Indigenous Peoples of Africa: Prospects for Resilient & Sustainable Livelihoods - Costantinos, Published by EcoAfrica
Africa has been experiencing a major ground swell of social, economic, cultural and political changes. While the movement towards fundamental political change is remarkable, there are certain formidable challenges that will make the transition to a stable, political and pluralist system of governance very difficult. The cultural, historical, political and socioeconomic conditions of this troubled region are not simply too conducive to the emergence of strong political polity. It is indeed within this context in which the legal empowerment of the indigenous peoples has to be recognized.
Across countries and continents, many terms and definitions refer to indigenous peoples. The 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples has not adopted a universal definition. While the prevailing view today is that no formal universal definition is necessary for the recognition of indigenous peoples’ rights, there is in practice a large degree of convergence of views. Indigenous Peoples can be identified in particular geographical areas by the presence in varying degrees of characteristics such as: having close attachment to ancestral territories and to the natural resources in these areas; self-identifying and being identified by others as being members of a distinct cultural group, an indigenous language; or having customary social and political institutions and primarily subsistence-oriented production.
Africa’s indigenous peoples
- Algeria: Amazigh/ Berber;
- Angola: San/Bushmen;
- Botswana: San/Balala, Nama;
- Burkina Faso: Peul, Tuareg;
- Burundi: Batwa;
- Cameroon: Pygmy, Mbororo, Kirdi;
- CAR: Mbororo, Aka/BaAka;
- Chad: Mbororo, Peul;
- DRC: Pygmy;
- Ethiopia: Hamer, Dassenech, Nygagaton and Erbore, Nuer, Afar, Borraan, Oromo, Mursi, Agnwak, Nuer, Gumuz,
- Gabon: Pygmy;
- Kenya: Turkana, Rendille, Borraan, Maasai, Samburu, Ilchamus, Somali, Gabra, Pokotand, Endorois, Ogiek, Sengwer, Yaaku, Waata, El Molo, Boni (Bajuni), Malakote, Wagoshi, Sanya, Kalenjin;
- Mali: Tuareg, Peul;
- Morocco: Amazigh/ Berber;
- Namibia: San, Himba;
- Niger: Peul, Tuareg, Toubou;
- Nigeria: Ijaw, Ogoni, Yoruba, Edo, Igbo, Urhobo, Itsekiri, Isoko, Efik, Ibibio South, Fulani, Hausa, Kanuri, Nupe, Tiv;
- Rep. Congo: Bantu,Pygmy;
- South Africa: San (Xun, Khwe and Khomani), Nama/Khoe;
- Tanzania: Bantu, Cushite, Nilo-Hamite& San;
- Uganda: Batwa, Benet, Karamajong
Characteristics associated with indigenous claims in Africa
Africans founded the Indigenous Peoples of Africa Coordinating Committee (IPACC) in 1997, as one of the main transnational network organizations recognized as a representative of African indigenous peoples in dialogues with governments and bodies such as the UN. IPACC (1977) identifies several key characteristics associated with indigenous claims in Africa:
- political and economic marginalization rooted in colonialism;
- de facto discriminationbased often on the dominance of agricultural peoples in the State system (e.g. lack of access to education and health care by hunters and herders);
- the particularities of culture, identity, economy and territoriality that link hunting and herding peoples to their home environments in deserts and forests (e.g. nomadic, diet, knowledge systems);
- Some indigenous peoples, such as the Sanand Pygmy peoples are physically distinct, which makes them subject to specific forms of discrimination.
In addition to the above-mentioned definition, the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACHPR) describes indigenous people as nomadic and semi-nomadic pastoralists and hunter/gatherers who live in situations of marginalization and discrimination. While all these definitions capture some key characteristics of indigene populations, they do not fully account for some of the distinct traits of the population. Furthermore, these definitions pose particular problems in the African context where the term is constantly confused with pastoralism. Therefore, the initial task of this study was to set out criteria that will help in identifying the indigenous groups in Africa that the research/study should focus on. Clearly defining indigene populations in the African context will help development stakeholders to identify and document the size, location and grouping of indigenes in Africa and decide when and by reference to what criteria, they should receive differential treatment in Bank projects.
Indigenes Countries
- Pygmy - DRC, Gabon& Republic of Congo
- Mbororo - Central African Republic &Chad
- Peul - Chad, Burkina Faso, Niger& Mali
- Amazigh - Algeria, Morocco (Berber)
- Batwa - Burundi, Uganda Tanzania
- San - Angola, Botswana, Namibia, South Africa
According to the information obtained from IWGIA and confirmed by the ACHPR, around “fifty million indigenous people in twenty one African nations, mostly nomadic and semi-nomadic pastoralists and hunter/gatherers live in situations of marginalization and discrimination. The major groups of indigenous people are the Amazigh/Berber in Northern Africa, the Pygmies in Central Africa, the Peul and the Tuareg in Western Africa, the Bantu in East Africa and the Sanpeople /Bushmen in Southern Africa.
The situation of indigenous peoples in Africa is daunting.
While discrimination of marginalized groups, mal-governance, corruption, impunity, violent conflicts and poverty is in general very high on the African continent, indigenous peoples are specifically among the groups suffering the most. Rural poverty in Africa is increasingly concentrated in indigenous and pastoral communities where they face economic, social, political and cultural marginalization in the societies in which they live, resulting in extreme poverty and vulnerability for a disproportionate number of them. Generally, their socio-economic and human development conditions are significantly worse than other populations. Caused by a number of factors such as dominating development paradigms favoring settled agriculture over other modes of production, establishment of national parks and conservation areas and natural resource extraction etc., this harms them in many ways. Indigenous peoples in Africa are often victims of violent conflicts. Indigenous peoples in Africa have limited access to justice and violations against their rights are often committed with impunity. In sum, indigenous peoples in African suffer from severe neglect, dispossession and human rights violations, and the general trend is that African states wish to assimilate them into dominant cultures and livelihoods.
Only few African countries have so far recognized the existence of indigenous peoples. However, this situation is gradually improving and several central African countries now recognize the existence of indigenous peoples in their countries. For example, Ethiopia’s Constitution provides for representation of every nation and nationality in the upper chamber of law making. Kenya a new constitution has been adopted which provides for considerable decentralization and recognition of historically marginalized groups to which indigenous peoples belong. In Burundi, the constitution provides for special representation of the indigenous Batwa people in the National Assembly and the Senate. Cameroon has a draft law on Marginal Populations. The Central African Republic has as the first country in Africa ratified ILO Convention 169.
Indigenous people’s poor representation in decision-making bodies at both local and national level and has very much limited their participation in decision-making processes. Mainstream populations have always discriminated indigenous peoples and looked down upon as backward peoples. Many stereotypes prevail that describe them as “backward”, “uncivilized” and “primitive, an embarrassment to modern African states. Such negative stereotyping legitimizes discrimination and marginalization of indigenous peoples by institutions of governance and dominant groups. Advances in human thought and action towards global justice and universalization of guarantees for human rights are gathering added momentum with the motive energy contributed by these unprecedented events. The ability of States to strip people of their rights to livelihood security, shrouded behind the thin veneer of non-interference in each other's internal affairs is increasingly becoming a thing of the past. While the dawning of this new era of political pluralism and economic growth is a welcome event, the stewardship, management and administration of social, political, and economic reforms is also marked by uniquely forbidding organizational-strategic issues.
Promoting indigenous peoples’ development
In the wake for Africa's renaissance, African scholars and practitioners must research and promote indigenous peoples’ development by connecting with the people, joining in on their aspirations, complementing their abilities with their resources and assisting to create true partnerships. Africans must commit to a common discipline of empowerment among all people, to a fundamentally new value system based on justice, peace and the integrity of creation. Indeed, it is a system recognizes the rich resources of indigenous peoples’ communities, their cultural and spiritual contributions and protecting the wealth of nature. It will be radically different from the value system on which the present economic and political orders function and which lies behind the current crises of indigenous peoples. We need to collectively define a new understanding of empowerment in which those who have been marginalized by reason of sex, age, economic and political condition, ethnic origin and disability, the homeless, refugees, asylum-seekers and migrants alike take their place at the center of all decisions and actions as equal partners.
Given time, the empowerment approach entailed in this new paradigm, can take root to become significantly enabling to African countries and peoples as they strive to meet their objectives. This requires among, other things, a fundamental paradigm shift in the identification of development challenges and a sustained effort to transform the way in which knowledge is currently constructed, organized and used as a basis for programming.
A new structure can emerge, which provides for a state agency that will administer assemblies, which will administer indigenous people’s lands. The institutional structure augurs on the principles already discussed in the previous section mindful of the following:
- that the structure should be Executive and its accountability should be to the people through a legislative organ, the Parliament;
- that the administration of land and participation of the people generally, and the land users participation matters should be conducted in a transparent manner;
- that land management and land delivery systems provision of professional service as opposed to administrative; institutional checks and balances should be built into the structure and prevented from developing into a monopolistic, bureaucratic entity
Needless to repeat, we can derive these principles directly opinions received from the people who argued that the present management was not close enough and accessible to the majority of the people. It was insensitive to the expectations and interests of the town dwellers; controlled effectively by a handful of administrative mandate to decide on land matters and who often abused their offices for lack of professional ethics and checks and balances. Hence, the recommended management and administrative structure maintains the principle of separation of powers at state level down to the village level. In particular, the Constitution guards the principle of the independence of the judiciary. The most dramatic advance in the history of human thought came about not because of the discovery of new answers for old problems but because of new queries for erstwhile problems. The thesis of this research is based on the need to elevate the discourse on people-driven in institutionalizing social ingenuity to a higher paradigm of institutional mainstreaming instead of trying to find new answers to justify emerging cerebral deprivation of the intellectual or the frustration of the state elite to explain grinding poverty in African rural communities.
Conclusion
The intrinsic difficulty of underpinning the reason for livelihood crisis is that an enormous number of physical, economic, social and political variables, at both national and international levels, influence the interplay between state and civil society, modernity and tradition, self-less nationalism and greed, knowledge based governance and ignorance, courage and fear of the unknown. At the level of civil society, problems manifest themselves in the form of insufficient and inadequate organizations and networks to develop responses to the challenges of vulnerability and its implications. The lack of institutional links between civil society and the public sector regarding livelihood security and obstacles and difficulties experienced by indigenous people in the process of developing adequate responses is a major hurdle we need to address. Furthermore, inadequate awareness concerning development and its implications, lack of a common will to mount a concerted assault from all quarters, and lack of resources has made the crisis even more demanding. Within a life span of something like five decades, African polities have exhibited an enhanced degree of coercive power. This has resulted in a pervasive military ethos through a long and painful process of ideological schooling. Hence, a major obstacle to efforts to install and consolidate systems is the all-powerful and hierarchical bureaucratic structure.
Even under democratically favorable contemporary global conditions, historical, ideological and strategic characteristics internal and external to the sub-Saharan Africa’s economic, social and political transition processes would still exist that make it a costly exercise. Characteristics and problems of this sort can be identified and understood through critical, yet constructive, analysis focused on certain key elements of the reform strategy; in setting the stage for the evolution of new social, political, and economic culture based on peoples priority, knowledge and practice. This has to change.
It is easy to follow the current trend within the international discourse and advocate community driven institutionalizing social ingenuity as a desirable form of adjustment for tens of millions of Africans; weathering in the storm of climate change; induced by reckless industrial growth and consumption. Nor is it difficult to make normative judgments about how states and societies should behave if institutionalizing social innovations in institutionalizing social ingenuity are to be the leading paradigms of humanity. This is in sharp contrast to the accountability of developed nations and at the same time the demeanor of ‘development finance’ institutions in support such migration of social innovations into national and global rules of conduct.
The failed ideologies of the last century have ended, but a new one has risen to take their place. It is the ideology of Development-and it promises a solution to all the world’s ills. Nevertheless, Developmentalism is a dangerous and deadly failure, a dark ideological specter, haunting the world and as deadly as the tired ideologies of the last century, that failed so miserably, (but) it is thriving. Like all ideologies, (it) promises a comprehensive final answer to all of society’s problems, from poverty to violence and despotic rulers. It shares the common ideological characteristic of suggesting there is only one correct answer, and it tolerates little dissent. It deduces this unique answer for everyone from a general theory that purports to apply to everyone, everywhere. There is no need to involve local actors who reap its costs and benefits. It even has its own intelligentsia at the IMF, World Bank& UN (Easterly, 2007:1).
Nevertheless, it is not so easy to conceptualize local sustainable development innovations as working processes, which are balanced against strategy, to determine what makes for real, as opposed to vacuously formal, declaratory rhetoric of sustainable development and climate change summits of governments. This is particularly the case where corporatist states tend to view the relations of their particular SD agenda with their broader governing roles and responsibilities as relatively simple and direct, unproblematically reducing the latter to the former. The ultimate objective of sustainable development is to achieve a balance between human needs and aspirations in sync with the quality of life today and in the future. Common sense would thus exact an urgent need to bring to scale the destructive magnitude of industry, untenable demographic dynamics and frantic misuse of resources into equilibrium on the one hand and the desired outcomes in sustainable livelihoods on the other. The 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development or Earth Summit, became one of the most effective means to reinforce the significance of environmental sustainability and generate global awareness of the environment–development relationship.
The major outcomes of this Earth Summit, including the Convention on Biological Diversity, the Convention on Climate Change, the Rio Declaration and the Agenda 21, 1992, draw attention to the importance of some major dimensions of sustainability in pursuing socioeconomic development. Beyond platitudes and empty pledges, global covenants for a sustainable world have borne little fruit. The Rio+20 jamboree manifestly projected the mercerization of well-meaning global survival concerns by over-represented and powerful trans-nationals which, successfully coerced a dramatic barter of the human environment and life on the planet with admirable succinctness and brazen verve. From a policy perspective, therefore, any research should provide the normative and operative analytical treatise, which will enable leaders to identify the institutional gaps and potential opportunities that inhibit or promote the migration of social innovations in sustainable development into institutional praxis. It must draw on case analyses to underpin the technological reform discourse as a means of endogenous common resources management and in-depth restructuring of polity that manages this.
Demands by indigenous peoples’ leaders and rapidly evolving national and international normative frameworks on the rights of indigenous peoples have led to the adoption of specific policies by the World Bank (1991, 2005), the Asian Development Bank (1998, 2009), the Inter-American Development Bank (2006), the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (2008) and the African Development Bank (2013-2014). Over the years, these institutions have accumulated extensive experience in dealing with issues related to development and protection of indigene populations. While one must exercise caution because of difference of settings and context, but we can identify and learn certain best practices and lessons from these.
