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 | 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