institute for preservation and development

＂The popular, dominant and hegemonic view of Africans of South Africa as people who are different among themselves in terms of their ethnicity, languages, surnames, culture and intangible cultural heritage should be the target of progressive South Africans for its defeat. This book serves as their weapon on the ideological front of their struggle for the resolution of their national question through the nation building project.＂

- Eze Chris Akani, Head of Department of Political Science, Ignatius Ajuru University of Education, Rumuorlumeni, Paramount Traditional Leader of Rumuevuorlu Community in Obio, Akpor Local Government Area, Rivers State, Nigeria, and a Member of the African Association of Political Science, African Studies Association and International Political Science Association.

Producing and providing irrefutable scholarly evidence of ethnic, linguistic, cultural and intangible cultural heritage commonality of the African people of South Africa, this book is a substantial and welcome addition to the concrete understanding of the task of recalling their past with thoughtful insights in projecting an independent vision of their future.

The study of the migration of the African people within their country and its transformation of their ethnicity, languages, surnames, culture and intangible cultural heritage is not exclusively of academic significance and interest. It is of socio-political, ideological and economic significance and interest in South Africa’s nation building project. The point is that a clear and concrete theoretical and ideological understanding of how their migration transformed their ethnicity, languages, surnames, culture and intangible cultural heritage in a country in which they are viewed on the basis of their ethnicity, languages, surnames, cultural and intangible cultural heritage regarded as diverse or different is an integral part of the inescapable task of its state and non-state actors in resolving the national question. At the centre of this task is the unity in action of its African people for the establishment of a truly South African community of the equality of material conditions and rights.