Colonialism and Post Colonial Ethnic Conflict in East African Countries

From the end of the nineteenth century until the attainment of independence in the early 1960s, the countries of East Africa were under the compound administration of European empires. afterwards decades of foreign rule which saw unparalleled transformations within society, the post-colonial states that emerged have been blighted by ethnic conflict. It has been argued that the beliefs of British, Belgian and German administrators led them to completely jar the societies they governed based on a fictitious tribal model, and in the solve they invented ethnicity. There is a great deal of believe on this matter, though, and its go on relevance to contemporary politics only makes it more vigorous. Before we go on to analyse to what extent it may have been invented under colonial rule, we need to first of all establish just what exactly is meant by the term ethnicity. It is a complicated as well as a contentious question, interpreted in a variety of different shipway that can depend on political beliefs, social status, place of birth and somebodyal history. Clearly, if we ar to talk about ethnicity without descending into an exhausting debate on linguistics and semantics, it is necessary to take for granted a sure degree of generalisation. We can say that all human beings, broadly, do move objectively to some form of ethnicity that is, a social group whose members they are linked with through a shared culture, religion, territory, language, or genealogy. What varies greatly is the awareness of this connection, and the importance an individual places upon it. The term tribe would further complicate the debate, and attend no other purpose than to draw discussion away from the work of invention the main focus of... ...nd every aspect of life from marriage ceremony to choice of profession was influenced by the ethnic group you belonged to. Transience, multiplicity, and change were the separate words, though. One can say that what the colonial governments actually invented, and what has often left over(p) such a painfully devastating legacy, was not ethnicity itself, but the computer code of ethnic groups in national laws, the exclusivity of groupings, and the bringing to the fore of a persons tribe at the expense of all other manner of identification. You no longer merely took comfort from being part of a Tutsi community, you were a Tutsi from the day you were born until the day you died, and the course of your life would be decided for you based on this label. Rather than inventing it, colonialism destroyed ethnicitys star defining characteristic in the East African context its mightiness to transform.