It is fashionable for Western observers, securely ensconced in their own national identities forged in toil and blood several centuries ago, to pour scorn on the rhetorical excesses and misguided scholarship of nationalist intellectuals in nineteenth-century Europe or twentieth-century Africa and Asia. Those whose identities are rarely questioned and who have never known exile or subjugation of land and culture, have little need to trace their ‘roots’ in order to establish a unique and recognizable identity. Yet theirs is only an implicit and unarticulated form of what elsewhere must be shouted from the roof-tops: ‘We belong, we have a unique identity, we know it by our ancestry and history’ It matters nothing that these are so many ‘myths’ and memories; with them, the English and French are ‘nations’, without them, just so many populations bounded in political space.