Nationalism and the Transfer of Power

Abstract

In Africa, we are dealing with ‘anti-colonial nationalism’, a nationalism that was predominantly expressed within the confines of the colonial state, whose boundaries rarely coincided with those of traditional polities.¹ As compared with European nationalism, there were no strong historical and social identities upon which African nationalists could build; ethnically homogeneous Somalia was a partial exception, but was itself divided into a number of competing clans. This is not to suggest, however, that Africa was a tabula rasa when colonial rule was imposed: as we saw in Chapter 2, many different forms of political organisation existed in pre-colonial Africa, ranging from centralised kingdoms to stateless societies; there was also a rich variety of cultural forms, though no shared culture such as would have been provided by a system of universal primary education.² The problem facing anti-colonial nationalists was that popular loyalties tended to gravitate towards a traditional unit which in the great majority of cases lay within, rather than being coterminous with, the colonial state boundaries (the Buganda kingdom within the Uganda protectorate affords a good example of this phenomenon). One of the nationalists’ most important achievements during the independence struggle was to render loyalty to a sub-national unit secondary to loyalty to the country-wide unit — in other words, to submerge sub-nationalism within a wider nationalism.