In Africa, the integration of the tribal lifestyle into modern society is an everyday reality. There is no such thing as a modern society in Africa without the influence of the tribal lifestyle. Africa is developing extremely fast and in many places you could walk by and not see any signs of a tribal lifestyle if you don’t know what to look for. Most native Africans, who live in modern society today, at one time also, lived in a tribal setting. These habits, traditions and beliefs don’t die fast. How a person is raised affects the way they live, the way they work, and the way that they will raise their children. Just because a person moves to a city doesn’t mean that they will leave their own culture behind. So Africa is unique in that it has the biggest immigration of people moving from a tribal lifestyle to the modern society. This obviously creates many complicated situations as modern society in Africa tries to find the balance integrating their old culture with their new.

Modern society in Africa has divided people into different groups by marking out country boundaries or state and province divisions. However, these boundaries do not accurately portray the divisions of different tribes in Africa. Tribes cross all separations and boundaries that are marked out by the modern world. There is a strong pride that exists in where a person is from and which language is their mother tongue. An African will feel a stronger tie with another person who is from the same tribe as them more than someone who is a citizen of the same country but of a different tribe. These tribal ties have massive affects on a national and even continental scale in Africa.

Many of the political positions given to someone are given on the basis of who your friends (mainly in your tribe) and family are. This obviously can make it more difficult to make decisions that are better for the country as a whole instead of just helping people of your tribal. Let’s look at one very clear example of how strong Africans can feel about these ties and how far they can stretch.

When Barack Obama was elected president of the U.S.A, the country of Kenya became very excited and repaved the airport runway and tried to fix up the country a little waiting for his visit. They were excited because they expected to receive some funding from him simply because his father was from Kenya. This is just a glimpse of how strong the ties are in tribes in Africa and how they have affects on international levels.     

Let’s look at some more examples of the integration of tribal lifestyle into modern society. In Africa new buildings are going up, new bridges and shopping centers are being built. They are using some of the latest construction methods and technology to accomplish this. However, in these new construction projects there is a ceremony that they need to do for the ancestors. The builders cannot fail to do this ceremony because if they do and something bad happens, they will be blamed for the accident because they did not doing the ceremony. Recently a large bridge was opened in the country of Mozambique which crosses the Zambezi River. The builders made every provision to make sure that the bridge was very well built. Every precaution was taken to build it to code so that it would be safe to drive on, but in the end it all came down to the ceremony of the ancestors. The ceremony was shown on national television so that everyone knew that it was now safe to dive on. This is just another example of how the modern society of Africa is very tightly tied to that of the tribal life from which it came.  

One last example of this is that hospitals are becoming more and more available to the people of Africa. The governments in Africa are helping out with costs to make it more affordable to the average person. In many countries the price to go to a hospital and even buy the medicine prescribed is much cheaper than what it costs to go to a traditional healer. For this reason many people decide to go to the hospital first and try to get healed there. However, if this does not work, they will inevitably go to the traditional healer looking for a healing brought about through magic. It is very common to hear that someone has been sick for a while and so they are going out to find a traditional healer in some little village.

As we have discussed, Africa is in a time of many changes as they begin to integrate into modern society. The traditions of their tribal lifestyle will continue on for many years possibly weakening as the generations go by and new things are taught. However, many areas of culture run so deep that it will take many years (if even possible) to completely take away every aspect of the “tribal lifestyle” from the African culture. This is just as true in the entire world. We can never completely get rid of the culture of our fathers because it never really dies, we continue to see traces of it here and there in our lives.  

*I used the term “tribe” in this article because that is the title of the subject. However, the word “tribe” is not very accepted in Africa and it is considered more politically correct to say “people group”.