This book sets out to address a gap in contemporary studies of nationalism and the nation. Despite the extraordinary growth of articles and books about nationalism and nations over the last 20 years, critical studies of African nationalism are not reflected in this literature. This is surprising for two reasons. In the first place, resistance to European colonialism usually happened in the name of nationalism and in pursuit of independent African nation states. In the second place, the pursuit of independent African nation states was not the only form that resistance to colonialism took.

Opposition to French colonialism, in particular, sought not so much the dissolution of empire as its democratisation. Before his conversion to nationalism, Leopold Senghor, the first president of independent Senegal, was a deputy in the French National Assembly. He only reluctantly sought independence for his country (Meredith, 2005). Closer to home, we will find in the figure of Sol Plaatje an ambivalence towards the British Empire. On the one hand, he railed against its injustices; on the other hand, he thought of himself as a loyal subject of the British crown (Willan, 2001).

What this means is that it is necessary to account for the rise of nationalism – and African nationalism in particular – as the preeminent form of resistance to colonialism and apartheid. This vision of what freedom from colonialism might look like has itself been a victim of nationalist mythologies, which narrate the story of an African people oppressed and exploited by foreign ones. Here, ‘the people’ are taken as something that preceded the period of nationalist struggle. What this conceals, however, is how an African people came into being in the first place. This book addresses itself to this question in the South African context.

The book will argue that African peoples emerged primarily in and though the process of nationalist resistance to colonialism. Here we must distinguish between the people as datum and the people as political subject. In the first case, the term ‘the people’ refers to an empirical collection of individuals in a given geography; in the second, it refers to a collectivity organised in pursuit of a political end.