Enumerating race and ethnicity in post-colonial Africa, 1955–2024

How have African states classified their populations after independence, and what became of the colonial census categories ‘race,’ ‘ethnicity,’ and ‘tribe,’ through which empire organized populations? Existing research provides rich accounts of census classification in individual African countries and cross-national analysis of ‘ethnicity’ during particular census rounds, but we lack a continent-wide, longitudinal account of how racial and ethnic classification has changed across post-colonial Africa. Drawing on an original dataset of 211 census questionnaires from 53 African countries between 1955 and 2024, this paper provides such an account. I combine systematic coding of the presence and absence of ‘race,’ ‘ethnicity,’ and ‘tribe’ with case-by-case analysis of questionnaire wording and category schemes to trace historical trends, colonial legacies, and cross-national variation. Three findings stand out. First, most post-colonial censuses do not explicitly enumerate any of the three concepts, making non-naming a central feature of the classificatory landscape. Second, where states enumerate them, the concepts follow divergent trajectories: ‘race’ becomes increasingly rare after the early post-independence period, ‘tribe’ declines substantially, and ‘ethnicity’ becomes the most prevalent but remains uneven across countries and over time. Third, empires structure but do not determine these trajectories. Former British colonies exhibit the greatest plurality of classificatory terms, while former French colonies rely almost exclusively on ‘ethnicity.’ Case-by-case analysis reveals striking diversity and fluidity in how race and ethnicity are defined, overlapped, and transformed across space and time. By mapping these trajectories across seven decades, the paper provides the first longitudinal empirical baseline for understanding how post-colonial African states have remade colonial forms of racial and ethnic difference. It reveals patterns that existing theories do not fully explain, positioning Africa as an important site for advancing research on state classification, racial and ethnic formation, and the transformation of colonial legacies.