19th–Early 20th Century: (Expanded Tribal Scale — The Fulani Defined as a Tribe by British, French, and Germans Across Nigeria, Cameroon, and Niger Despite B…

19th–Early 20th Century: (Expanded Tribal Scale — The Fulani Defined as a Tribe by British, French, and Germans Across Nigeria, Cameroon, and Niger Despite Being a Vast Amorphous Group, the Zulu Growing from a Tiny Sub-Group to a National Identity Intensified Under White Repression, the Nyamwezi Named by Outsiders and Eventually Embracing the Label, and the Yoruba Becoming a People Through Missionary Bible Translation): Many supposedly new tribal affiliations were in fact amendments, extensions, or enhancements of existing groupings — and many tribal identities had deep pre-colonial roots, even if they were not tribes in the manner the colonial state devised. The Fulani, a vast amorphous group scattered across the West African savannah in the nineteenth century, were defined as a single tribe by the British, French, and Germans, with the term coming to include smaller ethnicities that had never considered themselves Fulani. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the Zulu had been a tiny sub-group, but on the back of their state-building revolution they came to incorporate numerous other groups — a sense of being Zulu intensified during the twentieth century, largely as a response to the repression of white-dominated South Africa. The Nyamwezi were named not by themselves but by coastal observers who called the interior peoples the people of the new moon — as trade expanded, the so-called Nyamwezi became prodigious traders and in time embraced the identity, which was formalized under colonial rule when the Germans established headmen to govern this large new tribe. The Yoruba in their modern sense came into existence during the nineteenth century largely through violent upheaval but also through the work of missionaries who translated the Bible into a common vernacular — people became Yoruba through shared language. The Akan of the Gold Coast was a convenient large-group unit from the early 1900s, but in reality comprised the Akim, Fante, and Asante, peoples with deeper roots who would not have recognized the appellation just decades earlier.