The Problem With Africa's Borders

when the Europeans colonized Africa they cared about one thing above all else profit whether it was gold from Guinea rubber 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 divided between new and old colonial powers diplomatically to avoid any conflict between Europeans after all conflicts cost money which at the end of the day threatened the profitability of the colonies what wasn't taken into account where the divisions among the Africans themselves what this resulted in was cohesive nations like the Masai being divided between English Kenya and German East Africa what later became Tanzania and the bigger the nation was the more divided it often became the Yoruba nation for example with a population today of 44 million people were split between English Nigeria the French West Africa German Togoland and the English Gold Coast directly north the house a nation with a population of 75 million today were divided in half by English Nigeria and French West Africa what eventually became Niger both of which were partially included within the borders of modern-day Nigeria alongside 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 often leading to intense competition over the lands collectively deemed as theirs for some perspective Spain today has nearly the same population as the Yoruba France has slightly fewer people than the Hausa and the EBU have a population greater than Portugal Belgium and the Netherlands combined so imagine someone coming into Europe drawing a country that included only half of Spain half of France and also all those other guys that is a simplified version of what Nigeria and many many other African nations are in the worst cases these borders created a mess of civil wars revolutions and genocides within and between many African nations as the people tried to better align their countries to their Nations these events serve as reminders of just how impactful lines on a map can b-but the great thing about borders and what this whole disaster proves is that borders are just that lines on a map that can be changed so if we know the borders don't work for Africa we have to ask can the borders of Africa be fixed okay so first I'd like to take a look at this map published by Harvard University in 1959 what's shown is the approximate territorial boundaries of various tribes and nations found within the continent looking at this we can see the boundaries are by no means uniform where it's hard to live like the Sahara the territories are large and sparsely populated with some even being labeled as uninhabited where the natural conditions become more favorable like West Africa and the Lakes region we can see an explosion in ethno diversity and the map becomes crowded using these borders but now plotting conflicts across the continent we can see a problem ethnic diversity in Africa appears to be linked to conflict this map reminds me a lot of maps of the Holy Roman Empire with all of its many small and intricate tribes or in this case kingdoms fighting each other until well there was nothing really left to fight about that's why giving each and every tribe and nation in Africa their own country likely wouldn't work and that's what makes drawing borders in Africa so difficult but just like how the many smaller kingdoms of the Holy Roman Empire eventually unified to form Germany these tribal boundaries can be used as the building blocks for larger more stable nations what these true nations of Africa look like however depends on your definition of a nation for Germany forming a nation meant unification through a common religion language and ancestral descent where the people practiced Catholicism or spoke French or were Italians well those became different countries so by using these three factors religion language and ancestry we can start working on a framework for what the true unified nations of Africa would look like perhaps the clearest a dividing line within Africa's population is religion which is why I made it first while Africa is a land rich with its own native beliefs to your religions Christianity and Islam have come to play overarching roles across nearly the entire continent dividing Africa into a majority Islam North Indy majority Christian South this Islamic influence in the north is the result of expansions by several different caliphs it's and empires over the centuries connecting North Africa religiously and therefore culturally with their neighbors in the Middle East and Mediterranean Europe though the same could be said in part for Christianity having spread to places like Ethiopia before Islam even existed Christianity as a whole saw its greatest advance through the later missionary work done during colonization estimates place Africa's Christian population at around 630 million followers beating out Latin America to become the home to the largest Christian population anywhere on earth that being said until recently Islam was even more prevalent making up 45 percent of Africa's population compared to only 40 percent encompassed by Christianity back in the early 2000s since then however the Christian countries of Africa have experienced a far more significant boom and population increasing their total number of followers resulting in the two religions having nearly the exact same number of followers on the continent today leaving a Muslim Africa which covers around 15 million square kilometers and a Christian Africa also covering around 15 million square kilometers it's actually pretty remarkable just how evenly religion divides the continent but of course it's more complicated than this now first to shout out to Islam for only having one major sect Sunni Islam found throughout and shout out to Christianity for having for though only three really come into play here Catholicism Protestantism and Ethiopian Orthodox the fourth one is Coptic Orthodox centered within Egypt but they don't have a majority there so we're really not going to talk about them looking at this we can see it's not only tribal affiliations that divide African nations but religious ones to seem clearly by looking at places like Nigeria or Ethiopia where the split is roughly even and then there's places like Mozambique where not only do Islam Catholicism and Protestantism occupy equal areas but coexist with substantial traditional beliefs here as well while there are only two major religions on the cot and Africa is home to over 2,000 different languages what this means is that we can't look at each individual language but instead we'll have to look at language families so like how the Romance language family contains within it several related but distinct languages the same can be said about all those found in Africa considered the most diverse in the world is the Niger Congo language family alone containing around 1,500 languages and covering nearly all of sub-saharan Africa with 700 million native speakers this is the third most spoken language family in the world and because of it I'd like to split it up a little more to do this we can look at the languages only considered part of the Bantu subfamily splitting the language friendly into its Niger and Congo or Bantu halves I chose this because of the 700 million Niger Congo speakers around 350 million can be defined as Bantu cutting this language family perfectly in half the next-biggest family on the continent is what's called the afro-asiatic language family like Islam these are the languages that came to Africa through the involvement with their outside neighbors which means the main language found throughout here is Arabic with only two big exceptions deep in the heart of the Sahara there is the Tuareg language used by the nearly 3 million nomadic em'ly sikh who roamed throughout this area today and then down around the Horn of Africa there are the koushik languages shared across Ethiopia and Somalia between these is the third and final major language family in Africa nilo-saharan similar to the Niger Congo family nilo-saharan can be easily broken into two major groups the Nilo part comes from the people living around the Nile River with a couple small enclaves following the river all the way up to Egypt while the other half branches out deep into the Sahara more or less centered around Lake Chad after the three major language families we have two we equally distinct but smaller families both of which can be found at the bottom of the continent first there's the COI son language family which is where you'll find the famous clicking consonants being used [Music] but besides that there isn't much connecting many of the individual languages within this family together and the term COI son kind of works as a catch-all for a multitude of otherwise on categorizable and unrelated groups in the area below them is where we'll find the Afrikaans language now while many European languages are spoken across Africa this is the only one that evolved into its own distinct language deriving originally from Dutch spoken now by a majority of both people of African and of Dutch heritage here what this shows is that as people move and spread they bring their language with them meaning race and language often go hand in hand with one another and looking at a racial breakdown of the continent we can see every linguistic family corresponds to a specific racial group as well which is why I'm not gonna go much further into race other than to point out two significant groups not touched on by language the first are the Chaddock people who occupy North Nigeria and southern Niger essentially the Hausa I was talking about earlier in second are the Banda people both of which together served to chop up the Niger Congo language family even more in summary religion divides the continent into a clear North and South Muslim and Christian Africa language creates anywhere between six to nine domains and finally with race we have a combination of the two using all three we can begin to see what I'd like to call the big lines of Africa take form which again defined the theoretical limit of nations in Africa what this means is that a country contained entirely within these lines likely has a better chance of establishing peace and stability than a country that crosses them so should these be the borders of Africa well that's up for debate to see why we can look at a place like Sudan you see 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 that's also why in 2011 South Sudan successfully separated itself from the north to become the youngest country in the world which means the South Sudan can be seen as a test run for this concept of breaking apart Africa along these lines the only problem is with an ongoing civil war that began just two years after the country's formation and already several humanitarian crises underway the early years of this new nation haven't been exactly easy I mean just look at how long the Wikipedia page for 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 smaller ethnic groups within these still do not get along and this is because borders aren't the only problem keeping with South Sudan since its formation the country has experienced a water crisis a refugee crisis from a neighboring war and a famine which is a lot for any country to deal with all at once so it doesn't really come as a surprise when the newer army of South Sudan suggested to wipe out the entire Murrell tribe on the face of the earth as the only solution to guarantee long-term security of newer cattle 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 and than they do with the tribes themselves what this has done is create a cycle in which scarcity leads to conflict which creates more scarcity leading to even more conflict no matter what the borders of Africa are this this this this or this as long as people worry about their access to food and water and other basic essentials regional conflicts within even the most balanced of African nations will occur so while this serves as a tenuous framework for the creation of new states within the continent that isn't the full picture I think to end this I'd just like to say that while Africa's borders haven't been friendly to many of the countries they define that's not to say there haven't been some success stories to come out of them and to break up these countries would likely be detrimental to the progress made since colonization when European colonialism collapsed in Africa after the second world war and control of Africa was handed over to Africans the newfound leaders faced a decision to keep the borders handed down to them and suffer through the conflicts between mismatched tribes or to rearrange them and suffer through the new conflicts that arise damned if they do damned if they don't in a move that echo to the Berlin conference African leaders made the collective decision to keep the arbitrary borders as they had been drawn by Europeans to preserve one little piece there was left in Africa after World War two and so far this strategy has been working and peace in Africa has been steadily increasing since the 70s looking at the Global Peace Index for 2019 we can see many African nations have climbed to rank among the most peaceful in the world with 36 or exactly two-thirds of them ranking more peaceful than the United States and as Africa's recent population boom slows down an economic investment steadily increases the continent still has its brightest years ahead of it hey I hope you enjoyed I put a lot of research into this one and spent a few weeks just writing the script so if you did enjoy and you'd like to support what I do here you can check out my patreon other than that I'm wrapping up with school right now so hopefully you guys will start to see more frequent uploads against so subscribe if you haven't to see those Thanks

Channel: Atlas Pro

Views: 2,305,010

Rating: 4.9060364 out of 5

Keywords: education, geography, science, atlaspro, africa, border, nigeria, europe, colonialism, tribes, war, civil, conflict, peace, in, pan, africanism, islam, christianity, arabic, religion, language

Id: LvKONiRHgkU

Length: 14min 16sec (856 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 06 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/AutoModerator]

Rules | Wiki | Flairs

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

[u/TunnelRat1]

the problem of the problem is if we try to fix the problem the problem gets worse