Sociological Thinking as an Educational Antidote to Tribalism in Africa

Ethiopia and Sudan are only the latest cases in more than 20 African countries that have burst into civil wars over the last 40 years. Tribalism is viewed as a leading cause of the conflicts in Africa. The overall objective of this paper is to determine how the educational systems of Africa might be reformed along the lines of sociological thinking and harnessed into a mitigative force against the retrograde effects of tribalism. I propose that Benedict Anderson's concept of imagined communities, which argues that all identities are socially constructed, will have a detribalising effect on African children if deployed in school history textbooks. The rationale is that atavistic tribal sentiments stem from false beliefs about the importance and sacredness of each tribe as indoctrinated by elders. The puncturing of the myths surrounding the sacredness of the origins and greatness of the tribe through the concept of imagined communities would lead to disillusionment about tribal distinctiveness and significance. This conceptual paper adopts an autoethnographic qualitative methodological approach. It augments the researcher's lived experience with the analysis of history and the literature to understand the intellectual potential of the concept of imagined communities to detribalise African children. The failure to stem tribalism in Africa stems from the failure of the school system to expose African children to critical thinking about tribal narratives. African and Africanist sociologists have already revealed the myths of our tribal distinctions. However, this study is the first to focus on African children in the classroom exposed to detribalisation in light of the concept of imagined communities.