Alexander Keese Knihy

The debate about ethnicity in sub-Saharan Africa has come to an uneasy consensus in the 1990s, but it has to be asked if we are really close to a solution. How can comparative and historical views help to inform the debate? In this work, seven scholars bring in a long-term perspective to ethno-cultural solidarities, which they explore within a multi-disciplinary framework. This return to the ‘heart of the ethnic group’, twenty-five years after Elikia M’Bokolo’s and Jean-Loup Amselle’s path-breaking reinterpretation of ethnicity in Africa, argues for a reappraisal of approaches to ethnicity that have been adopted in recent decades. Focusing on two major geographical regions of the African continent – Senegambia including Guinea-Bissau and Sierra Leone, and the area of Southern Tanzania and the northern half of Mozambique –, the chapters in this volume provide a new historical interpretation of the processes of identity-building in sub-Saharan Africa.

From the 1930s, all colonial administrations in sub-Saharan Africa were faced with a complicated task. In an increasingly hostile international environment, after the frustrating experiences of World War II and confronted with new, emancipationist tendencies among the African populations themselves, they had to find a strategy to integrate part of the African elite as collaborators in a paternalist, but nonetheless modernising project – and they had to find this strategy fast! The group of potential collaborators was confusingly large, including so-called ‘traditional chiefs’ on the one hand, so-called ‘modern educated natives’ on the other hand. African experiences under Portuguese and French rule are part of that pattern, but they also form a particular context, because those two colonial powers were committed, in their ideology, to the assimilation of the African population as principal element of their ‘civilising mission’. The interplay between them and their African collaborators was thus particularly ambiguous. Martin Behaim Book Prize, 2006, of the Gesellschaft für Überseegeschichte