Abstract

The paper discusses « race » and « ethnicity » as political identities, imposed through the force of the colonial law, and reproduced in the postcolonial period. In Africa, non-natives were tagged as races, governed under civil law (a discriminating but single law), whereas natives were said to belong to tribes, each of them under its supposedly customary law, suited to its separated cultural essence. The challenge now is to distinguish our notion of political community from that of cultural community, separate the discourse on political rights from that on cultural or historical origins, create a single political community and citizenship from diverse cultural and historical groups and identities.