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Working Paper No. 44
SOURCES OF ETHNIC
IDENTIFICATION IN AFRICA
by Alicia Bannon, Edward Miguel,
and Daniel N. Posner
Copyright Afrobarometer
AFROBAROMETER WORKING PAPERS
Working Paper No. 44
SOURCES OF ETHNIC
IDENTIFICATION IN AFRICA
by Alicia Bannon, Edward Miguel,
and Daniel N. Posner
August 2004
Alicia Bannon is a student at Yale Law School. Edward Miguel is Assistant Professor of Economics at
the University of California, Berkeley, and NBER. Daniel N. Posner is Assistant Professor in the
Department of Political Science at the University of California, Los Angeles.
The authors thank Alice Kona, Bernard Onyango, Kevin Thelen, Godfrey Wasiche and Daniel Young for
their research assistance; the U.S. National Science Foundation (Miguel, SGER-#0213652) and the
Academic Senate at UCLA for their support; ICS Africa; members of the Working Group in African
Political Economy; and the editors of the Afrobarometer Working Paper Series for their extremely helpful
comments.
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Introduction
In the popular imagination, Africans are deeply and uniformly ethnic people. Ask an African “who she
is,” most people assume, and you will get an ethnic response: “I am a Yoruba,” “I am a Kikuyu,” “I am a
Buganda.” Moreover, ask most people why ethnicity is so salient in Africa and they will tell you that it is
because Africans are so “backward.” Once Africans become more educated and urbanized (in short,
more “modern”), it is assumed, ethnicity will cease to cause so much conflict, distort so many elections,
and pervert so many public policies.
The first part of this paper draws on survey data from more than 14,000 respondents in nine African
countries to dispel these myths about the salience and origins of ethnic identifications in Africa. We show
first that ethnicity is not nearly as central to Africans’ conceptions of who they are as is frequently
assumed. Responding to an open-ended question about how they identify themselves first and foremost,
fewer than one-third of African respondents identify themselves in ethnic terms. The majority identify,
instead, in terms of non-ethnic affiliations such as occupation. Moreover, contrary to the assumption that
Africans are “all the same,” the share of respondents who rank their ethnicity as their most important
group membership varies tremendously from country to country.
We then investigate the factors that predispose individuals to identify themselves in ethnic terms. We
examine both individual- and country-level characteristics and find support for the proposition that the
sources of strong ethnic identification lie not in economic or political backwardness but in “modernity.”
Specifically, we find that education, working in non-traditional occupations that expose people to
competition for employment, and exposure to political mobilization all increase the likelihood that an
individual will see him or herself primarily in ethnic rather than non-ethnic terms. Strikingly, we find that
the closer a country is to a national election and the greater the degree of political rights the people in a
country enjoy, the greater the likelihood that respondents from that country will say that they identify
themselves ethnically first and foremost. In addition, contrary to one of the central assumptions in the
literature on ethnic diversity, we also find a robust
negative
relationship between a country’s ethnic
fractionalization and ethnic salience.
The second part of the paper then turns to the slightly different question of the factors that cause
individuals to identify themselves in terms of one dimension of ethnic identity rather than another.
Drawing on survey data collected from more than 1,100 respondents in two Kenyan market towns, we
find that the salience of two competing types of ethnic identity, corresponding with membership in one’s
tribe and membership in one’s sub-tribe, depends largely on the scope of the social arena the respondent
inhabits. Respondents who interact in broad social and political spheres – because of their education,
occupation, or location in an urban population center – tend to associate more strongly with their tribe.
Respondents who interact in narrow social spheres – because of their lack of education, dependence on
subsistence agriculture, or rural location – tend to identify more strongly with their sub-tribe.
Taken together, these findings provide strong empirical support for situational and instrumental
approaches to ethnicity that are well-established in the academic literature. The context dependence of
ethnic identifications is borne out by the finding that the salience of ethnicity varies both across and
within African countries, and that it does so in predictable ways. The instrumentality of ethnic
identifications is suggested by the finding that competition for political representation (as evidenced by
election proximity and political rights) and jobs (as evidenced by participation in the “modern” economy)
tend to increase the likelihood that a person will identify him or herself in ethnic terms and to affect the
kinds of ethnic identities with which the person will identify. The results reported in the paper reinforce
those reported in other studies (e.g., Bratton, Mattes and Gyimah-Boadi forthcoming) to undermine
popular views that ethnic salience in Africa is uniformly strong and fundamentally pre-modern, and point
the way to a richer understanding of ethnicity in African politics
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Sources of Ethnic Identification: Evidence from the Afrobarometer
Data and Measurement
To investigate the sources of ethnic identification in Africa, we employ data collected in Round 1 of the
Afrobarometer, a multi-country survey project that employs standardized questionnaires to probe citizens’
attitudes in new democracies in Africa. Round 1 surveys were administered in 12 sub-Saharan African
countries between mid-1999 and mid-2001. Nationally representative samples were drawn through a
multi-stage, stratified, clustered sampling procedure, with sample sizes sufficient to yield a margin of
sampling error of +/- 3 percent at the 95 percent confidence level.
Round 1 Afrobarometer surveys included a question designed to gauge the salience for respondents of
different group identifications. The question was worded as follows:
We have spoken to many [people in this country, country X] and they have all described
themselves in different ways. Some people describe themselves in terms of their
language, religion, race, and others describe themselves in economic terms, such as
working class, middle class, or a farmer. Besides being [a citizen of X], which specific
group do you feel you belong to first and foremost?
The main dependent variable used in the analyses in the first part of this paper – the measure of “ethnic
salience” – is constructed from the responses to this question by 14,414 respondents in nine countries:
Botswana, Malawi, Namibia, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.
coded respondents’ answers to the “which group do you feel you belong to first and foremost” question
into five categories: ethnic, race, religion, class/occupation, and other. We defined ethnic responses in
two ways. Our principal definition, which we employ in the analyses reported in the main paper, equates
ethnicity with tribe (or sub-tribe) and language. However, recognizing that other non-tribal and non-
linguistic identities – e.g., race in South Africa, region in Malawi, religion in Nigeria – are sometimes also
understood in ethnic terms, we also coded our dependent variable in a second, more encompassing, way
to include these other categories as ethnic responses as well.
We replicate our main findings using this
broader definition in the Appendix.
Before turning to the main findings, three limitations of the analysis bear mention. First, although
broadly representative of Africa as a whole, the nine countries included in our study are not a substitute
for a continent-wide sample. The nine countries include no Francophone nations, no countries that have
failed to introduce at least some democratic or market reforms over the last decade, and, with the
exception of Uganda, no countries currently involved in civil wars. As Table 1 indicates, per capita
incomes in the nine countries are significantly higher than the African average (though this is driven by
the cases of Botswana, Namibia, and South Africa – the other six countries are actually poorer than the
average African country). Rates of under-5 mortality in our sample are slightly lower than in Africa as a
whole, and urbanization is slightly higher. Ethnic fractionalization – a measure of the likelihood that two
1
Further details of the Afrobarometer project, including the sampling procedures used in collecting the data, are
available at the project’s web site: www.afrobarometer.org.
2
The question was not asked in Ghana. In Mali, the question was included but the codebook did not provide
information about response categories until after this version of the paper was completed. The Mali data will be
added to future analyses. Lesotho was excluded because the name of the country nationality is identical to the name
of the country’s dominant ethnic group, the Sotho (who comprise 99.7 percent of the population, CIA 2003). Thus
the survey question (which asks, “besides being Mosotho, which group do you feel you belong to first and
foremost?”) rules out an ethnic response by definition.
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In addition to language and (sub-) tribe, the broad ethnic variable codes race as an ethnic response in all nine
countries; region as an ethnic response in Malawi, Namibia, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, and Uganda; and
religion as an ethnic response in Nigeria.
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people chosen at random from the country will be from different ethno-linguistic groups – is roughly
comparable to what is found on the rest of the continent. But the nine countries in our sample enjoy more
extensive political rights than the average African country (on the Freedom House scale, lower numbers
indicate greater rights). Our findings therefore must be interpreted with the caveat that they may not be
entirely representative of Africa as a whole.
Table 1: How Representative is Our Sample of African Countries?
Per capita
GNI in US$
(2000)
Under-5
Mortality per
1,000 (2000)
Percent
Urban
(2001)
Ethnic
Fractionalization
(Fearon)
Political
Rights Score
(2000-01)
All Sub-Saharan Africa
480
162
33
0.71
4.5
Nine Sample Countries
1,130
139
36
0.73
3.7
Botswana
3,300 99 50 0.35 2
Malawi 170
193
15
0.83
3
Namibia 2,050
112
32
0.72
2
Nigeria 260
153
46
0.80
4
South
Africa
3,020 79 58 0.88 1
Tanzania 280
149
34
0.95
4
Uganda 310
161
15
0.93
6
Zambia 300
186
40
0.73
5
Zimbabwe 480
116
37
0.37
6
Notes: GNI, under-5 mortality, and percent urban figures are from World Bank (2002). Ethnic Fractionalization
figures are from Fearon (2003). Political rights scores are from Freedom House (2001).
Second, the question from which we construct our dependent variable explicitly bars respondents from
describing themselves in terms of nationality: it asks “
besides being Namibian, Zambian, Tanzanian, etc
,
which specific group do you feel you belong to first and foremost.” We therefore cannot rule out the
possibility that respondents might consider national identity as more salient than the identity categories
that they mention, and that are recorded in our data.
Third, the question provides information about the salience of ethnicity in relative, not absolute, terms.
All we are able to infer from respondents’ answers is the identity that they rank first among those identity
categories explicitly mentioned in the survey question. We have no way of knowing how much
importance respondents attach to their first- (or second- or third-) ranked group memberships. Thus to
conclude on the basis of our data that ethnicity is more salient in country A than country B because a
larger share of survey respondents in country A ranked ethnicity first is not quite right. It is possible that
ethnicity might be more salient in absolute terms to people in country B, even though a larger share of
them rank some other category of identity as even more important than ethnicity.
These caveats notwithstanding, the measure of ethnic salience adopted in this paper is superior to that
employed in earlier studies, almost none of which measure the salience of ethnicity directly. Most rely on
inferences based on the presumed effects of ethnic salience. In effect, they reason that, because there is
ethnic violence in the country in question or because voting patterns or the distribution of patronage seem
to follow ethnic lines, ethnicity must be a salient motivating factor in people’s behavior. Others rely on
assumptions about what the diversity of ethnic groups in a country implies about the salience of ethnicity
in the country’s politics – a relationship that we demonstrate in a moment works exactly
opposite
from
the often hypothesized direction. Neither approach is as defensible as the one pursued here, which bases
its assessment of ethnic salience on the self-reported identities of individuals as collected in a nationally
representative sample survey.
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