ABSTRACT
Western attitudes, myths and images significantly influence the contemporary historical drama in African countries, particularly in the construction of ethnicity as a stigma and socio-political malady in the African context. This chapter focuses on four central issues. First issue is the power of representation as a tool of domination. Secondly, the negative rendering of African ethnicity in Western media and the impact of such discourse on the continent's political and intellectual elite. The other issues are the crisis of ethnic related state violence engendered partly by the insidious framing of African ethnicity; and the search for progressive alternatives within the complex socio-economic and political matrices of contemporary Africa. The programs and policies for social transformation that arose from the stigmatization of African ethnicity might be a pragmatic attempt to address ethnic related tensions in the goal of state building.
