats" come to mind.

> The tribe is family, history, and nation.

It's funny though how as babies we start out mostly alike, and happily adopt a lot or even all of wherever we're put. History is kind of irrelevant if you don't actually tell it, it's a story. Yes, knowing why one's parents behaved the way they did is useful, but anything before that isn't really different from stories about other people. Interesting for their content, but with no super special connection to me, giving me identity or anything remotely like that. In so far as they affected me, in so far as I am a result of that chain, I can more accurately examine those current traces in my current me, simply find out who I am, in the flesh, not in dead words and thoughts.

Now, don't get me started on "communities", beh. I know all of this sounds so anti-social, but it's not, I hate how the actual people let themselves be buried under essentially religious systems that will spew them out as quickly as they snatched them up.

[shakna]

> experiences with some sort of "narrative" that becomes more synthetic the more it becomes generalized and massaged?

We clearly have different thoughts on the matter, so I won't delve deeply here.

But I would say the message becoming more generalised isn't what I've seen. Though, the tribes I was immersed with had deep story-telling practices, such as weaving and repeated communal retellings. Resulting in near word-for-word retellings some hundreds of years apart. The moral isn't explained or given. Its just history.

[wordupmaking]

I'm happy for you that you don't just see the dark underbelly of it. But the ruins and the mass graves and the devious sadism of the last tribe "my people" was immersed in last are kind of the worst humanity has to offer, and tribalism is kind of one of my pet peeves. Doesn't mean I hate tribal people, especially since I don't really so much (just) mean "native tribes in Africa" when I think tribalism. Think people who liked Hip Hop people who liked Metal bashing each other in the 90s with such earnestness, or whatever. There's so many examples from cute and silly to horrible. There is no use to any of that, just insecure individuals trying to feel safety and identity in numbers. That's the tribalism I know, the one people engaged in after they have been uprooted. Football Hooligans. "Liberals vs. Conservatives". "PC Master Race vs filthy casuals". Israel vs. Palestine, with assholes and great people on both sides. I'm on the side of those who are on nobodies' side, and it involves a lot of kicking cans down empty streets.

> As man advances in civilisation, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all the members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him. This point being once reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races. If, indeed, such men are separated from him by great differences in appearance or habits, experience unfortunately shews us how long it is, before we look at them as our fellow-creatures. [...] This virtue, one of the noblest with which man is endowed, seems to arise incidentally from our sympathies becoming more tender and more widely diffused, until they are extended to all sentient beings. As soon as this virtue is honoured and practised by some few men, it spreads through instruction and example to the young, and eventually becomes incorporated in public opinion.

-- Charles Darwin, "The Descent of Man" (1871)

It's the in-between that drives me nuts, and the closing window of opportunity to achieve some kind of unity that isn't based on deformity and deception, if not outright force.

    I don't understand why half the world is still crying, man
    And the other half of the world is still crying too, man

-- Janis Joplin

[shakna]

There's plenty wrong. I saw kids rejecting their own culture, and an invading one. Coming out messed up so badly they couldn't tell anger from happiness.

But if we forget our past, we risk repeating it.

Remember the bad, and where you came from, and remember the good, so that you have a chance at ensuring the future doesn't look like your nightmares.

Maybe this might be an example of a tribe serving a better purpose:

The elders acknowledged the problems of the next generation. So they built a school, and brought in outside knowledge to run it. The school was too far inland to run from, and a long way from anywhere else. They learned maths, alongside the story of the elder who decided to make peace with the other tribes.

The school is their pride. They rejoice in the girl learning to be a doctor, and the guy who is now a national athlete.

They didn't forget who they were, but they saw who they weren't and are actively trying to add to it. Enhance themselves, by using their past as a guide.

[throwway390]

> the tribes I was immersed with

You should have started off with that. There's no point in arguing with you if this is the case. You're too invested in them.

This is fine. You're probably more correct that I am anyway, since you've experience on the ground. I'm just armchair quarterbacking.

[RobertoG]

Your comments:

"Yes, knowing why one's parents behaved the way they did is useful"

and

", but anything before that isn't really different from stories about other people"

are contradictory. How could you know why your parents behaved the way they did if you don't know about their parents?

The person you are is a function of where you grow up, that is, your community. To deny that is to deny what humans are: social primates programmed to absorb a culture.

[wordupmaking]

> How could you know why your parents behaved the way they did if you don't know about their parents?

I only need to know their experiences with them and other people. Anything before stuff that shaped them is a bonus. Otherwise: how can you know your grandparents without knowing your grand grandparents? And so on? At which point does "knowing" become clogging up your mind with fuzzy distant blobs, then?

> The person you are is a function of where you grow up, that is, your community. To deny that

Would be contradictory with "in so far as I am a result of that chain, I can more accurately examine those current traces in my current me".

Though come to think of it, I'm denying it the way you phrase it. Communities and societies are even more importantly functions of the individuals in them. They have no meaning and no existence on their own, outside of a mutual agreement of actual people. We get shaped by our relationships and experiences with other people, and you can sum that up as "my community", but that's just a shorthand for my own actual experiences with the actual people I interacted with, and their experiences with me.

And who would you "absorb" culture from, if that was all there's to it? From others who just absorbed it? There needs to be a source at some point, why not be such a source, at least partially.

[throwway390]

Where there's division, there's conflict.

Ordered by number of conflicts, in decreasing amount:

Tribes > Nation-states > Unions.

There will be more wars when the European Union breaks up. Or when the US does.

Conversely, Africa will greatly benefit from becoming more united in the same way the West has. This is now being reverted (see Trump, Brexit), so you just wait and see where that takes us.

[shakna]

There are thousands of tribes in Australia. Where is their civil war?

It isn't as simple as you say, because a tribe is more than you seem to think it is. I can change my country, I cannot change my tribe.

Having many tribes does not mean unity is impossible.

[throwway390]

"The Australian Bureau of Statistics estimated the total resident Indigenous population to be 458,520 in June 2001 (2.4% of Australia's total)"[0]

You're missing my point. There are no tribes in Australia, for practical purposes. Australia has moved past the concept of tribes. In Australia, people are born into Australia.

In Africa, in 2017, people are born into a tribe.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_Australians

[shakna]

> There are no tribes in Australia, for practical purposes.

That is utter, utter crap.

The Tiwi don't associate with the Kimberly kids. Their islands are closed to outsiders. You are given your totem at age of 12 in a smoking ceremony that outsiders are not permitted to witness. You are not born Australian. You cannot marry one. You are Tiwi.

[finid]

Though I didn't, you deserve to be downvoted.

Tribalism and the "killing each other" thing is not unique to Africa. On the latter, Europeans have Africa beat. If you're an America, I'll suggest you make a study of your ancestors history.

[throwway390]

> Europeans have Africa beat.

War seems to have stopped in (Western) Europe though. That is until the Russians take advantage of the current power vacuum to start one, or a spark ignites between ethnic groups that haven't been around in large enough numbers until very recently.

On the other hand, Africa is at war today. See: article being discussed and [0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_conflicts_in_Africa#21...

[finid]

I'm glad you qualified that, because splitting Yugoslavia was not peaceful. And Kosovo and Serbia is still a hot spot.

But yes, wars stopped because after WW II, they decided the madness had to stop. That led to the formation of the EU. Countries that belong to the same economic group seldom go to war. ECOWAS serves the same purpose in West Africa.

Assuming you're an American, you should be blaming your govt. rather than Russia for the what's happening around that region. I know you won't believe it, but that doesn't change the facts.

[hutzlibu]

"War seems to have stopped in (Western) Europe though"

There might be differen reasons than giving up on tribes. Afaik the biggest wars we had were totally not tribe related, but rather "Nation" and than "Race".

And the original tribes in central europe are loong gone, replaced by feudalism and christianity over 1000 years ago.

[throwway390]

My point is that Africa is at the lower end of that scale (tribes) where the West is at the upper end (Unions). Or was, until Trump and Brexit.

My point is that progress in Africa is hampered by unnecessary divisions between people. It's obviously not the only problem, but it's not helping, either.

[finid]

You should note that the wars in Libya on that list were caused by the major European countries and the US.