The Problem With Africa's Borders

When Europeans colonized Africa, they cared about one thing above all else: profit, whether it was rubber gold from Guinea from the Congo or diamonds from South Africa. The goal was to extract resources and send them back home. This focus on profitability led the European powers to hold the Berlin conference where Africa was diplomatically divided between new and old colonial powers to avoid any conflict between Europeans after all conflicts cost money which at the end of the day threatened profitability. of the colonies which did not take into account where the divisions were between the For the Africans themselves, this resulted in cohesive nations such as the Maasai being divided between English Kenya and German East Africa, which later became Tanzania, and the larger the nation, the more divided the Yoruba nation often became, for example, with a current population of 44 million people.

They were divided between English Nigeria, French West Africa, German Togo and the English Gold Coast, directly north of the house, a nation with a population of 75 million today, they were divided in half between English Nigeria and French West Africa, what eventually became Niger, both partially included. within the

borders

of present-day Nigeria, along with the EBU, another tribe of around 49 million people whose traditional lands lie entirely within the country's

borders

and that's not to mention all the smaller tribes crammed in between them, which often leading to intense competition for lands collectively considered theirs, from some perspective Spain today has almost the same population as the Yoruba.

France has a slightly smaller population than the Hausa and the EBU has a larger population than Portugal. Belgium and the Netherlands combined, so imagine someone arriving in Europe drawing a country that includes only half of it. from Spain, half from France and also all those other guys, that's a simplified version of what Nigeria and many other African nations are. At their worst, these borders created a disaster of civil wars, revolutions and genocides within and between many African nations as people sought to better align their countries with their nations, these events serve as reminders of how impactful conflicts can be. lines on a map, but the best thing about borders and what this whole mess shows is that borders are just lines on a map that can be changed, so if we know that borders don't work for Africa, we have to ask if they They can fix Africa's borders.

So, first I would like to take a look at this map published by Harvard University in 1959. What is shown is the approximate land area. The boundaries of various tribes and nations found within the continent. Looking at this, we can see that the boundaries are by no means uniform where it is difficult to live like in the Sahara. The territories are large and sparsely populated and some are even labeled as uninhabited where natural conditions become. More favorable like West Africa and the Lakes region, we can see an explosion in ethnic diversity and the map fills up using these borders, but now, by plotting conflicts across the continent, we can see a

problem

.

Ethnic diversity in Africa appears to be linked to conflict. This map remembers. I was given many maps of the Holy Roman Empire with all its intricate little tribes or in this case kingdoms that fought each other until there was nothing left to fight for, so we give each and every tribe and nation of Africa its own. This country probably wouldn't work and that's what makes drawing borders in Africa so difficult, but just as the many smaller kingdoms of the Holy Roman Empire eventually unified to form Germany, these tribal borders can be used as building blocks for larger and more stable nations.

However, what these true nations of Africa look like depends on their definition of a nation for Germany, forming a nation meant unification through a common religious language and an ancestral ancestry where people practiced Catholicism or spoke French or were Italian, those they became different countries, so by using these three factors religion language and ancestry we can begin to work on a framework of what the true unified nations of Africa would be like perhaps the clearest dividing line within the population of Africa is religion, that's why I made it first while Africa is a rich land with its own native beliefs of its religions.

Christianity and Islam have come to play predominant roles in almost the entire continent, dividing Africa into a majority Islamic north, India, a majority Christian, In the south. This Islamic influence in the north is the result of the expansions of several different caliphs and empires. the centuries that religiously and therefore culturally connected North Africa with its neighbors in the Middle East and Mediterranean Europe, although the same could partly be said of Christianity spreading to places like Ethiopia before Islam existed . Christianity as a whole saw its greatest advance over the last decade. Estimates of missionary work done during colonization put Africa's Christian population at around 630 million followers, surpassing Latin America to become home to the world's largest Christian population.

That said, until recently Islam was even more prevalent, making up 45 percent of Africa's population compared to only 40 percent covered by Christianity in the early 2000s; However, Christian countries in Africa have experienced a much more significant population boom and increased overall number of followers, resulting in the two religions having almost exactly the same number of followers on the continent. Today, leaving a Muslim Africa that covers around 15 million square kilometers and a Christian Africa that also covers around 15 million square kilometers, it is actually quite remarkable how evenly religion divides the continent but of course it is more complicated than this now, first, shout out to Islam for we only have one major sect of Sunni Islam everywhere and we thank Christianity for doing so, although only three really come into play here: Catholicism, Protestantism and the Ethiopian Orthodox, The fourth is the Coptic Orthodox centered on Egypt, but they don't have a majority there, so we're not really going to talk about them.

Looking at this, we can see that it is not just tribal affiliations that divide African nations, but also religious ones, which seems clear when looking at places like Nigeria or Ethiopia, where the division is more or less even, and then there are places like Mozambique. where not only Islam, Catholicism and Protestantism occupy equal areas but also coexist with substantial traditional beliefs, while there are only two main religions in the cot and Africa is home to over 2,000 different languages, what this means is that we cannot look at each individual language, but instead will have to look at language families, for example how the Romance language family contains several related but distinct languages.

The same can be said of all those found in Africa, considered the most diverse in the world: the Niger. The Congo language family alone contains around 1,500 languages ​​and covers almost all of sub-Saharan Africa with 700 million native speakers. This is the third most spoken language family in the world and that is why I would like to divide it a little more. This we can see the languages ​​that are only considered part of the Bantu subfamily, dividing the friendly language into its Niger and Congo or Bantu halves. I chose this because of the 700 million speakers of Niger Congo, around 350 million can be defined as Bantu, neatly cutting this language family.

In the middle of the next largest family on the continent is the so-called Afroasiatic language family, like Islam, these are the languages ​​that came to Africa through interaction with their external neighbors, meaning that the main language that was found here is Arabic, with only two major With exceptions deep in the heart of the Sahara is the Tuareg language used by the nearly 3 million em'ly Sikh nomads who roamed this area today and then around the Horn of Africa are the Koushik languages ​​shared in Ethiopia and Somalia among these is the third and last major language family in Nilo-Saharan Africa similar to the Niger Congo Nilo-Saharan family can be easily divided into two main groups the Nile part comes from the people living around the Nile River with a couple of small enclaves following the river to Egypt, while the other half branches deep into the Sahara more or less centered around Lake Chad.

After the three main language families, we have two equally distinct but smaller families, both of which can be found at the bottom of the continent. First, there is the IOC son family of languages, which is where you will find the famous clicking consonants, but other than that there is not much that connects many of the individual languages ​​within this family and the IOC term son functions as a link. all by a multitude of categorizable and unrelated groups in the area below them is where we will now find the Afrikaans language, while many European languages ​​are spoken throughout Africa, this is the only one that evolved into its own distinctive language originally derived from Dutch . spoken now by a majority of people of African and Dutch descent here, what this shows is that as people move and spread, they bring their language with them, meaning that race and language often go hand in hand.

On the continent we can see that each linguistic family also corresponds to a specific racial group, so I am not going to go much deeper into race, other than to point out two important groups that are not affected because of the language. The first is the Chaddock people who occupy northern Nigeria and southern Niger, essentially the Hausa that I spoke of earlier in the second place, are the Banda people, which together served to further divide the linguistic family of the Congo into Niger. In short, the religion divides the continent into a clear north and south of Muslim and Christian Africa. language creates between six and nine domains and finally with race we have a combination of the two, using all three we can begin to see what I would like to call the great lines of Africa, which again define the theoretical limit of nations in Africa as much as possible.

What this means is that a country contained entirely within these lines probably has a better chance of establishing peace and stability than a country that crosses them, so if these were the borders of Africa, well, that's up for debate to see. why we can consider a In a place like Sudan it is seen that in 2010 the country of Sudan looked like this even though religiously, linguistically and racially it was clearly divided, which is why the lines I created cut the modern country in two and This is also why in 2011 South Sudan successfully separated from the north to become the youngest country in the world, which means that South Sudan can be seen as a test of this concept of dividing Africa in this sense, the only

problem

With the ongoing civil war starting just two years after the country's formation and with several humanitarian crises already underway, the first few years of this new nation haven't exactly been easy.

I mean, just look at how long the Wikipedia page on ethnic violence in South Sudan is and I think this reveals something even more important about Africa despite a shared religion. a shared language and a shared race, the smaller ethnic groups within these still do not get along and this is because borders are not the only problem with South Sudan since its formation, the country has experienced a water crisis , a refugee crisis from a neighboring war and a famine that is a lot for any country to deal with at once, so it is no surprise that South Sudan's new army suggested eliminating the entire Murrell tribe from the face of the earth as the only solution.

To ensure the long-term security of new livestock, what this reveals is that although conflicts are often fought along tribal lines, the causes of these conflicts often have more to do with resources than with the tribes themselves, What this has done is create a cycle where scarcity leads to conflict which creates more scarcity which leads to even more conflict no matter what Africa's borders are this this this this or this as long as people care about their access to food and water and other basics regional conflicts even within the most balanced African nations will occur, so while this serves as a tenuous framework for the creation of new states within the continent, that is not the full picture.

I guess to end this I would just like to say that while Africa's borders have not beenfriendly to many of the countries they define, that is not to say that some success stories have not emerged from them and dividing these countries would probably be detrimental to the progress made since colonization, when European colonialism collapsed in Africa after the Second World War. world war and control of Africa was handed over to the Africans, the new leaders faced the decision of maintaining the borders that had been inherited to them and suffering conflicts between mismatched tribes or reorganizing them and suffering new conflicts that arise.

Damned if they don't, in a move reminiscent of the Berlin conference, African leaders made the collective decision to maintain the arbitrary borders as drawn by the Europeans to preserve a small piece of Africa left after the Second War. World and until now. This strategy has worked and peace in Africa has steadily increased since the 1970s. If we look at the 2019 Global Peace Index, we can see that many African nations have risen to rank among the most peaceful in the world at 36 or exactly two-thirds of they. It is a more peaceful country than the United States, and as Africa's recent population boom slows and economic investment steadily increases, the continent still has its brightest years ahead.

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