Originally, the Latin tribus referred to the three (possibly legendary) founding tribes (Titii, Ramnes and Luceres) whose members were collectively citizens of the Roman city-state. Notwithstanding these impeccable origins and the cachet associated with such expressions as the 'Twelve Tribes of Israel', in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries colonising Europeans applied the word 'tribe' indiscriminately to describe the supposedly 'uncivilised' archaic communities into which the indigenous peoples of Africa, America and part of Asia were divided before the imperial partition. The term was thus applied to distinctive cultural entities, whose members spoke the same language or dialect, generally occupied a common territory, and might or might not acknowledge the authority of a single chief or political leader and so form a more or less clearly demarcated political as well as social unit.
While nineteenth-century Europeans rarely dignified the peoples of 'Dark Continent' with the title 'nation', it is interesting to note that this, as it were, suppressed term should have reappeared in the religious vocabulary of vodu and other similar syncretic Latin American religions where the various gods and spirits, transported with slavery to the new world, are grouped in 'nations'. So, those whom Europeans dispareged as primitive tribes were ressurected as 'nations' (Hausa, Ibo, Guinea, Dahomey, etc.) in this syncretic cosmology.
- I.M. Lewis, Frontier Fetishism and the 'Ethiopianisation' of Africa
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