Nancy Jacobs inquired why "tribe" and "native" are more of a problem
in African contexts than in North American ones. Regarding "tribe",
I think the answer has to do with U.S. bureaucratic practice.
Legally the U.S. treats (I think this is still the case) Indian
tribes as "domestic dependent nations" which retain a form of
sovereignty, and whose relationships with the U.S. government are
governed by treaties and a history of treaty-making.
Such treaties and the sovereign rights which go with them or with the
capacity to make them depend on being recognized as a corporate
group, a "tribe". In the late 1940s and 1950s the U.S. government
pursued policy with the rather chilling designation of "termination",
under which they sought to persuade Indian tribes to accept the
termination of their status as distinct tribes; in other words, to
abandon a legally recognized (if limited) distinct national identity
and citizenship in favor of a more generic ethnic identity.
Since the late 1960s the trend has gone the other way; increasing
numbers of Indians have petitioned and sued for recognition as
tribes. In essence, people have a choice: they can call themselves a
tribe, and get certain things as a result, or not, and not get them.
There are several points here. One is that the determination of who
constitutes a tribe in legal/bureaucratic sense lies with the Bureau
of Indian Affairs and the U.S. Federal Courts.
Another is that for such purposes tribes are wholly modern, and give
rise to modern forms of ethnic conflict, such as that between Navajo
and Hopi in the Southwest.
A third is that neither of the preceding points necessarily
contradicts or renders less genuine other forms of identification by
individual Indians or groups of Indians as nations, tribes or in
other English translations of their sense of identity.
On "native", I have noticed that Canadians tend to say "Native", and
sometimes "First Nations", whereas in the U.S. it has seemed that
"Native American" has been the more common usage involving "native"
(although this may be changing). In the U.S., many Indians prefer to
be called Indians, although political activists seem to reject the
term in larger proportions than other Native Americans. In U.S.
history we have additional complications such as uses of "nativism"
meaning movements of earlier immigrants later ones.
In South Africa in the last few years there has emerged a strong
movement among Africans to restrict immigration from other parts of
Africa. At a certain stage the old government had a bureaucratic
category "foreign Natives".
Will South Africa have a new nativism? How will it be defined - will
all born there be "natives", so that there will be white and Indian
natives, as well as those whom the pan-Africanists would see as sons
and daughters of the soil? Or will it be more of a matter of native
vs. foreign Africans, with descendants of immigrants from other
continents remaining in a liminal limbo?