ABSTRACT
In a country where culture and ethnicity are the primordial criteria of group solidarity, black Americans find their racially-based attempt to solve their identity problem irrelevant. Even in voting for Deanships and other elective offices, there is considerable cross-voting and ethnicity is a much better predictor than nationality or “race.” Ethnicity is both important and pervasive enough to lend itself to a facile one-factor determinism. In Nigeria, ethnic conflict is first and foremost an elite rather than a mass phenomenon. Northern Muslim groups fall in the middle of the ethnic hierarchy as viewed by Southerners. In addition to notions of relative rank, ethnic attitudes are also colored by more specific stereotypes which groups and sub-groups have of each other. As might be expected from ethnic attitudes of mutual suspicions, ethnicity is an important determinant of interaction, but in a much more complicated way than is generally assumed.
