Description
Despite the theoretical import and analytical utility of racialisation in underscoring how groups are racialised in modern times, the concept has received minimal attention in Africanist scholarship. With the exception of South Africa where, because of its horrific history of apartheid, racialisation has been employed to reflect on the oppression of black people, the concept is yet to be embraced in discourses of ethnic discrimination in much of Africa. The consequence is that Africanists tend to think of Africa as a non-racial continent where tribalism is predominant and to externalise racism as a phenomenon particular to Western societies where the black-white racialisation binary tends to be the norm. For many Africanists, tribalism is to Africa what racialisation is to the West: they are not coterminous. In this research article, we utilise the crucial case of racialisation of ethnicity in Nigeria―one of Africa’s most ethnically diverse states―to deconstruct this hegemonic binary thinking that forecloses many Africanists from seeing how racialisation is embedded in discourses of ethnic discrimination beyond the black-white dualism and how racism is a characteristic feature of African societies.
