Historical and Cultural Aspects of the Formation of Nations in Postcolonial States of Africa

In our time, Western states have to abandon the classical concept of a nation as a culturally integral community and to look for solutions to the problem of supporting the unity of their citizens while preserving the cultural diversity brought in recent decades by migrants from all over the world. In modern conditions, this should happen so that postcolonial states, most of which are initially multicultural due to their unique history of formation, will find themselves in a preferable position if they abandon attempts to build nations according to the outdated classical Western model. While irreversible globalization is associated with modernity (Modern History), which began in the West half a millennium ago, nation-building in contemporary postcolonial countries shows that globalization is in no way synonymous with Westernization, and modernity, as a historically conditioned type of society and culture, disintegrates into many modernities. Our analysis of the process of the formation of nations in three postcolonial states of Africa—the United Republic of Tanzania, the Republic of Zambia, and the Republic of Uganda—has shown that today, due to better historical prerequisites, Tanzania is closer than Zambia and Uganda (and, in general, most of the countries of sub-Saharan Africa) to the formation of a nation as a community of fellow citizens committed to the same basic values and having a single culture and identity over local and private—ethnic, regional, confessional—cultures and identities with their value systems, for whom loyalty to one nation-state, common for all of them, is primary in relation to the differences caused by them. In Zambia and Uganda, local identities, especially tribal and ethnic, are more significant than in Tanzania. However, considering the global trend of multiculturalization, which is especially clearly manifested today in the West, the situation in Zambia, Uganda, and most similar postcolonial countries is perhaps becoming equally or even more promising.