• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1746 0

trading, retail, and transportation in Douala, Cameroon’s largest city and principal port. Today, the Bamiléké—the so-called “merchant tribe of Cameroon”—control most of the country’s commerce (except possibly in East Cameroon, where, historically, Ibo immigrants from Nigeria dominated). In addition to owning luxury hotels, breweries, clothing stores, and other large businesses in the major cities, small Bamiléké communities operate the local grocery stores and mom-and-pop businesses in almost every town. The Bamiléké are also the country’s financiers. Through a robust nationwide network of interest-bearing tontines, or local lending associations, the Bamiléké operate an informal capital market so efficient it constantly threatens to put government-owned banks out of business.

19

There are many other disproportionately wealthy black minorities throughout Africa, each with a different, complex story—some with horrible endings. In tiny Rwanda, the Tutsi minority were historically not particularly “entrepreneurial,” but they were a cattle-raising elite who for four centuries (the last one under Belgian colonial rule) dominated economically and politically over the country’s 80 percent Hutu majority. Meanwhile, in neighboring Burundi, where they comprise roughly 14 percent of the population, the Tutsi still control approximately 70 percent of the country’s wealth. Burundi’s capital Bujumbura—the only city and the only pocket of wealth in the country—is known as Tutsi Tinsel Town.

20

In Ethiopia, Eritreans long constituted a starkly successful merchant class, concentrated mainly in Addis Ababa. The examples get more obscure, but the pattern is the same. In Togo, the Ewe—fortuitous beneficiaries of a missionary education—were an economically advanced minority favored first by German and later by French colonialists. In Guinea, the 20 percent Susu are a disproportionately educated, economically (and at present politically) powerful tribe. In Uganda, the Baganda minority dominated economically over the rest of the country even before the British employed them to help rule the country. In Tanzania, the brown-toothed Chagga minority—the brown water they drink is staining—live on the fertile slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro and are not only wealthy coffee farmers but flourishing businessmen and bureaucrats.

21

With varying degrees of intensity, all of these African groups have been the objects of widespread resentment. In Uganda, for example, the politically dominant groups of the north have repeatedly subjected the economically powerful Baganda of the south to bloody purges. In Nigeria in 1966, tens of thousands of Ibo were slaughtered indiscriminately by furious mobs. In Ethiopia, the relatively prosperous Eritreans were recently expelled en masse. In Cameroon, “la Probleme Bamiléké” has been called “the most critical source of inter-ethnic tension” in the country today, with hostility seething among Cameroon’s two hundred other tribes and even priests lashing out against Bamiléké “exploitation” of “the weak and the poor.”

22 Finally, in Rwanda, the genocidal massacre of the Tutsi minority is inextricably connected with their historic economic dominance.

The Indians of East Africa

and the Lebanese of West Africa

Most of the disproportionately wealthy African minorities discussed above do not dominate their respective economies to anywhere near the extent that, say, the Chinese do in Southeast Asia or whites do in southern Africa. (The Bamiléké in Cameroon and the Tutsi in Burundi may be exceptions.) Indeed, their relative advantage vis-à-vis other indigenous groups often pales by comparison to the much starker market dominance of nonindigenous ethnic minorities—not only descendants of former European colonizers but also so-called entrepreneurial “pariah” minorities such as Indians and Lebanese.

In Kenya, for example, notwithstanding the disproportionate success of the Kikuyu, an overwhelming percentage of the country’s businesses—from car dealerships to the fish processing industry to the country’s largest