The official censuses undertaken in anglophone Africa in the last 160 years offer a unique insight into the bureaucratic image of the population enumerated. The censuses are more than headcounts and the questionnaires administered, particularly in the colonial period, often requested information on aspects of each individual's personal identity, notably ethnicity, language and religion. The result is a mass of personal information, which through the processes of simplification and categorisation offers a statistical ordering of the population according to the perceptions of the era. However, the coverage of identity issues has been less comprehensive, but more diverse in its content, since independence, owing to the sensitivities associated with such probes. The questions posed and the responses elicited are highly variable and often the subsequent published tabulations do not allow for the monitoring of long-term trends. Indeed the recent round of post-millennium censuses offers only a limited view of African identities, which might beneficially be improved with reference to the censuses of other multi-ethnic and multilinguistic societies confronted with the task of nation-building.