In spite of recent criticisms the concept of ethnicity should be retained in anthropological analysis to designate more or less coherent cultural entities. These entities will be fluctuating of course, due to their position in a larger social space where women, goods, ideas and institutions are exchanged. Ethnicity is not, as some have argued, a colonial invention, but an incontestable anthropological fact, where identity is nurtured by otherness. Ethnicity does not of itself have a political vocation: traditional African states were more often than not pluri-ethnic. The ‘national’ phenomenon, the convergence of the State and ethnicity is rare in pre-colonial African history. The nation-state is a modern phenomenon, the product of a more or less arbitrary manipulation by an elite having a certain number of ethnic features: a political re-modelling of collective identity.