Ethnic Rivalries in the Electronic Passport

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Mr. Dowling's Electronic Passport Africa Today

Ethnic Rivalries

      The people of sub-Saharan Africa have more than 3,000 ethnic groups speaking more than 800 languages. Many Africans identify more with their ethnic group than their country. This is due to the fact that when Europeans colonized Africa, they created borders without regard to the interests or customs of diverse ethnic groups. Sometime borders divided people belonging to the same ethnic group, while at other times, bitter rivals were forced to share power. As African countries won their independence, the arbitrary borders set by the Europeans remained unchanged.

      Sudan, in northwest Africa, is an example what can happen when rival groups are forced to live with one another. The Muslim Arabic speaking people in northern Sudan have been engaged in a civil war with the black animists and Christians in southern Sudan. Amnesty International has charged the Arabs in northern Sudan with "ethnic cleansing" of the black southern Sudanese. More than one million people have died in battle or from famine and disease resulting from the war. The Arab controlled government in Sudan has close ties with Iraq, and on August 20, 1998, the United States launched cruise missiles against a factory in Sudan that the Americans said manufactured chemical weapons.

      Ethnic rivalries in the mountains of East Africa have claimed the lives of millions of Africans in the last several years. The Hutu people controlled the tiny nation of Rwanda, despite the fact that the ethnic Tutsi outnumbered them. The Hutu are generally shorter than the Tutsi, have darker skin and tend to be farmers, while the Tutsi are are pastoralists, who tend to animals. In 1990, Tutsi living in Uganda invaded Hutu controlled Rwanda, but the two sides signed a peace agreement in 1993 calling for a coalition government. The following year, an aircraft carrying the presidents of Rwanda and neighboring Burundi was shot down. Deep-seated ethnic hatred erupted and the Hutus slaughtered an estimated 800,000 Tutsis as retribution. Many experts in the region now believe a Hutu extremist shot down the plane. The Tutsi rebels responded with a fourteen week civil war that defeated the Hutu government and forced almost two million Hutu to flee to neighboring Zaire (now Congo). Ethnic tensions in the region continue, but most Hutu and Tutsis had returned to their homes by 1997.

      Since many Africans are multilingual, they generally speak their native language and a second world language such as Arabic or English. Arabic has long been the language of merchants and traders in Africa. Additionally, it is spoken by most of the 350 million Muslim people on the continent, often as a second language. Kiswahili, a mixture of Arabic and Swahili, is spoken in many parts of East Africa.

To cite this page:
Dowling, Mike, "The Electronic Passport Homework to Ethnic Rivalries," available from http://www.mrdowling.com/611-ethnic.html; Internet; updated Tuesday, April 30, 2002 .