American Tribes. Lessons For South Africa

Amy Chua is best known for Her 2011 best-seller, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, a highly controversial mani-festo of zero-tolerance parenting, Chinese style.

As a first generation Chinese American – her parents immigrated from the Philippines – Chua was determined that her two daughters were not going to grow up in the American Way, with TV, play-dates, sleep-overs and suchlike decadent practices. They were offered in exchange – not that there was a no-thank-you option – three hours of music practice a day and an insistence on straight As at school.

Chua was reviled for what was seen as psychological abuse, but survived the insults and the death threats (and her daughters survived to study at Yale and Harvard respectively), and returned to her other occupation, as Professor of Law at Yale.

This new book has nothing of the tiger mother about it, except perhaps in the stern conviction with which Chua anatomises what she sees as the failures of American foreign policy in particular and societies in general.

In Chua’s view, most or all societies are structured upon – or perilously balanced against – contending tribes, which can be actual tribes, such as the Hutu and Tutsi, or religious groupings, such as the Sunni and Shiite branches of Islam. To this, Chua argues, the US used to be a partial exception, in that traditionally it formed a “super-group”, that is, an American identity transcending tribal loyalties – the famous melting pot: “America was able to elect Barack Obama as president because this country is a super-group, a group in which membership is open to individuals of any background but that at the same time binds its members together with a strong, overarching, group transcending collective identity.”