Discuss the origin and nature of African nationalism

ORIGINS AND NATURE OF AFRICAN NATIONALISM
Robert Rotberg (1996) that nationalism referred generally to a definite territory that was inhabited by a people who possessed a distinctive common culture, history and a language and who felt that they constituted a nation.
That nation was a common enterprise that deserved to be run by all the nationals or their middle class representatives. This came from a gradual erosion by parochial tribal/clans ties and the growth of the acceptance of the idea (or myth) of a national culture. Worship of the state then follows.
Nationalism provided an ideology to which citizens (especially middle class) seeking an escape from the old oppressions of the church or monarch, or from foreign rule, could devote their efforts in the hope of obtaining liberty in colonial Africa, nationalism remained an answer to oppression since the nation by its very existence, promised a better future to people’s possessing common cultural traits who lived within its defined borders. People everywhere in Africa in 1960s deserved to enjoy the better future - the New Jerusalem. It was from such revolutionary roots that the notion of national self-determination came from.
Revolutionary nationalism diffused an ideology and the actions of national governments unified relatively homogenous peoples.
Nationalism meant the consciousness on the pair of individuals or groups of their membership of a nation and the desire to further the liberty or prosperity of the particular nation.
According to BA Ogot (1995) the early nationalist ideologies in Africa in 1960s attempted to unite diverse people’s under the barrier of a single national idea without raising the question whether the concept of nationhood which had evolved in Europe and the Americas was relevant for the ethinically pluralistic societies that were soon to become independent within the boundaries of former colonial territories.
For Africa, thus, nationalism meant the removal of colonization, uhuru, freedom, with the hope that other things would added later.
But there is also post colonial nationalism, expressed in the ideology of the state. It argues that integration of the new nation requires the demise of the pre-existing ethnic groups. This sort of nationalism rejects all sub-national ethnic loyalties and requires unconditional allegiance to the state, considered to be the embodiment of the nation.

Benedict Anderson argues
“A nation is an imagined community and imagined and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign. It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow members, meet them or even hear them, yet in the minds of each, lives the image of their communication.”
Nationalism therefore is the consequence of a new form of social organization, based on deeply internalized, education-dependent high cultures, each protected by its own state.
But to the Marxist, nationalism was a purely bourgeoisie ideology, a false consciousness - it was expected that socialism was bring everybody together and a common socialist class would emerge.
Nature of African nationalism
Rotberg states that African nationalism was created by colonialism. He says, without the partition and subsequent colonial rule of tropical African by the powers of Europe, there might have been no African nationalism.
So, the colonial powers created by arbitrarily dividing the continent into administrative entities and imposing there upon imported legal, linguistic and cultural concepts.
But the colonial power never completed the nation-building process which the independence leaders in Africa were expected to complete the colonial territories became potential nations.
There was conquest and detribalisation of territories like Malawi or the Congo.
The populations residing in the various colonies possessed no common indigenous culture or language.
Cultural domination provided Africans with common experiences, a sense of history with common experiences, a sense of history and even a common language e.g. India. Methods of administration.
But before colonial era, we had Lozi, Buganda, Asante kingdoms which were not necessarily nations but states.

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jerop5614 answered the question on January 15, 2019 at 06:19