Minorities and the State in Africa By Michael U. Mbanaso and Chi ...

concerns over the historic connections that these Baluba laborers had with Angola's newly hostile neighbor.

Similarly, Kudakwashe Manganga discusses ethnicity in the context of the experiences of migrant workers in Salisbury (Harare) from 1890, when Salisbury was established as an urban frontier, to the early 1950s. To a large extent, the colonial attitude toward migrant workers and its preoccupation with hierarchy and discipline forced Africans to identify themselves with their “type” and use ethnic, kinship, or other social networks in their scramble for scarce socioeconomic and political resources. Although Rhodesian society was stratified along racial and ethnic lines and on the basis of assumed ethnic superiority and although some Africans assumed and articulated colonial ethnic tags, African ethnicity was not primordial, static, and rigid. Instead, ethnic self-definition complemented definition by others. Migrant workers were not merely ethnic minorities but social, political, and economic actors in a cosmopolitan city. Ethnic identity and ethnicity are often “militarized” and given precedence over other identities as the basis for political and social action.

The legacies of colonialism, such as colonial languages, remain important sources of identity and division in postcolonial Africa. While many African countries inherited a single European language, Cameroon was bequeathed two (English and French) as a result of its unique colonial experience as a mandate territory after World War I. Although one of Africa's most ethnically divided countries, Cameroon is affected by what Walters Samah's chapter characterized as the “Anglophone problem” in the colonial period and the deliberate and systematic attempt by the Francophone-dominated regime since reunification in 1961 to assimilate the Anglophone minority through a project of harmonization called national unity and national integration in the past three decades.

The Anglophone problem, which can be likened to the cases of East Timor, Eritrea, and Western Sahara, has to do with the real feeling of marginalization and exclusion of the minority English-speaking community in the Francophone-dominated state. Despite the fact that its existence is real, the state has consistently refused to recognize the feeling and