IT’S a good thing that the SNJ provides a platform for student opinion and Bradley Young has written some strong pieces in recent weeks.

His last piece - ‘Divide and conquer and blame tribalism’ - is chiefly interesting because it is right and wrong at the same time, and where it is wrong it is very wrong.

He begins by stating that the phrase ‘tribal conflict’ is invalid or meaningless in historical terms, though it’s not made clear why that point is especially relevant just now.

He says that the phrase implies primordial origin and rejects that idea, preferring to attribute such conflict to the colonial actions of ‘the West’.

In that respect he is simply wrong - tribal conflict, in Africa and elsewhere, predates Western interference in Africa by centuries.

And in the early days of their forays into Africa the adventuring, exploiting and colonising Europeans actually reduced tribal conflict by imposing, admittedly sometimes pretty brutally, an overriding system of social control based, roughly on their own legal systems.

No sane person would argue that that process was ‘malign’, ie was imposed with evil intent.

Where Bradley young is right, however, is in criticising the clumsy, sometimes arbitrary and nearly always ethnologically illiterate division of African lands into new countries.

Because many of the boundaries ignored long-standing tribal culture the scene was set for some real wars between new states.

And in many cases the protagonists were divided on tribal lines - old tribal identities that long pre-dated the arrival of Europeans and which still endured.

But to say that ‘the West’ (not the best term, as the USA has played virtually no part in African colonial affairs) was instrumental in creating the tribal identities is to spoil what might have been a good argument about unintended consequences of badly thought-out colonial administration.

Chris Arnison

Rodborough