Tribalism and relationships

This week’s article is a bit touchy. Many people that have experienced tribalism whether as a perpetrator, victim or witness often tend to not want to talk about it. 

We dance around the subject and avoid confronting it head on. I can even admit that while I think it is wrong on all counts, I have had difficulty openly discussing it in the past. 

But as a country we are aware (though unspoken) that it exists. If there is a place where tribalism thrives in all its might, it has got to be privately, in the day-to-day lives of individuals, in their families and around their friends. 

In my relatively short life, I have heard terrible stories about couples that could not stay together because of the tribalism their families are rooted in. 

I have seen people from two different ethnic backgrounds get ridiculed and treated like second class citizens because they fall in love with someone their family considers to be from a ‘problematic’ tribe. 

In everyday life, there are stereotypes, some true some not that are placed on people due to what region of the country they come from. It is ignorant to assume that those same stereotypes apply to everyone from that specific tribe.

We take these stereotypes (majority of which we have never witnessed) and use them as ammunition to destabilise the matches of those around us. By way of discouragement, running interference and many other forms of aggression all in the name of making sure our people “keep it within our tribe” or at the very least surrounding regions.
 
Historically, we are in a society where you do not stand up to your elders or do not offend your loved ones by speaking up and challenging the status quo. Ignoring any attempts by society to keep you away from what they consider an imperfect match would be considered by those superstitious among us as making room for curses or for your partnership to fail. 

Although numerous couples have shown that a person’s culture and religion does not impede their ability to love, cultural discrimination is still a big issue in African relationships.

Bi-cultural couples have a hard enough time already blending their two cultures and learning how to co-exist whilst accepting each other’s quirks and traditions. An extra layer of difficulty is added when they do not have their family’s support. 

We are a generation of table shakers, change makers (or at the very least trying to be). We should push further to right the wrongs of the generations before us some of which have been so deeply ingrained in a large majority of our generation. 

Tribalism, like racism and the other members of the family that is discrimination are something we have to fight hard to eliminate, effect change by being the change. So that somewhere down the line not too far from now, we are not still taking part in conversations about how a relationship will not last because one person is from a tribe with particular ‘ways’. 

As well as to ask ourselves, how best we can educate ourselves about the roots of tribalism, what role we play to facilitate it and how best we can combat it, especially in the day-to-day interactions and relationships we are trying to build.