Experiencing Identities: Making and Remaking African Communities

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Notes

1. These papers were originally presented at the annual conference of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the Commonwealth, held at Arusha, Tanzania, in April 2002.

2. This is exemplified in several important collections on the region produced in recent years. See for example: Fukui and Markakis, Ethnicity and Conflict; Donham and James eds., The Southern Marches of Imperial Ethiopia; James et al. , Remapping Ethiopia; Kurimoto and Simonse, Conflict, Age and Power in North East Africa. Further south, in central-east Africa, the interdisciplinary collaboration is even older: see for example Fallers, The King's Men; Roberts, Tanzania Before 1900.

3. This works in certain contexts, but the pitfalls become clear particularly when non-Africanists (and even, on occasion, Africanists) discuss ‘anti-colonial nationalism’: see for example Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780, chap 5.

4. It must be conceded that for the pre-colonial past the attempt to unravel identities is, owing to a paucity of source materials, well-nigh impossible. Thus the ‘Zulu’, ‘Asante’, ‘Ganda’ and so on are often necessarily treated as ‘bloc entities’.

5. In part we owe something, as most of us do, to Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities.

6. Eventual ‘victory’, in whatever form, is often held to guarantee and indeed strengthen a particular identity. But this is only part of the story, and ‘defeat’ is also a vital dynamic: see for example Schivelbusch, The Culture of Defeat.

7. Arguably this has been the case much more acutely across Africa than, say, in Europe. In this and the subsequent issue, see the articles by Caplan, Knighton and Reid in particular.

8. Such an approach has been skilfully taken up by Jean-Paul Chretien, one of whose central concerns is to understand the roots of the Rwandan genocide: see his The Great Lakes of Africa.