Africa's future - Balkanization?

I've been saying this for over thirty years, ever since I had up-close-and-personal contact with the endemic conflicts that have plagued Africa for generations. It's good to see that at last, someone's daring to say it in public. The Sydney Morning Herald reports:

If Southern Sudan, why not Southern Nigeria, or Northern Ivory Coast, or multiple Congos? The Sudanese vote has implications for all of Africa, signalling that the borders drawn by colonial cartographers are no longer sacrosanct. Some fear it may spur the Balkanisation of the continent.

"The referendum in Sudan could have a domino effect," said Shehu Sani, president of the Civil Rights Congress in Nigeria. "It is likely to be infectious to other parts of Africa in the sense that most countries … are divided along the lines of Christians and Muslims."

The continent's arbitrary borders - blind to ethnic, cultural and political faultlines - were drawn up by European powers at the Berlin conference of 1884-85. When the colonies began gaining independence 50 years ago, the Organisation of African Unity (now the African Union) declared the borders immutable because the alternative would look like a smashed window pane of thousands of warring states.

Eritrea broke away from Ethiopia in 1993 after nearly 30 years of war, but it had already been a separate entity in colonial times. So the sundering of Sudan, Africa's biggest country, would represent an unprecedented challenge to the historical status quo.

It is being watched closely in Nigeria, Africa's most populous country, which has its own, sometimes violent, schism between a predominantly Muslim north and largely Christian south.

"What's happening in Sudan is raising a lot of fears, particularly in Nigeria, which is a colonial creation," Sani said. "It was thought the defeat of Biafra [a secession attempt in 1967 that led to civil war] had made division impossible, but Sudan is rekindling the thought."

In recent weeks the political crisis in Ivory Coast, where the President, Laurent Gbagbo, is resisting calls to step down, has provoked fears of renewed civil war, broadly characterised as between northern Muslims and southern Christians. Permanent separation could seem a tempting long-term solution.

But divisions in Ivory Coast are more complex than religion alone. The same is true in Sudan and Nigeria, which has more than 250 ethnic groups.

If, as expected, Southern Sudan votes for independence, there are likely to be at least a few corners of Africa taking heed. Somaliland is seeking international recognition of its breakaway from Somalia, rebels in the Cabinda enclave demand separation from Angola, and Morocco has resisted proposals for a referendum on the independence of Western Sahara.

There's more at the link.

Africa's colonial borders are a patchwork quilt designed in Europe, without even considering on-the-ground realities, and forcibly overlaid (usually at the point of a gun) upon tribal, cultural, linguistic and other boundaries that long predated the colonial era. It's been a constant source of friction. In Namibia, for example (formerly South West Africa), the Ovambo nation was divided by the border drawn between that country and Angola. As a result, the members of the tribe were physically separated, to their utter astonishment. Being tribal kin, they naturally tried to maintain contact across the border, only to run into passport and Customs regulations that were utterly alien to them. Inevitably, this led to rampant defiance of laws intended to enforce such artificial colonial boundaries. The same happened across the continent.

The tragedy of many African wars is directly traceable to this colonial folly. Take the Belgian Congo (later Zaire, and today the Democratic Republic of the Congo) as just one example. No less than six major ethnic groups were shoehorned into a single state as a result of this colonial conquest. The resulting conflicts as each tried to avoid domination by the others (or, if possible, sought to dominate them for its own benefit) have cost literally millions of lives, and continue to do so to this day.

I think one of the main reasons Africa hasn't already fragmented into many smaller states is the dishonesty and greed of post-colonial politicians. Political corruption is endemic in Africa. It stands to reason that politicians want to rule the largest area possible, and the largest number of subjects, so that they have a wider field for their peculations. It's therefore been in the best interests of African politicians to maintain colonial-era boundaries, which almost invariably enclose larger national states than would exist if tribal, ethnic and cultural divisions were followed and the continent were Balkanized.

Nevertheless, it may be the only way Africa can move forward. That would permit the formation of nation-states that are genuinely homogeneous in terms of language and culture. This might offer an opportunity for that particular tribe or people to advance their own interests within their own borders, rather than have to fend off another group trying to dominate them for the latter's benefit, or fight to defend themselves against predation (and there are many predators in Africa, not all of them four-legged).

It'll be interesting to see where this goes.

Peter