The Invention of Tradition Revisited: The Case of Colonial Africa

As Werner Sollors has remarked, the word ‘invention’ has ‘become a rather popular category in intellectual discourse’. No longer ‘reserved for accounts of technological advances such as the telegraph’, invention has been applied to ‘such diverse phenomena as the invention of culture; of literary history; of childhood as well as the loss of childhood; of motherhood; of kinship; of the self; of America; of the Negro; of the Indian; of the Jew’. Some usages of ‘invention’ have laid so much stress on ‘the importance of language in the social construction of reality’ as ‘to let “reality” disappear behind an inventive language that dissembles it’.1