Multiculturalism has failed in the majority of African States with 217 wars and major massacres being recorded between different racial, ethnic, religious and cultural groups throughout the continent since it generally achieved Independence from colonial rule half a century ago.
According to official records, Angola has been the worst affected African country with it literally being at war with itself and its neighbours for over 27 years since it achieved sovereignty from its former Portuguese colonial government.
The only African country to avoid any ethnic differences, massacres and genocides over multicultural clashes since Independence is Chad, Equatorial Guinea.
All the other 53 now independent African States have suffered inter-tribal wars, religious massacres, ethnic conflicts and deadly cultural differences with a cumulative death toll of well over 19 million people of different backgrounds and ethnicities.
The Republic of Chad suffered the biggest multicultural failure during the half century period since Independence, largely due to Muslim immigration and the warring activities of the Boko Haram terrorist-cum-religious organisation.
The Democratic Republic of the Congo was the second most affected State which experienced the 1997 inter-tribal wars that saw thousands of both Hutu and Tutsi men, women and children being massacred due to their ethnic, cultural and spiritual differences.
When I worked in Africa during the two decades of the pre-African Independence ‘Cold War’ years, I regularly took note of the fact that most of the towns and cities built in Africa during the Colonial era acted as essential barriers between all the different African tribes and religious groups.
In Tanganyika, for instance, I found that the original German colonists had delicately established frontier towns directly between any two different African tribes which had historically and forever been at each other’s throats. I soon realised, with the advent of violence, just how necessary it had been in the past to keep distinctly different cultural values and people apart.
While working in neighbouring Kenya, I also soon learned that the so-called ‘Highland Tribes’ were the undisputed enemies of the culturally different ‘Lowland Tribes,’ and that the Masai were the only group to freely accept and have dealings with the White way of life in both Kenya and Tanganyika.
I also experienced how multiculturalism among Kenya’s different tribal people failed during Kenya’s Mau Mau rebellion in the 1950s. Although all tribal Africans continually espoused to their colonial administrators that all Black people “are one,” any differences of cultural thought and political endeavour between them could mean instant war or death.
When Kikuyu tribal members would not swear allegiance to Mau Mau-ism, they were summarily attacked. This was particularly so with regard to members of a different tribe who would instantly lose their lives and, very often, their families because they spoke a different tongue and had different cultural habits and values.
More recently, Uganda allowed its borders to be breached and to be opened to African migrants and asylum seekers escaping inter-tribal clashes in neighbouring African States. The Government of the time appeared to accept a policy amounting to what we would today call multiculturalism.
The plan was to allow people owning different ethnic, religious and tribal ideals to live as one homogenous nation. Within a short while, this attempted multiracial experiment was doomed and more intense authoritative control had to be exerted by the Government in the interests of national peace and law and order.
The story of failed multiculturalism in Africa goes back to the early days following Independence when there was a concerted attempt to de-ethnicise the population of each country. The idea was to cancel out all cultural differences and to create nations of African people without any cultural and philosophical differences in spite of their built-in ethnicity.
African multiculturalism as it was preached by the victors of Independence, was a political tool used to control and silence indigenous minorities; to have like-thinking people in the workplace and to restrict schoolchildren to only one ethnic way of thinking and living.
The evidence of Africa’s failed multiculturalism is now starting to be felt in some of those European countries which recently opened their doors to foreign migrants.
Official statistics show that 49 million Muslim ethnic people currently live in ghettos of their own making in strictly multicultural Europe but are generally not assimilating in any way with the locals.
Various surveys and research undertaken by responsible European journalists and think tanks have found that many European asylum seekers are against multiculturalism for fear of losing their original national identities and the fact that they prefer to live together in groups.
Does this fact, taken in consideration with the experience of so many African countries, tend to indicate whether multiculturalism is now on shifting sands. Even here in Australia, a good many people are these days failing that old saying of “when in Rome, do as the Romans do”– and join the national family.