Ethnic Competition and Modernization in Contemporary Africa

It has been argued that modernization promotes potentially disintegrative forces in developing areas, and in particular, often gives rise to powerful ethnic groupings (for example, see Geertz, 1963; Melson and Wolpe, 1970; Huntington, 1968). In this article, we elaborate this hypothesis in the context of the developing nations of black Africa. We note that important competition can and do covary in contemporary Africa (Morrison and Stevenson, 1972). And we attempt to explain why this should be so.