Strangers in West African Societies

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Abstract
Opening Paragraph: The difficulties attending the attempt of the new African polities to weld their disparate elements into viable nation-states have been popularly attributed to ‘tribalism’. Certainly, in some cases groups indigenous to a region did come into conflict as new states arose there, but a hard look at tribal relations in modern Africa shows these relations to be of a different order from those of pre-European times. One element in the so-called ‘tribalism’ in modern Africa, and one which has so far escaped systematic treatment, is the conflict which arose between Africans indigenous to an area and African ‘strangers’—those groups which for various reasons had moved out of their homelands and had established relatively long-term residence in the territories of other groups—as political autonomy and independence became a reality. An examination of the factors which made for conflict between ‘locals’ and ‘strangers’ in West African societies would not only give us the opportunity to understand this phenomenon in a time-perspective, but would also enable us to see whether the status and role of the ‘stranger’ in these societies could throw light on the universal problem of the ‘stranger’.

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