From his high school days in the 1950s Archie Mafeje was a member of the Non-European Unity Movement (NEUM), later renamed the Unity Movement of South Africa (UMSA), a radical Marxist political organisation. He was therefore versed in classical Marxism and other radical theories. Yet his early work, published as a postgraduate student at the University of Cape Town (UCT) in the early 1960s, is written from the functionalist anthropological perspective fashionable at the time. This suggests that he was a radical Marxist in Unity Movement circles, while steeped in liberal and functionalist anthropology in his academic work – which indicates the bifurcated existence that still afflicts a good number of black students in South African universities today.

His famous essay of 1971, ‘The Ideology of “Tribalism”’, established a radical break with his early liberal functionalism, yet constitutes a thematic critique of anthropological categories, of particular themes or concepts within the social sciences, rather than an all-encompassing critique of the social sciences themselves. Notwithstanding his otherwise compelling critique of the ideology of tribalism, his handling of the concept of tribe has been widely misunderstood. Mafeje did not so much reject the entity of tribe, or claim it was non-existent – he rejected it for being anachronistic. In The Theory and Ethnography of African Social Formations, he laments this misreading of his work. What Mafeje set out to analyse was the ideology of tribalism, as the title of his 1971 essay clearly indicates; the problem lies in his concession that the entity of tribe existed in Africa at an earlier period. Jimi Adesina's objection is that such a view is not borne out by history or archaeology. There was always migration, movement and intermingling on the African continent. This was interrupted by colonialism and the implementation of arbitrary colonial borders. I believe it is because of this fact that Mafeje says that Europeans invented tribes in Africa.

Mafeje's argument turns on four key issues. First, his understanding of the ‘ideology of tribalism’ is that it was European in origin: colonial administrators used it in their policy of divide and rule on the African continent. Second, the ideology of tribalism was used by European social scientists not only to explain conflicts in Africa, but also to rationalise colonialism.