Early 20th Century: (Making Tribes — Identity as Continually Shifting and Multiple, Pre-Colonial Africans Belonging Simultaneously to Lineages, Clans, Villag…

Early 20th Century: (Making Tribes — Identity as Continually Shifting and Multiple, Pre-Colonial Africans Belonging Simultaneously to Lineages, Clans, Villages, Chiefdoms, and Language Groups, the Colonial Need for Fixed Categories Creating Rigid Tribal Units, and the Dynamism of Africa’s Long Nineteenth Century — Not Colonial Rule Alone — Driving the Creativity of Ethnic Formation): Identity in Africa was never singular and never static — it was continually shifting, at times imperceptibly, at times with dramatic force. Pre-colonial Africans had long held multiple identities simultaneously, belonging to lineages, clans, villages, chiefdoms, and language groups, with any one identity emphasized above others according to circumstance. Scholarly attention has focused heavily on the transformative power of colonial rule in creating new ethnic identities where previously Africans had lived in fluid groupings — the needs of colonial administration demanded the invention of fixed ethnic units, or tribes in European parlance. Yet caution is required: in many cases, group cohesion rooted in shared culture, language, economy, territory, and tradition long predated colonial rule and stretched continuously over centuries into the deep past. The nineteenth century — an era of profound and often violent upheaval — had itself been a markedly formative epoch in which a range of new groups came into being through creative economic, political, and military flux. European administrative systems were frequently co-opted into long-term African processes already underway. It was the dynamism of Africa’s long nineteenth century, not simply the colonial impact, that drove much of the creativity of the era — colonial rule constituted merely the latest stage in an ongoing revolution of identity.