During the last quarter of the century, there has been a tremendous increase in the study of African politics by western and eastern scholars. The 1960s saw an equally growing body of African scholars who devoted their energies to political developments in Africa. This interest was not unconnected with the use of African nationalism and the subsequent independence of many African countries from the late 1950s to the mid 1960s. Such interest in Africa was motivated by academic as well as non academic reasons. For the academics, Africa and its people became testing grounds of the many theories and concepts which had developed as a result of the expansion of the Social Sciences in general and of political Science in particular. There was a need to test whether African nationalist movements as· well as African leaders conformed to the prevailing "development" theories and concepts which had been developed in North America and Europe. Both the eastern and the western scholars took pains to identify characteristics in the nationalist movements which conformed to the prevailing assumptions of this ideology. This article sets out to examine the falsity or validity of the western concept of African nationalism. The political historiography of Africa reveals two widely spread but unfortunately false assumptions. The first assumption is that the African nationalist movements were mass movements. The second assumption which actually rises from the first was that such movements which qualified for the title of "nationalist" covered the whole territory, that is the future nation. Consequently the assumption that party politics was a mass movement has led to the popularization of the concept of a mass party as the instrument which won back African independence.