Modern African culture is characterised by conflicted responses to Arab nationalism andEuropean imperialism. Increasingly, beginning in the late 1990s, Africans have been reasserting their identity.In North Africa, especially because of the rejection of the label Arab or European, there is now an upsurge of demands for special protection of indigenous Berber languages and culture in Morocco, Egypt, Algeria and Tunisia.The re-emergence of Pan-Africanism since the fall of apartheid has heightened calls for a renewed sense of African identity. In South Africa, intellectuals from settler communities of European descent increasingly identify as African for cultural, rather than geographical or racial, reasons. Famously, some have undergone ritual ceremonies to become members of the Zulu or other communities. Many aspects of traditional African cultures have become less practiced in recent years as a result of years of neglect and suppression by colonial and post-colonial regimes.There is now a resurgence in the attempts to rediscover and revalourise African traditional cultures, under such movements as the African Renaissance, led by Thabo Mbeki,Afrocentrism, led by a group of scholars, including Molefi Asante, as well as the increasing recognition of traditional spiritualism through decriminalization of Vodou and other forms of spirituality. In recent years, traditional African culture has become synonymous with rural poverty and subsistence farming. The vast majority of the scholarship on Africa was extraneous and catered to the demand for exotic and outlandish representations of Africa. The enforcement of government decrees and policies tended to produce effects that confirmed the prejudices of the European colonialists.
