This is a podcast from the archives of the BBC Reith Lectures.

This lecture in the series The Colonial Reckoning given by Dame Marjorie Perram was originally broadcast in 1961.

The Colonial Reckoning

The BBC presents the second of six wreath lectures given by Marjorie Perram, fellow of

Nuffield College, Oxford. Today she discusses African nationalism.

In my last talk, I asked a question, what is the nature of the force that in less than a decade

has swept the rule of Europe out of almost

the whole of tropical Africa and has bred more than 20 new nations in its place? The ready

answer is African nationalism. But how have the tribes of yesterday become the nations of today?

Is this the kind of nationalism we have known during the last few centuries in the Europe where nationalism was bred?

Or is it something new?

Nations have generally developed where peoples have had as their common possession

territory, race, history,

customs, language, religion, and at least in large measure, environment and way of life.

These, of course, are only favouring conditions.

A nation is made by the desire of people to come together into one state, and this desire

has been successfully asserted even without one or two of these conditions.

But the astonishing fact about Africa is that nearly all its new nations let all these

elements except two.

One is race, and yet in some parts there are racial as well as tribal divisions, as in Kenya, in Uganda, the Sudan.

The other is common territory.

Yet the territories were arbitrarily demarcated by alien powers, only some 60 or 70 years ago, so arbitrarily indeed that they sometimes cut right through important tribes.

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