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Africa Needs a New Map
It’s time to start seeing the redrawing of the continent’s colonial
borders as an opportunity, not a threat.
BY G. PASCAL ZACHARY
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APRIL 28, 2010
Muammar al-Qaddafi isn't exactly known for brilliant ideas on
maximizing political justice; his own country, Libya, is essentially
his private fiefdom. But a few weeks ago, he had a pretty good one:
to partition Nigeria, "the giant of Africa," as he called it, in
half. Religious violence along the border between the country's
north and south seemed to have drawn a pretty clear battle line;
Nigeria's massive and massively diverse population seemed to warrant
separate states. After years of watching this oil-rich country of
150 million struggle to manage its obvious divides, Qaddafi just
gave voice to what others must have been thinking: Time to split
Nigeria up.
But in Africa, the declaration fell on deaf ears. Nigeria recalled
the Libyan ambassador and firmly rejected the idea. Even for a
continent accustomed to Qaddafi's antics, this time the Libyan
leader went too far. Talking about redrawing continental borders --
which are today almost exactly as they were at the time of
independence 50 years ago -- is something of a cardinal sin. But
Qaddafi did not exactly repent. He had misspoken, he said: Nigeria
should not be split in two, but perhaps into three or even four
nations.
Silence about borders has become Africa's pathology, born in the era
of strongman leaders that followed decolonialization. Loath to lose
any of their newly independent land, the conti nent's leaders
upheld a gentleman's agreement to favor "stability" over change.
Today, the unfortunate result is visible in nearly every corner of
Africa: from a divided Nigeria, to an ungovernable Democratic
Republic of the Congo (DRC), to the very real but unrecognized state
in Somaliland. Borders created through
some combination of ignorance and malice are today one of the
continent's major barriers to building strong, competent states. No
initiative would do more for happiness, stability, and economic
growth in Africa today than an energetic and enlightened redrawing
of these harmful lines.
Like it or not, talk of a new map is echoing around Africa today for
one very clear reason: Sudan, the continent's largest country by
landmass, is scheduled to hold a referendum vote next January, in
which the people of the country's autonomous south could decide to
sece de. Many see the prospect of instability as threatening. Yet
there is no better time to reth ink the tangled issue of
African borders. If it works in Sudan, perhaps other countries
sho uld follow.
In fact, many thought the borders would change back in the late
1950s and early 1960s, when most African nations broke free from
colonial rule. "An aversion to the international borders drawn by
the colonial powers, if not their complete rejection, has been a
consistent theme of anticolonial nationalism in Africa," wrote the
scholar Saadi Touval in 1967. He went further, pretty much summing
up the problems that still persist today: "The borders are blamed
for the disappearance of a unity which supposed existed in Africa in
preolconial times; they are regarded as arbitrarily imposed,
artificial barriers separating people of the same stock, and they
have said to have balkanized Africa. The borders are considered to
be one of the humiliating legacies of colonialism, which, according
to this view, independent Africa ought to abolish."
Source: FP, Foreign Policy
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