ABSTRACT
In the African interior, kingdoms rose and fell as pastoral peoples conquered agricultural peoples, established their rule over wider areas, and were conquered in their turn. The exceptions were Sudan, Somalia, and of course Ethiopia, which was far from being a new state, and which had Amharic as its official language. In African as in Asian lands occupied by European rulers, the traditional political and religious elites complied with the policies of their new masters, while basically resenting them. In the beginning of African anti-colonial nationalism, influences from America were important. Rulers of independent states did their best to unite their subjects in loyalty to a single nation which they set out to create; and to pursue political centralisation, economic modernisation and mass education. The African scene in the 1970s thus certainly had many features which recalled the European nationalist struggles of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
