Invented Traditions in Africa and Wales: Colonial Impact

Introduction: What Are Invented Traditions?

Traditions that are presented as age-old and that showcase a link between the distant past and the present tend, in reality, to have their origins in relatively recent times. They are, for the most part, modern public, social, cultural, and political manifestations, with most originating no more than three to four centuries ago. "Invented traditions" is the name coined to aptly, if loosely, represent the devised or imposed traditions seen today. These new traditions may have been instituted formally in recent times — and can often be traced to a specific date or year — yet they were established very rapidly and came to be recognized as genuine traditions. The royal broadcast of Christmas is a fitting example: the broadcast began in Britain in 1932.

Invented traditions are those practices impressed upon the peoples of a nation, society, or even a portion of society through repetition, making them a ritual. There is a tacit understanding to follow certain rules and norms while observing these rituals. Notably, invented traditions seek to project practices or rituals in a way that lends them meaning, especially when they are connected with the past. The newly redesigned architecture of the British Parliament after World War II, which follows the Gothic style, is one striking example. In this sense, even relevance to an era that is not very old may be drawn upon in invented traditions. The traditions we see today are nonetheless constructed in such a way that their relevance to certain historical facts can be established (Hobsbawm & Ranger, 2012).

Invented traditions are alternatively understood as enforced, devised, or constructed practices — rituals that offer a response to a new situation while seeking to maintain continuity, or, as is more commonly recognized, professing to establish continuity with a very distant past (which is not factually the case). All traditions devised recently may not endure; they may be discontinued owing to certain exigencies, superseded by newer forms of practice, or simply rendered irrelevant.

It is here that the distinction between tradition and custom must be clarified. One important point that distinguishes them is that traditions are not susceptible to change in spite of shifting social, evolutionary, or political considerations. Customs, on the other hand, are not merely responses; rather, they follow the natural laws of evolution and are generally compatible with the times of the societies that develop them. Customs represent the outcomes of practices, conventions, and routines that establish a coherent social structure and balance the forces prevalent in a society, making them amenable to change in order to suit evolution. Traditions — invented or otherwise — may also be evident in the professional domain, where they can at times prove an impediment to exercising the alternative reflexive action needed to counter an emergency. Traditions thus carry an inherent weakness.

The effects of the invented traditions imposed on the African population during various European occupations — from the first quarter of the nineteenth century to approximately the middle of the twentieth century — are explored in the first part of this essay. The second part examines a parallel process in Wales, where Anglicization and Methodist evangelism dismantled centuries of indigenous custom.

European Invented Traditions Imposed on African Society

The Europeans invented traditions to emphasize and declare their power over the world. The African continent they sought to claim was characterized by flexible, age-old customs — such as according chiefs of tribes a place of honor and indisputable dignity. The Europeans mistakenly equated this with the rigidity that their own neo-traditions conferred upon them. They thought of themselves as modernized and highly civilized people whose traditions would carry them into a modern, evolved era. In contrast, according to the Europeans' perception — which was in fact a misconception — the Africans subscribed to rigid traditions that did not allow for change and were therefore conservative and unable to prosper or evolve.

Of note is the fact that African customs and systems allowed people to transcend tribal boundaries freely and to account for natural processes and laws whenever the need arose. African tribes that existed prior to colonization had built-in mechanisms for competition, systems to challenge the authority of chieftains, and due regard to age, gender, and occupation. The fluidity and virtue of intermingling between tribes — including in matrimonial matters — went unnoticed by European observers. The Europeans sought instead to align African society along their own perceptions of social order and hierarchy. In order to establish control and rule Africa efficiently, they imposed their own newfound traditions. A striking example is the infusion of Christian thought and ritual into the native Maasai traditions. In this way, the purity, continuity, and flexibility of Africa's actual historical traditions were fundamentally disrupted.

Tradition Used by Elders to Profess Authority

Europeans sought complete dominance over Africa, and the interactions between tribes could pose serious problems in that endeavor. The rulers also needed local collaborators who would enforce their directives on the tribes. They educated younger Africans in modern ways that could then be implanted within tribal structures. This disrupted the natural process of passing customs from generation to generation. The flexibility that had once been the key to harmony was replaced by rigidity, as chiefs became possessive, seeking full control over their land and women in response to the threat posed by newly trained young men who possessed skills and knowledge unknown to tribal elders.

Traditions such as record-keeping and skills needed in an urban economy, introduced by the young into tribal life, threatened the existing structure. Elders and chiefs sought to correct this situation by forcing their decisions upon the community — a stark departure from the past, when flexibility had maintained harmony (Hobsbawm & Ranger, 2012).

Musical and Merry Welsh: The Erosion of Welsh Culture

Traditions are practices followed assiduously by their participants and imply the continuity of a society with its past. The pageantry of the English monarchy appears steeped in tradition carried through many centuries; however, as this section explores, the rituals visible today are not as old as they seem. Across many societies, traditions have been constructed, devised, and institutionalized in recent and traceable times. They have been mostly responses to turning points in history and rarely predate a few decades before World War I. The traditions we see today took root quickly, aided by the growing military strength of the European nations and by advances in communication that made it easier to reach larger segments of society rapidly.

The leisurely and entertainment-oriented Welsh traditions began falling apart as early as the seventeenth century. As noted in an extensive study carried out by Edmund Hyde Hall in 1810, the Welsh had begun acquiring the habits of the western world and adapting to the hectic life that overwhelmed the foibles characterizing their way of life. Methodist evangelists tried to influence the Welsh people as early as 1660, as noted by G. H. Jenkins. The British dissenters who called themselves Methodists — an offshoot of the Church — carried out a campaign to transform the Welsh, whom they regarded as a laid-back and backward society. Most of the new mannerisms imposed by the evangelists were drawn from the traditions adopted by the French or the English. The raw, innocent, and free-flowing Welsh behavioral practices gave way to the sober and subdued mannerisms of a more "developed" people. Gentle tea replaced more intoxicating afternoon drinks; the recurring brawls in pubs ceased. Those who did not change lived a "medieval" life and wrote poems and ballads tracing their ancestry back to the princes of old. Meanwhile, their kinsmen were embedded in the western world, working out the strategies that would later be pursued by Napoleon (Hobsbawm & Ranger, 2012).

Welsh music — characterized by bards, the harp, and group singing and dancing — had probably begun to recede by the early eighteenth century. Wales had a long tradition of folk dances and music that disappeared within a few decades, so powerful was the effect of foreign cultural invasion. In a very short period of time, a society in which virtually every household had a harp had changed so dramatically that almost none could any longer understand Welsh poetry. John Roderick, an almanacker and grammarian, decried the pathetic state of Welsh music in a letter to Lewis Morris in 1729. Consequently, the Morris brothers and their colleagues discovered a large trove of Welsh musical notations they could not decipher — laid down in strange original Welsh notation, dated 1613. In the space of one generation, the whole of Welsh musical tradition had disappeared. Even the tunes then being created were composed for the fiddle rather than the harp, and were English rather than Welsh. Not even the most noted musicians recognized earlier compositions that alluded to the richly musical way of life the Welsh had once led (Hobsbawm & Ranger, 2012).

Conclusion: The Legacy of Invented Traditions

The traditions that evolved in Africa can be ascribed to a thirty to forty year period prior to World War I. Traditions were either invented or imposed upon people, and as a result, the entire traditional landscape of Africa changed beyond recognition. Some historians have found that what exists in today's Africa does not resemble what might have existed in the pre-colonial era. The tribes used the new traditions to their own ends, unable to withstand the onslaught of the European invaders; yet those traditions became established very fast — the reasons for this rapid assimilation vary from context to context. The traditions were chiefly of two types: political (formal) and social (informal). The political ones are generally highly bureaucratized and formal, whereas the social ones manifested in different forms but became rigid once institutionalized. The events that occurred in Africa bring to the fore the problems associated with invented traditions imposed upon a local populace that had hitherto existed within an evolved system of its own.

The total collapse of original Welsh history, traditions, and customs — and their replacement by Anglicized versions — is explained by three major invented-tradition phenomena: the Welsh people's own constructed version of their history, the advent of Christianity into their common daily lives and routines, and the remembered lineage of their princes. As far as their history is concerned, the Welsh believed themselves to be the original inhabitants of the British Isles. The Triads of the Isles of Britain were memorized by the natives, who recalled having fought invaders, been defeated, and reclaimed their land. British Christianity had been accepted in Roman times, and heroes such as Arthur and Ambrosius Aurelianus repelled subsequent pagan attacks. The Welsh also preserved the lineage of tribal princes dating back to the seventh century, including figures such as Cunneda, Cadwaladr the Blessed, and Llywelyn, who ruled until 1282.

It was only in the couple of centuries that followed that the connectedness with the past became obscured. The Anglicized dominance of Wales reduced a merry and vibrant society to one bereft of its innocent ways of life and its secular structure, conforming instead to the modernized ways of the western world in all respects — history, literature, religion, and ancestry. As the concept of invented tradition illustrates, when externally imposed practices displace organically evolved customs, the consequences for a society's identity can be profound and enduring (Hobsbawm & Ranger, 2012).

Hobsbawm, E., & Ranger, E. (2012). The Invention of Tradition. Canto Classics. Retrieved from http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/history/regional-and-world-history-general-interest/invention-tradition-2