Tribe? No – The Luo are a Nation, not a Tribe.
By Ochieng K. Ogola (2023)
It is absolutely essential to distinguish between tribes and nations. The Luo are a nation, not a tribe. The term tribe is a colonial imposition; a deliberate tool of belittlement used by imperial powers to fragment and diminish the legitimacy of African peoples.
If you don’t understand the difference, you’re either uninformed or still trapped in the colonial mindset.
Why the Term “Tribe” Is Problematic
The word tribe was imposed by colonial powers to create hierarchies, divisions, and a sense of primitiveness among African societies. This language was never neutral it was strategic and derogatory, meant to keep African nations weak, divided, and easily controlled.
Using tribe today, especially to refer to groups like the Luo nation, continues that legacy of marginalization. It ignores our long-standing systems of governance, shared language, rich histories, and deep cultural unity.
We, the Luo, possess a shared language, history, culture, governance structures, and identity that long predate the arbitrary colonial borders. We are not some incidental ethnic group to be casually labelled and dismissed as a “tribe.” That kind of framing – reducing proud, historical nations to tribes – is the very logic that created the fractured, unstable post-colonial states we inhabit today.
Until African peoples recognize that what they often call “tribes” are, in fact, nations with their sovereignty, identity, and legitimacy, there can be no authentic unity or state-building. Unity must emerge from the voluntary federation of nations, not from the artificial welding of disparate peoples into colonial-era contraptions we now call “states.”
So, if you’re still speaking of states as though they are organic nations — or worse, lumping nations like the Luo into the colonial vocabulary of “tribes”, then we are not even having the same conversation. We’re operating on completely different paradigms.
Conclusion: Reclaiming African Nations
It’s time to reject the colonial vocabulary and reclaim our identities. The Luo are a nation, and so are many others across the continent. Reframing the conversation from “tribes” to nations is the first step in decolonizing African minds and rebuilding African unity on honest, sovereign terms.
We must name ourselves, not accept the names imposed on us.
What you have elaborated is exactly what we konw as divide and rule policy engineered by the colonialists to belittleus and in fact, to reduce our future power struggles aganist them.
In fact, by this time in history, African nations would have been more than the European nations.
The truth of the matter is that the numbers the euro-elites named tribes in Africa would have been nations other than their inferiority complexity naming.