Experiencing Identities: Making and Remaking African Communities

This issue of the Journal of Eastern African Studies carries five articles on the theme of ‘Experiencing Identities’, each exploring the meaning and significance of identity across time and space in eastern Africa. Issue number 3 of 2007 will carry five further articles on the same theme.1 This collection was first conceived in the best tradition of cooperation between the disciplines of history and anthropology in the field of eastern African studies.2 A powerful historical thread runs through the ten articles, and a concern for understanding ‘past states’ in the pursuit of understanding the relationship between experience and identity, but the articles also seek to explain current identities, real or imagined, whether in the eye of the beholder or of the beheld. Each article is thus concerned with change and/or continuity over time, usually within defined spaces or – perhaps more accurately – spaces in the process of being defined.

Studying, no less than understanding, identity is a complex business. Identity shifts across time and space, and can be easily mutable in both its individual and collective senses. It has often been more or less assumed by scholars in eastern Africa that particular communities just were as they said they were, or as others described them.3 To think otherwise can make the reconstruction of social understandings, whether in the past or in the present, exceedingly difficult to tie down.4 But by having the courage to think about what identities mean now, and what they may have meant in the past, we open up new areas of enquiry and scholarly investigation. This attempt to unravel the apparent mystery of whether people are what they say they are, or what others say they are, is in many ways a very recent – we hesitate to say ‘post-modern’ – scholarly endeavour, the symptom, perhaps, of a world as unsure of itself as at any time for the past fifty years or more.

Certain terms used in framing this collection of articles warrant some explanation. The first, the notion of ‘experience’, is relatively straightforward. It is no startling assertion to suggest that identity, above all, is an experience: it is simultaneously dynamic and fluid on the one hand, reaffirming and self-fulfilling on the other, in itself rendering further change, or consolidating previous wisdoms. All the articles included here describe identity as a thing which is experienced, something lived. Identity is also, of course, something which is based on experience; identity is accumulated experience, and the process by which identity is ‘formed’ can take place within or without a given community. In other words, to give an example, the accumulated experience of people living within the territory of Eritrea brings about the identity embodied in the Eritrean People's Liberation Front (EPLF); equally, the historical experience of central Ethiopians not only involves the evolution of their own identity, but also leads to their projection of identities onto other, adjacent communities, for example Eritreans or Somalis. These are, moreover, two-way processes: identity is never formed in isolation, but must always be relational. In identifying oneself, one is identifying others.

Second, our use of the term ‘community’ is self-consciously circumspect. By ‘community’ we simply mean either a physical grouping or an abstract entity with shared traits, real or imagined, be those traits cultural, linguistic, geographical or whatever.5 The communities discussed in these volumes range from the macroscopic in scale – the ‘nation’, for example Eritrea and Ethiopia (Reid and Uoldelul), and the ‘pan-ethnic’, for example the Somali (Barnes) and the Swahili (Caplan), in this issue – to the microscopic, notably the localities in central Ethiopia discussed by Abebe and Nicolas in the next issue. The validity of the term ‘community’ in this context is debatable, to be sure; but of possible alternatives, ‘polity’ is too prescriptive and ‘entity’ altogether too vacuous. The central point is that a community has shared experiences, at least at some imagined point of origin, however differently those experiences might be interpreted in reality; it is something that has, or is supposed to have, a common identity, however much divergent experience itself may have rent asunder that perceived common identity to create new ones. In many of the case studies included here, the community is continually reinventing itself to take account of experience and current political and socio-economic exigencies. Such change may be visible, and absorbed (even if grudgingly), as we see in the next issue among the Argobba described by Abebe, or the Samburu by Holtzman; on the other hand, Nicolas's Shoan community sought to recapture a past state, to pick up a thread of history from which the community believed itself to have become separated. At the same time, in two of our cases, the very existence of the ‘community’ may be questioned, even completely rejected, by certain parties: Eritrea and the Swahili have been at the centre of heated, and ongoing, debates. Yet they, too, are counted as ‘communities’ here for the simple reason that many people say they are, both inside and outside the community itself. The forms of the debates are markedly different, of course: the Swahili have not taken up arms in their own defence, but Eritreans have had to fight to prove the physical existence of their community.

And third, of course, there is the notion of ‘identity’ itself. Identity is expressed in a myriad of ways, embodied and symbolised in a vast array of activities and institutions. Space, or physical territory, is a potent expressions of identity; but territory is only part of the story and, in some cases, only a very small part. Identity is also commonly founded on particular interpretations of the past, at local as well as national level, and on the manipulation and interpretation of ‘cultures’; it is linked to ideas about dislocation, and separation from ancestral pasts and homelands. Very often it is born of notions of shared suffering, hardship or persecution.6 It can be asserted through language and modes of living, these intertwined with perceived historical experience. And it is even manifest in the very food that communities eat or the goods they consume. At the same time, of course, several writers highlight the role played by another, even more ecletic, ‘community’ – the scholarly – in underwriting and interpreting identities. Sometimes in so doing, scholars become involved in the very formation and expression of such identities.7

Any attempt to understand identity must necessarily involve a more innovative approach to the passage and interpretation of time than might otherwise be the case. The standard method of temporal categorisation in African history – pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial – can be an obstacle to understanding how communities evolve and see themselves over time. Thus particular passages of time – the ‘colonial era’, for example – have been reinterpreted, or at least approached from a different angle, in order to gain the best possible perspective on identity-evolution. In this context scholars have struggled with the question of ‘the global’ or ‘the external’ versus ‘the indigenous’ in examining how change takes place in a given community, and how such change is interpreted. There is much to be said for the longue durée approach – explicitly adopted by Knighton, and implicitly by Reid, for example – as long as we are conscious of discontinuity as well as continuity.8 The study of identity over time is a hazardous business should one fail to recognise the temporal nuances of community histories.

These ten articles explore key themes – national and ethnic perspectives, territory and identity, and time and culture. They examine identity through national, spatial and cultural prisms, although we are conscious that others might have been chosen. Some of the articles centre upon snapshots in time, perceived ‘moments’ of change – whether in the past, or the present. All of them endeavour to see the past as part of the present – part of the experience of identity. They are all concerned to explore the ways in which ‘communities’ within our region of eastern Africa define themselves according to changing local and wider regional and global circumstances. These are themes that have a widespread interest across the entire region of eastern Africa.

Notes

1. These papers were originally presented at the annual conference of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the Commonwealth, held at Arusha, Tanzania, in April 2002.

2. This is exemplified in several important collections on the region produced in recent years. See for example: Fukui and Markakis, Ethnicity and Conflict; Donham and James eds., The Southern Marches of Imperial Ethiopia; James et al. , Remapping Ethiopia; Kurimoto and Simonse, Conflict, Age and Power in North East Africa. Further south, in central-east Africa, the interdisciplinary collaboration is even older: see for example Fallers, The King's Men; Roberts, Tanzania Before 1900.

3. This works in certain contexts, but the pitfalls become clear particularly when non-Africanists (and even, on occasion, Africanists) discuss ‘anti-colonial nationalism’: see for example Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780, chap 5.

4. It must be conceded that for the pre-colonial past the attempt to unravel identities is, owing to a paucity of source materials, well-nigh impossible. Thus the ‘Zulu’, ‘Asante’, ‘Ganda’ and so on are often necessarily treated as ‘bloc entities’.

5. In part we owe something, as most of us do, to Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities.

6. Eventual ‘victory’, in whatever form, is often held to guarantee and indeed strengthen a particular identity. But this is only part of the story, and ‘defeat’ is also a vital dynamic: see for example Schivelbusch, The Culture of Defeat.

7. Arguably this has been the case much more acutely across Africa than, say, in Europe. In this and the subsequent issue, see the articles by Caplan, Knighton and Reid in particular.

8. Such an approach has been skilfully taken up by Jean-Paul Chretien, one of whose central concerns is to understand the roots of the Rwandan genocide: see his The Great Lakes of Africa.