Building Bridges or Barricades: Interrogating Ethnic Identities in Africa
Building Bridges or Barricades: Interrogating Ethnic Identities in Africa

Summary/Abstract: African states have experienced multiple crises. The most devastating one is political. This is the inability to evolve a viable system that is suitable for the management of our daily social experiences. It is this failure that has generated many other problems in other spheres. These problems, in concert, have made the atmosphere in today’s Africa that of frustration, despair and disappointment, which are largely responsible for the so many crises of adversarial politics. Specifically, it is what is responsible for the affirmation of parochial identities and ethnic strife at the detriment of the rather transcendental national identity in contemporary African states.But, why have the affirmation of sectional identities and its attendant conflicts remain daunting, intricate and resilient, in spite of the attempts to create a higher culture to transcend them? Or is it that the attempts have been that of a square peg in a round hole? This paper will employ the conceptual, analytic-descriptive and reconstructive methods to examine the above and related questions. This will involve the use of indigenous management strategies in a manner many scholars have ignored. It is, therefore, expected that this paper will initiate a perspective, that is, a re-assessment of extant interpretations of the clash of ethnic identities in Africa.

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