One of Africa’s new states faced a particular challenge to create an ‘imagined community’1 among groups of people thrown together without their own permission. The colonial period was both long enough to do very serious damage to pre-existing institutions of government, and too short to create strong new institutions that had more than the most superficial legitimacy in the eyes of the populace. Africa’s post-colonial history shows how difficult it has been to create a functioning polity from scratch among peoples without a history of common political organization; but also how surprisingly persistent is the attachment to the units created by the colonizers. In addition to bequeathing an inherent institutional weakness to the new states, the European empires also left a legacy of legal systems that had created a many-tiered citizenship structure whose central feature was racial discrimination. The colonies were founded on a basis of racial and ethnic distinction that justified the gaps in standard of living and legal rights between rulers and ruled. On the one hand there were European settlers – who were full citizens with the same rights as their relatives who lived in the ‘home’ country of the colonizers; and on the other there were African ‘natives’ (indigènes) – who were subjects.2 With the exception of a small minority admitted to full citizenship, the native or indigène was a subordinate being without full rights, and regarded as essentially a child under European guardianship. Those from other continents (especially Asia) or of mixed race occupied a middle position often with their own specific rules. Throughout Africa, racial discrimination determined not only political rights, but also freedom of movement, and most importantly the right to hold land. In the ‘settler colonies’ deemed suitable for large-scale white immigration the distinctions were particularly marked, but throughout Africa whites were eligible for freehold title to land granted by the colonial state; Africans’ rights to hold land were often both geographically restricted and conceptually limited to what the colonial power interpreted their subjects’ ‘traditional’ laws to be. At the same time, paradoxically, the law often favoured those 4