In 1966, the renowned Nigerian journalist Peter Enahoro wrote a series of articles for the Lagos Daily Times, later collected in a small book titled How To Be a Nigerian(1966). “The search for the Nigerian is in progress” (1), Enahoro declared. He went on to identify the emergent Nigerian national character by means of irony and satire. Enahoro's very first sentence about “the Nigerian” was a statement about the pervasiveness of ethnic consciousness in everyday life: “Europeans talk about the weather: Nigerians talk about tribe” (3). Enahoro wrote this in the midst of a political crisis that, in about a year's time, led the country into ethnic pogroms and civil war, and himself into exile.

Talking about “tribe” is one matter. Killing one another because of it is a different one, of course, and not a necessary result of the first. The years 1966–67 were a violent climax within a process of ethnicization of politics in Nigeria that had begun about a two decades earlier. “Ethnic politics” or “political ethnicity” in the more specific sense is a form of politics that employs—and is driven by—arguments and emotions about ethnic identity, with well-known catastrophic results not only in Nigeria. It can largely be explained by the dynamics of political competition between large regional-ethnic power blocs that emerged during the period of decolonization. By contrast, “ethnicity” in a broader sense—that of “ethnic identity” or “ethnic self-consciousness”—is a form of group identity with wider social, cultural and moral dimensions. It is not primarily directed at a national political arena but targets the members of an ethnic group itself, becoming a means of self-definition and integration. It also includes dimensions directed at (or against) others, having boundary-making and exclusionary functions that, of course, may serve internal group integration at the same time.

Since the 1980s, the emergence and role of ethnicity (or “tribalism”) in Africa has been the subject of extensive study (Lentz 1995). “Primordialist” approaches to ethnicity, viewing ethnic identity as an innate and more or less natural condition of human beings, have become obsolete—definitely so in the study of African history, however strong such views may be in popular consciousness. It has become commonplace to acknowledge that ethnicity did not simply “emerge” but has been made—“constructed,” or even “invented.” Research has focused on the details of this process of “making” ethnicity.