Intellectuals were the worst peddlers of Tribalism

By Patrick Hall

It’s been nearly a decade since the death of one of my favorite authors Chinua Achebe. Achebe was among the elite in the literary world.  He remains one of the most recognizable if not dominant figures of modern African literature. In his many novels, such as Things Fall Apart and A Man of the People, to the more biting narrative entitled The Trouble with Nigeria, Achebe’s literary mindset and influence reached well beyond the confines of his native Nigeria.  Similar to Shakespeare or Mark Twain, Achebe’s words spoke both to what is good in all human beings and what is often malformed, deviant, and in some cases just plain evil. In his writings, he constantly exposed the reality or taint of the original sin that exists in all of us.  He was painfully aware that in the struggle to throw off British Colonial Rule, and the subsequent horrors of the Post-Colonial Biafran conflict, it was the black political class, narcissistic intellectuals along with their military, who often perpetrated the worst crimes and pogroms. Ironically, this was done in the name of freedom, social justice, equality, and national sovereignty.
 
Achebe like many of his contemporaries understood, that ongoing disputes taking place in his country after independence were exasperated by the British Colonial Powers, not recognizing the centuries-old ethnic and cultural differences in Pre Nigeria culture. However, he was also just as emphatic that in Post-Colonial Nigeria, there comes a time, when Nigerians and most so-called oppressed people must stop blaming the “other” for the current discordance and/or murderous activities created and sustained by their black African brethren.
 
In his book A Man of the People, the underlying subtext was, that the black intellectual class and the many duplicitous characters, who ruled after the British left, bear responsibility for the dissemination of a toxic emphasis on “ethnic, religious or tribal” efficacy. This oftentimes superseded what was beneficial or constructive for an emerging country, that we know today as Nigeria.

In many corners of African society, this made Achebe throughout his lifetime both a beloved and hated figure among the intellectual and political classes. To cite Achebe, “some intellectuals were the worst peddlers of Tribalism.”

As a former pseudo-Black-Militant-Hippie, who came of age during the late 1960s, I couldn’t get enough of the Stokely Carmichaels, H Rapp Browns, Bobby Seales, Frantz Fanon, and even Malcolm X. People who framed the debate dealing with racism, and other inequalities in American society. I was still attempting to shoehorn the epistemic of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr into the way I viewed America.  My earlier youthful allegiance or naivete was more attuned to the strident calls of Black militants and white intellectuals like Saul Alinsky, Norman Mailer, Edward Said, Michel Foucault, Noam Chomsky, and others. Like our first Black President, I was more accommodating to cultural-political heresy, that the cultural left propagated which was to blame everything on Western man, the United States, and white people. And not necessarily in that order.  This was the greatest failure of the cultural left, which gave birth to today’s diversity, equity, and inclusion industry (DEI).  DEI serves as an imprimatur to the egregious error or postmodern practice of stuffing the complexities of political science, history, and economics into bottles labeled race, gender, and class. It simply erodes or castrates’ analytical standards.  As a result, DEI’s message devolved into division and not unity.

As a nation, we now are encouraged by the DEI alchemists to sit in our little hyphenated race, gender, class, and environmentalist enclaves waiting to be offended by God’s knows-what.   It was (or is) neo-segregationist at its core.  It’s a distortion, if not the polar opposite of what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr tried to convey to all Americans, if not the world.  Examining and judging people via the content of our character (as individuals), and not by skin color, gender, class, or the many other ways that America and Western culture has become increasingly tribal.  Cultural diversity, multicultural, equity, Critical race theory, as well as the many emerging radical elements within the LGBTQ+ community feed or accentuate the deadly sin of tribalism and balkanization.  In regards to Critical Race Theory and the cacophonous “white fragility/white privilege babel”, are little more than racism under new management.

These terms and polities on the surface might appear to be seeking social justice for their constituencies. In reality, they have over the decades chipped away at the foundations of American culture.  A culture despite its flaws has done more than most Western societies to provide opportunities, “the freedoms if you will,” to both succeed and fail.  

[Patrick is a retired University Library Director. He is graduate of Canisius College and the University of Washington where he earned Masters Degrees in Religious Studies Education, Urban Anthropology and Library and Information Science.  Mr. Hall has also completed additional course work at the University of Buffalo, Seattle University and St. John Fishers College of Rochester New York. He has published in several national publications such as Commonweal, America, Conservative Review, Headway, National Catholic Reporter, Freedom's Journal Magazine and American Libraries. He has published in the peer reviewed publications, Journal of Academic Librarianship and the Internet Reference Services Quarterly. From 1997 until his retirement in January 2014 he served on the Advisory Board of Urban Library Journal, a CUNY Publication.]