Nations today live far from their native homelands

In what is typical of his many eccentricities, Muammar Gaddafi is demanding that the Helvetic Republic be disbanded and the several Nations which compose it “returned” to their original “homelands.”

To most East Africans, it must be a perplexing statement.

They have never even heard of such a country.

But “Helvetic Republic” is the official name of the tiny but influential central European state known as Switzerland.

And, concerning at least one point, the outspoken Libyan Leader is correct. The Swiss State is made up of very many Nations.

That is probably the problem bothering the ever busy mind of the Gomhouriya’s Leader (Gomhouriya being one of the plethora of renditions of the Arabic word which the Omani and Yemenites once brought to us — Kiswahili speakers – as Jamhuri, meaning “republic”).

Once again, however, this talk of a State being composed of several “Nations” may perplex many people.

Yet it is simple. The words “State” and “Nation” do not mean the same thing.

State is a subjective legal or political category which can be created overnight.

Nation, on the other hand, is an objective ethnic or cultural or linguistic category which originates and develops by itself without anybody willing it into existence.

The Indian State was not created till 1948, whereas the Nations within it have existed since anybody can remember.

These Nations include the Gujerati, Panjabi, Bihari, Tamil and Bangla (“Bengali’).

Like the Swiss, they show that very many Nations can agree or be forced to exist within a single State.

The British State is composed of the English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish Nations.

The Nigerian State, created only in 1960, is composed of the Hausa, Ibo, Yoruba, Fulani and other Nations, each with separate roots that lie much deeper in history.