Abstract EN:

What is a nation? What does it mean to be involved in nation building? To what does it refer in South Africa? These are the questions tha interest this book. Now, these questions may be judged passé by those for whom the national form is fast disappearing from the global scene. From such a perspective these are perhaps 'bad' questions in the current situation; or perhaps only interesting for historians and others interested in the past. Indeed, in the present we are asked to attach new prefixes to nations (trans or super or post ) that suggest their transgression or even supercession. But it might be too soon for a requiem to the nation. Or a hymn in celebration of its passing. Th nation is pursued, especially in African states after independence, in the narre of anti Imperialism, in the narre of liberation and selfcontrol. Indeed, the will to nationhood remains a powerful and attractive instinct in many former colonised societies. If these notions are increasingly chimeras in the face of Empire, we need account for the durability of the national imagination in these places. This is precisely what so much of the contemporary literature cannot do. How often the 'African state' or 'the State in Africa' is treated in relation to the 'colonial state' or to 'ethnicity' or to 'underdevelopment', 'arrested development' or 'imperialism', 'modernity' and 'modernisation', 'capitalism', 'bureaucratisation', 'traditionalism' and 'traditional authority', 'ritualism' and 'power'. How rarely it is treated in relation to nationalism or the nation state