When one turns to Africa the problems of interpretation seem, if anything, almost more acute and relatively little in any modern school of discourse actually helps to resolve them. The words ‘nation’ and ‘nationalism’ have been used so indiscriminately since the 1950s that an analysis of African realities in terms which tally with those used elsewhere is exceedingly difficult. But the difficulty has been further compounded by a fashionable school of current academic theory of an Hobsbawmian sort, represented in particular by a collection of essays entitled The Creation of Tribalism in Southern Africa. This school wants to de-tribalise or de-ethnicise pre-colonial Africa, that is to say it is bent on claiming that Europeans, missionaries in particular but colonial officials and early anthropologists as well, invented tribes because it was convenient to them to do so. The very effort to put oral vernaculars into writing, to provide an administrative network or to dissect African society for the purposes of study, created identities which did not until then exist. Ethnic identity is something essentially modern.

It should be clear from the entire argument of this book that I am unlikely to want to play down the social impact of the introduction of writing and the translation of biblical texts into a range of vernaculars. Unquestionably, as we will see, this could significantly alter and extend identities, even occasionally it could be said to have created new ones.