‘In opposition to custom, Mbembe insists that the idea of ‘tradition’ never really existed and reminds us there is a pre-colonial African modernity that has not been taken into account in contemporary creativity. Boom!

African cultures tend to be syncretic. While all cultures bleed, borrow and adapt, generally it is those of the European tradition – the British are a key example — who are overly concerned with strict categorization and the illusion of maintaining a sense of cultural purity. Indeed, we see this attitude across the entire globe now, the result of nationalisms and rigid binary identities that did not exist in the pre-colonial African context.

In contrast to the myth of a fixed, unchanging traditional Africa, most African cultures were far more fluid and dynamic than their European counterparts. Let’s take something mistakenly understood as a fixed and foundational concept – ethnic identity. Before the 1884 Scramble for Africa and the following European annexation of the continent, ethnic identity would have been constructed in a very different way from what we imagine today. In The Invention of Tradition Terence Ranger states that, `far from there being a single “tribal” identity, most Africans moved in and out of multiple identities, defining themselves at one moment as subject to this chief, at another moment as a member of that cult at another moment as part of this clan, and at yet another moment as an initiate in that professional guild:’

As a result of this, belonging is understood less as ‘a matter of restrictive labelling, and more of choosing between various semantic classifications dependent on the particular contexts and identities involved’.’