On borders
In the light of the new coronavirus cases in Osun state, let’s very briefly talk about Nigeria’s (or Africa’s borders). It was sometime last year that I found that probably the fourth-largest concentration of Ogbomoso indigenes after Ogbomoso itself, Ibadan and Kano, is in Abidjan, in the Ivory Coast. Basically, this Nigerian community has links with that part of the Ivory Coast because of trade routes that predate the British and the French, and apparently, those trade routes are still in use, which is why and how the people who made it through Nigeria’s ostensibly closed borders were able to make it through. The rest of this thread is culled directly from my column in BusinessDay three weeks ago. You can read the complete thing here as what is in this thread is but a summary.
There is a theory in geopolitics that holds that the most stable, natural countries, are formed along longitudes, not latitudes, and the reason is climate. Before technology changed the way that people worked and lived, moving within the same lines of longitudes made sense. The climate was broadly the same, so the adjustment was easier. This aided the formation of states along those similar climatic zones, and this applied in Africa as well. The great empires of the ancient world (including those on the continent) tended to follow climatic zones. The Roman Empire was largely built around the Mediterranean climate, the Islamic Caliphate was largely a desert empire, the Mongol Empire was strongest on the steppes of Central and East Asia. In Africa, the great empires of Mali, Shongai, Sokoto and Benin, as examples, did not have major climatic variations within their borders.
When the Europeans colonised Africa, they cared only about one thing, profit. The goal was to extract resources from the hinterlands and send them back home through the continent’s long coastline. This led to them drawing borders in Africa that discarded this natural law and ran along latitudes, resulting in cohesive nations such as the Masai of East Africa being divided between British Kenya and German East Africa, an area which later became known as Tanzania. The bigger the nation was, the more divided it often became, so the Yoruba nation today, straddles English Nigeria, French West Africa (Benin) and German Togoland (now French Togo). A young friend of mine from today’s Akwa Ibom has mentioned cousins in South-West Cameroon, which is today rebelling against the government in Yaounde, another has mentioned his relatives having their bedrooms in Benin and their kitchens in Nigeria. Imagine someone coming into pre-EU Europe and creating a country that is half of Spain, half of France and throws in a bit of Belgium and the Netherlands. That is a simplified version of what Nigeria and most other African countries are.
In the worst cases, these artificial borders created a mess of civil wars within many African countries as the people try to better align their countries to their nations. In other cases, different peoples chuked into the same country went to war as they tried to assert their dominance over their new countrymen. Following artificial border designs, African communities have not moved freely in their daily activities, which has inflicted economic hardship and social inconvenience. These problems, often expressed in resource conflict and elaborate smuggling operations, still exist as reminders of just how impactful lines on a map can be. Or cannot be.
Nigeria’s borders have, officially at least, been closed since August 2019. But increasingly, the evidence is showing that the border closure is, in reality, an annoyance for formal businesses and people in the headline border crossings where the Nigerian state can muster total control of the levers of coercion such as Seme and Idiroko. As the ease of the Osun crossing shows, in other places such as Dorofi, Ekok and Jibiya, it is (almost) business as usual, and goods and people are still moving through. The ancient nations are still very much alive, while the artificial countries are suffering from internal stress.
The great thing about borders and what these disasters prove is that borders are just that. Lines on a map that can be changed. So, if we now know that the present borders don’t work for Africa, we have to ask ourselves a truly searching question, can the borders of Africa be fixed?