This article critically discusses modernisation and Marxist theories on ethnicity and political development in Africa in general. It attempts to unravel the formative and reproductive processes at the heart of the ethnic phenomenon. To this end, and with particular reference to the Zimbabwean context, the genesis as well as the dissemination of the ethnic factor in politics is located in the nooks and crannies of unequal colonial racial power structures and relationships. The article also illustrates that the prominence of ethnicity in political development is, largely if not wholly, evoked by the situational blending of structural elements and variable subjective interpretations which ethnic actors make of those situations. Perhaps this analysis will be of some practical relevance to the easing of ethnically based conflicts in contemporary polities.
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