Have you gotten your DNA done?

[UGAalum94]

Originally Posted by breathesgelatin

I'm curious what you mean by that. Tribes as in the sense of organized tribal political groups with extremely distinct identities and memberships? Or tribes in the sense of different cultures with different practices and systems of power?

I believe the first but not the second. There has always been cultural and ethnic variation in Africa.

I was under the impression that there were tribes but the colonial influence mucked things up by creating geographical groupings that didn't make sense in terms of the tribes.

[breathesgelatin]

Originally Posted by Alphagamuga

I was under the impression that there were tribes but the colonial influence mucked things up by creating geographical groupings that didn't make sense in terms of the tribes.

Well, the colonial influence also royally mucked things up, particularly in Western Africa in the very early years of North and South American colonization, via the slave trade, which encouraged different African groups/tribes to conduct wars in order to capture people from other tribes to sell to Europeans for the slave market. It's certainly true that slavery created that problem. But there was already conflict between these different groups/tribes before European contact: the Europeans just capitalized on this conflict.

The geographical thing came later, in terms of European nations divvying up actual territory in the 19th century--where what you're saying is definitely true. But at first (pre-1800) the Europeans were not as interested in setting up colonies in Africa itself but using its resources (human and otherwise) to further their colonial goals in the Americas.

/history grad student

[UGAalum94]

Just for the record, I wasn't trying to diminish the influence of the slave trade on Africa or anything.

My intial impulse was to say that there were tribes but not countries before colonialization (I think countries as we think of them are pretty new historically anyplace really.) I thought that might have been the idea that Centaur was thinking about.