This chapter attempts to review comprehensively the interconnection between ethnicity, development and social cohesion with special reference to modern history and contemporary circumstances in Africa. Ethnicity is a historical construct, changeable in relation to the political economy of the modern state. At the same time, ethnicity is a given and overwhelming reality for people, thereby reciprocally affecting politics and economy. Ethnicity dynamically changes in accordance with vertical and horizontal cleavages and thus intra- and inter-ethnic relations and given competitive situation for limited resources in the state and market has tended to result in exclusionary ethnic cohesion and political tribalism in Africa. African ethnicity and its interconnection with development and social cohesion should be understood, referring to phenomena occurring in the contemporary context of globalization: increasing migration causing ethnic diversity and exclusionary reactions, increasing corruption and decline of trust in the state, international spread of organized crimes, increasing incapability of national governments towards global crisis, destructive impact of unregulated markets, and yawning inequality as a global issue. We then examine five critical issues with grave political and economic implications: building democratic institutions, constitutions and governance devolution, media and education, land and territory, natural resources and foreign investment. We conclude the chapter with argument that achieving growth with equity and social cohesion through overcoming relevant problems is not unique challenge to Africa in this acceleratingly globalizing world.

This chapter argues that ethnicity is a universal human characteristic; it is an identity whose moral economy of mutual social relations causes internal dispute more continuously than external contexts cause interethnic competition. Ethnicities are mixed, shared, and subject to constant change in their own self-awareness and their inter-relations with others. The last two centuries of Kenya’s history illustrate this point. In the stateless, precolonial, past, different ways of taming the varied regional environment were the greatest influence on the nature of “ecological ethnicities” that shared ideas, took in each others’ economic migrants, and engaged in little “inter-tribal war”. Under colonial rule, access to scriptural literacy and arguments about how best to resist subjection caused much a sharper, patriotic, ethnic self-awareness. Regional inequalities in development, especially the triumph of agriculture over pastoralism, made ethnicity more competitive – a condition greatly emphasised when independence gave some Africans a centralised coercive power over others. Kenya has only recently adopted a devolved constitution that may defuse this often lethal competition but it is as yet too early to say.

This chapter argues that ethnicity is a universal human characteristic; it is an identity whose moral economy of mutual social relations causes internal dispute more continuously than external contexts cause interethnic competition. Ethnicities are mixed, shared, and subject to constant change in their own self-awareness and their inter-relations with others. The last two centuries of Kenya’s history illustrate this point. In the stateless, precolonial, past, different ways of taming the varied regional environment were the greatest influence on the nature of “ecological ethnicities” that shared ideas, took in each others’ economic migrants, and engaged in little “inter-tribal war”. Under colonial rule, access to scriptural literacy and arguments about how best to resist subjection caused much a sharper, patriotic, ethnic self-awareness. Regional inequalities in development, especially the triumph of agriculture over pastoralism, made ethnicity more competitive – a condition greatly emphasised when independence gave some Africans a centralised coercive power over others. Kenya has only recently adopted a devolved constitution that may defuse this often lethal competition but it is as yet too early to say.