Thanks Ramira, I had wondered about this too
In Ghana, and probably elsewhere in Africa, the idea of a name is a bit more fluid than the Western idea. A person might have a official name on a birth certificate or passport, but be generally known but a nickname, maybe based on their home village or even profession. I knew a man who taught Christian theology in high school and was referred to by his colleagues as B.K. - Bible Knowledge.
In North American English, I use “the” to mean a specific, and omit “the” when talking about a generality. To me, “central Africa” means between the north and the south. Hence, too, the small “c” indicating it is not part of a proper name as in “The Central African Republic” or some such. I guess technically it could be east Africa too; but “west Africa” is confusing because do we mean the area around Mauritania and the West Sahara, or Central Africa, or South-West Africa (now Namibia).
Details, details. It appears some people knew what I meant, even if I failed to be precise.
Another side note on African names, I recall at the time Idi Amin Dada was notorious for his erratic ways - it was pointed out that he was the first African head of state of a former colony who had not gone through the European university system… hence the cultural clash because he wasn’t as familiar how to play the game of western “civilized” diplomatic behavior, of hypocritically saying the right thing and then behaving badly behind this borders like western or communist leaders would; so his behavior came across as erratic and bizarre.
Yes it does not matter you refered to 100% the wrong region and could not even say the name of the country which is we can say “not unknown”, but it is okay because we get to tell 100% irrelevant to the OP question stories about the weird ways of the africans and the weird tribal africans and how weird they are.
Detials, detials, but those africans they sure are weird
100% the wrong region???
A friend of mine belongs to the Seventh-Day Adventists, and that church divides Africa into four regions: North Africa, Southern Africa, West Central Africa, and East Central Africa. The East Central Africa division is headquartered in Nairobi; do you know what country Nairobi is in?
There are a number of different methods of dividing Africa into regions, and more than a few definitions of “central Africa.” What was once known as British Central Africa is today Malawi, 1500 miles or so from the Central African Republic. What the United Nations calls “middle Africa” is centered on the Congo River Basin, while the Central African Economic and Monetary Community pointedly excludes the largest part of the basin. The Anglican Church of the Province of Central Africa is in Zambia, Zimbabwe, Malawi, and Botwana, while the Anglican Church of the Congo covers both Congo-Kinshasa and Congo-Brazzaville. The United Nations does place Angola in central Africa; many other definitions place it in southern Africa.
What definition are YOU using, and what makes you certain that everybody else does and must use that definition?
Why any one of the sources of you can look at here, in this little known resource that I have already linked to.
Of course since it is only the Africa which could not have any idea of typical standard regions, it is the african dark continent, it is so understandable that some random american church’s geography should be a reference and be the basis of more indigent response.
Who can detract from telling more stories about the weird people in the africa?
Errm, why should we take the word of an absolute nutbar American Christian offshoot (nice cereal, though) on African geographic terminology?
I pretty much knew that Jomo Kenyatta was from… ummm … Kenya? What are the odds?
But I was not sure if he was the fellow in the article, seeing that I read the anecdote in the Economist about 25 years ago, and supposedly it was an old story then. Thus I wasn’t sure what country was referenced in the story… Just that it was tribal Africa, with an old western-educated tribal leader and respected politician, but obviously not South Africa, nor Nigeria, nor the Sahara and north coast, so that would leave… the center. It’s more likely to be Kenyatta than Idi Amin (never got old enough) or Bokassa (not really that old, less likely to be making political speeches to the masses).
Which brings me back to the point of that anecdote that both the author and I were making, was that the western-educated leaders in Africa balance intellectual western though and culture with appeal to the common man of their country and his culture… The ability to operate in two or more cultures at once a testament to their overall intellect, for the ones who do it well.
Operating in two cultures, then I ask whether they in fact have two names, the one they present to their western audience and the one they present to their fellow ethnic group(s).
I agree it is confusing.
Googling Central Africa, you wade through mostly Central African Republic pages.
There does seem to be an area defined generally as “Central Africa” although some maps now include South Sudan, which extends a little past the westernmost extent of Kenya.
Similarly, the Central Africa Time Zone includes none of those countries and lies due south of Kenya and Tanzania, and you also find pages like this - https://wgnmka.wikispaces.com/Central+Africa - where the map includes Kenya and Tanzania.
SDA makes cereal??
“Tribal” - why is it only SS Africa, as an entire continent, that gets tagged with this, at root, primitivist narrative? Happens with Native Americans too, and that comes from the same place. Nobody ever speaks about the Irish tribe or the Polish tribe. Tribal is a problematic term.
But hey, by all means, continue with the Victorian Darkest Africa stories, bwanas…
Kellogg was an Adventist.
Hey, we also do it to the Middle East and Central Asia, but only after the place turns into a quagmire and we have to explain why we can’t get a handle on it. You are right it is used in a very “othering” manner.
The problem is that Kenya is so iconically “East African” that calling it something else is really jarring. It’s like calling France something other than “Western Europe” or calling Brazil something other than “South America”. “Central Africa” is a term that has some wiggle room. But Kenya specifically just doesn’t (ok, sometimes it’s lumped in with the Horn).
I’ll note that many organizations operating in Central Africa have headquarters in Nairobi because it is a much more livable city than, say, Bangui.
This.
You’re right, they do do this, and it’s done in the same primitivist narrative - Kipling gets around. But I’d argue people are more usually known as their ethnicity - Pashtun, Kurd, Arab - and the actual word “tribal” isn’t as strongly associated with them - certainly not many people talk about “tribal Afghanistan” the way “tribal Africa” got thrown around in this thread. Or calls Kenyatta a “tribal leader” in that dismissive way - nobody emphasised that Hamid Karzai was a tribal leader (even though he was)
Of course. The Irish have clans 
No doubt “tribe” can have negative connotations depending on use - but the basic use is to define closely related groups that are (or recently were) living the traditional lifestyle.
The most confusing thing about “tribe” is its vagueness - especially in Africa, it is applied to ethnic groupings large enough to be much bigger, although the general connotation is at the village or association of villages level. But then, we have very imprecise words for these groups. The smaller groupings are sometimes called “clans”, implying strong inter-relatedness. This is how I have heard the Middle East often described at the village level… indeed, there is a suggestion in the news about Hamas vs. Fatah that is as much about inter-clan rivalry as about politics or ideology. However, Kurds, or Pashtun, or Ibos, are best described as an ethnic group - I have not heard of the grouping at that level described as tribes. (Whereas North American natives seem to have “tribe” applied to both village groupings and the more general ethnic groups spanning provinces and states.)
Apparently a characteristic of clans, at least in the middle east, is much intermarriage between fairly related families - each clan keeps to themselves, each clan during lawless times has each others’ backs. When things become more modern and mixed, with mass migration to big cities, this distinction tends to melt away.
The Pakistanis refer to the “tribal areas” even though the one ethnic group for most of these areas is Pashtun, so single “tribe” does not apply - the Pashtun seem to consist of a large number of tribal groups, so tribe means something smaller than ethnic group in this situation.
Similarly, yes, there are no English “tribes” or clans because generally, the English have mixed and matched for centuries and put very little value on super-family groupings. Oddly enough, across the border in Scotland, the opposite was true - highland Scots were divided into clans, and membership in the wrong clan could get you killed (based on old feuds) until the last two centuries. Then, the tribal chiefs (lords) dispossessed their subjects because raising sheep was more economical. With the clan membership totally disrupted by the diaspora and mixing, it’s more a matter of tradition and nostalgia than real significance.
So tribe, ethnic group, nation, association? When a group needs a formal name, and has the internal self-organization to pick it, that’s their name.
Just like people and their formal names, to get back to the OP.
When one of my co-workers needed to formalize his name to become a Canadian citizen, he changed it. He explained that he had used his home village name from India as a surname, but now that he had to formalize his name going forward, and for his children, he picked his father’s name as surname instead. Apparently from his … ethnic group … people only had their one name, no family surname.
it is in fact like they insist it is accurate to call France, “central europe” because there are parts of europe to the west of it…
Traditional lifestyle? … as if…
no you wanted to tell cool story bro stories
Exactely.
And the indignance that somehow getting the entire geography wrong and not even being able to mention the name of the actual country (it is all that confusing black africa…).
… the very first paragraph of which notes there are a couple of different definitions including various groupings of countries, without one single standardized list.
No, in the first place there are a number of different parts of the world lacking a single strict definition. For example, the Wikipedia article on Central America starts off with an entire section on “Different Definitions,” while the one on Central Europe notes that “views on which countries belong to Central Europe are vastly varied.” “Various definitions of Central Asia’s exact composition exist, and not one definition is universally accepted.” Middle East? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_East#Territories_and_regions That article includes sections on “Traditional definition” and “Other definitions.”
In the second place, I referenced several DIFFERENT organizations and churches that use different definitions. For example, is the Most Reverend Albert Chama, Bishop of Northern Zambia and Archbishop of Central Africa within the (Anglican) Church of the Province of Central Africa, some neocolonialist something-or-other for thinking that his church’s definition of Central Africa (Zambia, Zimbabwe, Malawi, and Botswana) might possibly have some validity, even though it doesn’t agree with the one you picked?
I think it probably has more to do with Africa (along with parts of the Middle East) being the parts of the world where the concept of “Nation-state” is weakest. Most of the nations of Sub-Saharan Africa owe their boundaries mostly to Europeans drawing lines on a map, rather than organic development over many centuries. In Poland, after the Holocaust and the expulsion of the German minority in 1945-46, the country is something like 97% ethnic Polish. What country in Sub-Saharan Africa has that kind of ethnic uniformity? Lesotho and Swaziland, probably, but I can’t think of any others.
Politically, that means that many people in that part of the world think of themselves as belonging first to an ethnic group, and only secondarily to a nation. The 2007-8 Kenyan crisis and the Rwandan genocide of 1994, for example, were both primarily based on ethnicity.
While “tribes” is indeed a loaded term, I’m not sure any other term for ethnically-based groupings would not have or soon acquire the same connotations. What term would you prefer?