Apartheid’s focus on tribe marked a decisive shift in native control. While blacks were moving from tribe to race as the locus of oppositional politics, the state responded by going in the opposite direction, reinvesting in tribe as the antidote to black militancy. The logic is simple enough; it had played out before, as we have seen. When racial solidarity posed a threat, authorities turned to tribal institutions in order to foment division. But apartheid brought new techniques to this endeavor.
