TRANSFORMING territories inherited from colonialism into stable development-sustaining nation-states remains a defining aspiration of African nationalism. For post-independence political rulers and elites, nation-building called for the use of the state to nurture national identity at the expense of particularistic identities. This state-driven strategy of nation-building encouraged an approach to the management of ethnic pluralism that was marked by ambivalence. On the one hand, as political rulers moved to consolidate power shortly after independence they became even more hostile to the formal organization and expression of sectional interests. A common feature of early post-independence revisions of constitutions, justified by the quest for national unity, was the proscription of ethnic-based political parties (Le Vine, 1997). On the other hand, whether governing through civilian regimes or military autocracies, they sanctioned the use of ethnicity as the key ingredient of elite competition for power and resources. African intellectuals, committed disciples of the modernist projects of nation-building and development, were equally, if not more, hostile to ethnic-based political competition. This hostility was stoked by the judgement that the self-serving manipulation of communal sentiments by elites explained the ongoing politicization of ethnicity.

It well may be the case, as Crawford Young (1993: 23-4) has suggested, that the stigmatization of ethnicity in ‘intellectual discourse and state doctrine’ was extreme in the case of Africa. The stigmatization of ethnicity in politics and the resulting limits on attention to institutions that could facilitate more effective management of pluralism within participatory political contexts accorded with the suppositions of the prevailing doctrine of development which equated political modernity with growing national unity. The post-Second World War international order condoned this bias towards national unity. As the decolonization process wound down, the international order placed the normative emphasis on the territorial integrity of sovereign states which were vested with the right to self-determination and was unaccommodating to the claims of minorities within states (see Young, 1998: 1-3; Jackson, 1990: 139-59; andHerbst, 2000: 97-138).