The Surprising Durability Of Africa’s Colonial Borders

In 1993, the American journalist Robert D. Kaplan penned a famous article, “The Coming Anarchy,” in which he described a visit to West Africa as a glimpse into the future of a world defined by “demographic, environmental, and societal stress, in which criminal anarchy emerges as the real strategic danger.” Considering the political geography of Africa, Kaplan claimed to behold “a premodern formlessness” that evoked Europe before the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. Africa lacked nation-states, he argued, and the political maps of the continent were mere deceptions. 

“The Coming Anarchy” was written only two years after the Soviet Union dissolved into independent republics and violent nationalisms reemerged in the Balkans; at that time, many believed that Africa’s postcolonial borders, hastily drawn without any African involvement at the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885, would similarly disintegrate either in bloody orgies or quiet pacts. That same year, for example, the Kenyan intellectual Ali Mazrui made a similar forecast:

More than 30 years later, what is most striking is that almost nowhere on the African continent did this vision come to pass. African states did not become more ethnically homogenous; regional integration, while frequently discussed, has remained quite limited; and rather than launching colonial missions, African states and the international community are trying to wash their hands of humanitarian interventions.

The great surprise of the first quarter of the 21st century has been the endurance of Africa’s colonial borders. The durability of Africa’s multiethnic states, most of which project power unevenly over vast territories and possess relatively small militaries, has everything to do with their tradition of multilateralism, a tradition born out of the social networks of anticolonial struggle and the Pan-African Congresses of the first half of the 20th century. Rather than a continent where “war made the state and the state made war,” one might say conferences made the state and the state held conferences. 

This is not to say that 20th-century African history was peaceful. Mazrui reminds us that by 1993, nearly 2 million Africans had lost their lives defending the borders inherited from colonial regimes. Since then, millions more have died. Yet the borders have held.

Even when contemporary African borders have been modified, as in the case of Eritrea’s separation from Ethiopia or South Sudan’s independence from Sudan, much of the contestation has revolved around the accurate demarcation of colonial borders rather than primordial claims about ethnic or communal homelands. Interviewed in 2006 about the boundary commission that would demarcate the border between Sudan and South Sudan, the historian Douglas Johnson said:

Even the borders of the newest state in Africa, then, can be determined according to the lines drawn on colonial maps, regardless of where those lines curtail the movement of mobile communities and divide ethnic homelands.

A question that remains largely unanswered is: Why did Africa, which was long imagined as riven by ethnic and tribal conflict, preserve the multinational states it inherited from European colonial powers? Other regions of the world — Eastern Europe, the former Soviet republics — have, over the same time period, seen mutually incompatible nationalisms rip their multiethnic states apart.

Counterintuitively, Africa’s colonial borders have endured because of contemporary African states’ Pan-African origins. Anticolonial nationalists in Africa fought not just for national self-determination defined as sovereignty over an independent state, but rather for a new world order. As Adom Getachew, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, persuasively argues, “the anticolonial account of self-determination … established nondomination as a central ideal of a postimperial world order.” Nondomination as a principle of international relations explicitly rejected “the arbitrary power and exploitation that structured the relationship of the colonizer and colonized” in a violent and rapacious international system of masters and slaves.

The metaphor of masters and slaves became a key framework in which Pan-African leaders made their plea for African sovereignty during the first half of the 20th century. While much of the world celebrated the signing of the United Nations charter in 1945, W.E.B. Du Bois, the African American intellectual and activist, declared solemnly that it left in place a world where “there will be at least 750 million colored and black folk inhabiting colonies owned by white nations, who will have no rights that the white people of the world are bound to respect.” The empires that prevented the Black and brown masses of the world from receiving recognition condemned colonial subjects to a form of slavery in the view of a cohort of Pan-Africanist thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic.

For Du Bois, the essence of Pan-Africanism was “an effort to bring together leaders of the various groups of Negroes in Africa and in America for consolidation and planning for the future.” Joining Du Bois, C.L.R. James and Eric Williams organized the Pan-African congresses that, in the immediate aftermath of World War I, did so much to shape decolonization in Africa. At these conferences, they mentored the generation of African leaders who led the continent to independence — Nnamdi Azikiwe in Nigeria, Jomo Kenyatta in Kenya, Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana, Julius Nyerere of Tanzania and Léopold Senghor in Senegal — with the aims of securing civil and political rights for Africans and their descendants throughout the world, encouraging friendly racial relations, and supporting educational, industrial and commercial enterprises.

But what political shape would Pan-African unity take? In 1919, along the sidelines of the Paris Peace Conference, Du Bois held another Pan-African Congress where he proposed the formation of a Central African super-state. This super-state would be born out of a combination of what used to be Belgian Congo, the occupied territories of German Africa and, perhaps eventually, even the Portuguese colonies like Angola and Mozambique. Ever the liberal humanitarian, Du Bois claimed that such a state would facilitate the modernization of Africa, a modernization to be achieved through schooling. It was, he said, an endeavor that could be “a last great crusade for humanity.”

During the 1940s and 1950s, the idea of regional federations in Africa became popular with the colonizing powers as they puzzled over the dilemma of how to keep restless European settlers happy while containing African majorities’ desire for independence. Colonial elites began to imagine that entities like the proposed Central African Federation, which was to include both Rhodesias (Zimbabwe and Zambia today) and Nyasaland (now Malawi), might foster “racial” partnership and stabilize the economic resources of colonies that Britain imagined to be too small to survive on their own. 

In a period in which the United States and Soviet Union threatened to eclipse Europe’s place in the world, many hoped that European control of Africa could be replaced by internationalization. Yet, colonial officials would soon discover that making an entity bigger did not necessarily resolve intractable questions over who would rule it. In this case, white settlers wanted to constitutionally preserve minority rule, which African majorities absolutely rejected. 

At an even grander scale, politicians like Senghor, Senegal’s first president, proposed a French Community that would replace the empire with bonds of fraternity between Africans and Europeans. “By decolonisation,” Senghor wrote, “I mean the abolition of all prejudice, of any superiority complex in the minds of the coloniser, and also of any inferiority complex in the mind of the colonized.” The French Community idea, officially announced in 1958, built upon interwar notions of “Eurafrica.” But racial prejudice prevented France, for instance, from including more than a small minority of Africans in French politics as equals. Arguments about the meaning of a shared citizenship between Europeans and Africans eventually ended in France and its African colonies, most notably Algeria, going their separate ways as independent states. 

While many of the attempts at federations frayed over the question of how to bridge the divide between settlers and the colonized, one of the most consequential proposals for African unity focused instead on the creation of an Africa for Africans and those of the African diaspora. It was called the United States of Africa and put forth by Nkrumah, Ghana’s first president, and his Trinidadian adviser for African affairs, George Padmore. In 1958, the two men organized the first Pan-African conference held on the African continent (renamed the All-African People’s Conference), which brought together the leaders of Africa’s independent states: Egypt, Ethiopia, Liberia, Libya, Morocco, Sudan and Tunisia. More revolutionary, however, was the inclusion of ordinary people from territories, including those still under colonial rule, like Angola, Benin (then Dahomey), Cameroon, Chad, Congo (then still under colonial rule), Ivory Coast, Kenya, Mozambique, Nigeria, Nyasaland, Rhodesia, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Tanganyika, Togoland, Uganda and Zanzibar. 

One of the aims of the conference was to organize the efforts of the newly independent countries to support the anticolonial and liberation efforts across the continent and in the Caribbean. More than 300 people attended. Figures like Frantz Fanon and Tom Mboya argued for an emphasis on armed struggle, while Nkrumah and Padmore suggested that African liberation should be achieved through nonviolent methods. The slogan of the conference became “independence by any means necessary.”

At that time, the project of African independence from colonial rule was still largely future-oriented. Ghana, formerly the Gold Coast, was the only African nation south of the Sahara that had achieved independence. But just two years later, 1960 was inaugurated as “the year of Africa,” with 17 African states becoming independent; in the ensuing four decades, culminating with the fall of apartheid in South Africa, white minority rule evaporated from the continent. The anticolonial vision of the delegates at the All-African People’s Conference had been wildly successful. 

After the first wave of independence, African states broke into two separate groups: The Casablanca Group was made up of states like Ghana, Egypt, Algeria, Libya, Guinea, Mali and Morocco, while others like Ethiopia, Liberia, Senegal and Cameroon established the Monrovia Group. The two found themselves at loggerheads over the question of how much to prioritize political and economic integration, an African version of the European Union that was often captured in Nkrumah’s slogan “Africa must unite!” The Monrovian group, which sought to emphasize territorial nationalism, won out; as Kal Raustiala argues, “In short, African states accepted peace over peoples. Self-determination, in practice, turned out to be less about self-rule and more about ending European rule.”

In 1963, a compromise was reached between the two groups in order to establish the Organization of African Unity, which enshrined the dual principles of mutual noninterference in each other’s internal affairs and a serious commitment to liberating Africa from European rule. The accord was reached by invoking the principle of gradualism; continental integration would happen slowly, so slowly that it did not challenge the sovereignty of the individual states. In practice, this meant that while African states cooperated to confront challenges like apartheid rule in South Africa, they also collaborated with one another to preserve their own territorial integrity.

While there are various regional economic and political organizations of states scattered across the continent, sovereignty today remains with Africa’s 56 multinational states. By some estimates, there are more than 3,000 African ethnicities and 2,000 languages spoken across the continent. Despite this diversity, “the coming anarchy” did not come. 

Wars and humanitarian disasters have occurred, of course, but the last 30 years have been marked by the relative stability of African international relations. Irridentism (the effort to seize control of another nation’s territory) has been largely absent in a context where nationalism was forced to recognize internal diversity. Supranationalism, meanwhile, is largely confined to reinforcing rather than supplanting national sovereignty. 

Danger, however, lies in the weakening of multilateralism across the continent as stronger outside powers increasingly enlist African allies in a new 21st-century “great power competition.” Great power competition is often thought of in terms of a new cold war between the U.S. and its allies on the one hand, and a resurgent China or a belligerent Russia on the other hand. In East Africa, this framework worked well when trying to explain the first decade of the 21st century. 

Sudan, for example, boomed despite U.S. sanctions as its oil industry prospered with Chinese support. Meanwhile, China became a leading investor next door in Ethiopia’s infrastructural development and manufacturing expansion. Between 2005 and 2013, Chinese investment helped propel Ethiopia to an average economic growth rate of approximately 10.5% per year, making it one of the fastest-growing economies in the world. Ethiopia, Sudan, Angola and Rwanda were hailed as African “lions,” fast-growing economies promising a new model of illiberal development. Watching China become the largest trading partner across the continent, replacing the U.S. and Western European nations, and seeing new patterns of investment, many policymakers in Washington began to fret that the West was losing the continent to China.  

Yet by 2013, there was a noticeable pullback in the ambitions of China’s investments in Africa, particularly in the Horn of Africa. It turned out that China’s risk appetite had limits, and as countries such as Libya fell into civil strife, China hesitated. Similarly, China and the U.S. tried to broker a peace deal between Sudan and South Sudan once conflict broke out in 2012. When this peace proved fragile, China responded by reducing its investments in both countries. Around the same time, following the death of Ethiopia’s long-time leader Meles Zenawi in 2012, who championed his country’s economic development, China began hedging its investments in the country.

In the place of China’s cautious approach to East Africa, more adventurous economic partners have emerged, the most important of which have been the Arab Gulf states, particularly the United Arab Emirates, and Turkey. While countries like the U.A.E., Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait are not typically seen as great powers, their much higher median per capita income, combined with domestic instability in East Africa, means that Gulf investors can have an outsize influence. What makes this influence particularly disruptive for many African states is that Gulf powers, particularly the U.A.E., are often prepared to work with non-state actors in order to fulfill their ambitions. For instance, the U.A.E. has become a huge investor in the autonomous but not internationally recognized territory of Somaliland. Meanwhile, there are credible accounts that the U.A.E. supports paramilitaries in Libya and Sudan. This support helps these forces maintain autonomy from internationally recognized governments, once again reshaping African multilateralism.