Despite the fact that the new?postapartheid?South Africa frequendy called the Rainbow Nation, the applicability ofthe term far from being unanimously accepted. For example, Robert Thornton argues that African countries today are countries, not nations, states or ethnic groups (148), and he insists that Africa one of these countries, since there is no fundamental identity that any African clings in common with all, or even most other Africans (150). Until the dismantling of apartheid as a political system, governmental policy decreed that Whites, Blacks, Coloureds, and Indians constituted separate nations (see Morse et al. 226). Thus, black homelands could be created and released into official independence in a move strengthen the white claim the largest portion of the land.1 By maintaining that different nations inhabited the geographical space called South government policy led a situation in which rather than serving as an overall uniting factor, nationalism in the African con? text accentuated differences (Green 45). The political context in Africa, however, has altered dramatically over the last ten years. 1990 saw the unbanning ofthe ANC and the release of Nelson Mandela; a new constitution was debated and finally installed in 1994, and in the same year the first democratic elections were held. This created a political reality in which it now at least possible imagine Africa as a multicultural that includes people of all skin col? ors. If the concept of the nation be kept distinct from that of the state,2 then the term nation would have imply some sort of identity shared (at least some extent) by all its members, a binding force that lets a seemingly heterogeneous group of people imagine themselves as a com? munity (see Anderson), that lets them see themselves as a nation. In the case of Africa, there seem be very few possible sources for unity; even the common language and its standardization via print capitalism as emphasized by Benedict Anderson (see 44 ff.) does not apply, since Africa's constitution recognizes eleven official languages: Afrikaans, English, Ndebele, Pedi, Sotho, Swazi, Tsonga, Tswana, Venda, Xhosa, and Zulu (in alphabetical order). Within the critical debate on the origins of nationhood, there some agreement that a common one possible aspect of such identity. For example, Raymond Grew argues that national identity something constructed out of (35), Stuart Murray points out that nationalism writes to provide mythologies strengthen the sense of a collective self (10), and John Tosh notes that history probably a