ABSTRACT
I n April 1848 Louis Kossuth met a delegation of Hungarian Serbs who told him that their nation demanded the recog nition of its language.
Kossuth, then, would probably recognize only two or three nations in modern Africa south of the Sahara-Botswana, Lesotho, Somalia. The Serbs would recognize hundreds: the ‘tribes’ that are contained within, or that sometimes overlap, the boundaries of the new states. In this paper I adopt the Serb definition, and try to show that African tribes and their tribal ism can indeed be equated with European nations and their nationalism.
