What forms Afghanistan's borders?

Answer 1

Africa's Arbitrary Borders

The colonization of Africa by European powers in the 19th century created political units that divided ethnic groups in some cases and combined rival groups in others. As African nations began to gain their independence in the 1950s, these arbitrary borders sometimes became a cause for conflict.

Africa's Arbitrary Borders

By Howard W. French

From the earliest days of African independence, this continent's leaders have repeatedly had to wrestle with the legacy of the arbitrarily drawn borders established and frozen in place by Europe's colonial powers.

The impact of these borders were felt to varying degrees from one country to another throughout Africa. In the case of Ghana, for example, the country's western border with Côte d'Ivoire (Ivory Coast) split the large cultural cluster of Akan-speaking peoples in two. Ghana's eastern border with Togo achieved the same result, by arbitrarily splitting up the large Ewe ethnic group.

Over time, divisions like these have repeatedly fed political tensions between neighboring states. In the case of Ghana, both Akan and Ewe groups have shifted their national allegiances depending on the shifting fortunes of the countries they inhabit.

Even more troublesome are cases like Nigeria, where European boundaries forced starkly different, rival cultures, each with long-standing political traditions of their own, to cohabit within the confines of a single state. When Nigeria won its independence in 1960, these rivalries remained.

Regional antagonisms have bedeviled Nigeria from the earliest days of independence from Britain, and in the late 1960s led to one of the continent's most destructive civil wars.

Initially, many of the founding fathers of Africa's newly independent nations sought to overcome the problems inherent to their marginally viable ministates by creating large federations that would, it was thought, help reduce the ethnic rivalries experienced in their small new nations by joining larger, more cosmopolitan groupings.

Federation also seemed to promise greater economic strength by allowing poor and weak nations to pool their resources, both economic and human. Only in this way, many early African leaders believed, could their countries ever achieve the kind of economies of scale needed to successfully develop themselves through industrialization.

But the idealism embodied in those ambitious experimental schemes of the early 1960s quickly collided with the hard-nosed realities of politics. And in the immediate post-independence era, the greatest force maintaining Africa's colonial divisions quickly proved not to be the actions of outside powers, but rather the political competition among the continent's own leaders.

One of several early examples of Africans working to overcome the legacy of European cartographers was the Mali Federation, in which Senegal and Mali, both former French West African colonies, decided on the eve of independence in 1960 to come together as one.

By August of its first year of existence, the federation came to an abrupt end, however, amid an increasingly open conflict between the Malian president, Modibo Keita, and his Senegalese counterpart, Léopold Sédar Senghor.

Africa's early thrusts toward regional and continental federation received their symbolic death knell with the overthrow in 1966 of the first Ghanaian president, Kwame Nkrumah. Many Africans regarded Nkrumah, whose country became the first sub-Saharan nation to gain independence from a European power, in 1957, as the guiding light of Pan-Africanism (a movement to unite all African peoples), and the most vigorous advocate of drawing African nations together into what he said should become a United States of Africa.

Shortly after Nkrumah's ouster, irrevocable evidence that the tide had turned from a movement toward fusion into larger groupings came from Ghana's giant nearby neighbor, Nigeria, where a devastating civil war broke out in 1967.

With the encouragement of France, many former French colonies, long wary of a large and powerful Nigeria, provided recognition and assistance to the Biafran rebel movement that sought independence for Nigeria's oil-rich southeast.

The Biafran secession collapsed after some of the bloodiest fighting this continent has ever seen, however. More than 1 million people, many of them civilians, died during the conflict, mostly due to starvation from food shortages caused by the war. And as Africa as a whole seemed to recoil from the experience of the Nigerian war, a new consensus seemed to emerge in favor of the principles of noninterference in the internal affairs of neighboring states and inviolability of inherited borders.

Although there were breaches of these rules, such as Zaire's support in the 1980s for the antigovernment UNITA rebel movement in Angola, by and large, noninterference remained the prevailing ethic in African politics from the late 1960s to the early 1990s. Cross-border conflicts on the continent became the exceptions to a pattern of strife marked by unstable, coup-prone governments and civil wars.

The 1990s began, however, with the long civil war in Liberia, which got its start as an invasion of the country by rebels from neighboring Côte d'Ivoire. The governments of Côte d'Ivoire and Burkina Faso backed the rebellion of Charles Taylor, in part, to avenge the killings by Liberia's dictator of the time, Samuel K. Doe, of the president (William Tolbert) and senior government ministers he had overthrown.

Although well documented, the action by Côte d'Ivoire and Burkina Faso in support of Taylor, who was finally elected president of Liberia after seven years of stalemated war, has never been officially acknowledged.

By the late 1990s, however, a dramatic change in feelings toward cross-border interventions in Africa emerged, reflecting both an open ambivalence about the continent's inherited colonial borders, and a growing sense among African governments of the need to take greater collective responsibility for regional security.

With the return of large-scale communal violence to Rwanda in 1994, where the Hutu majority in that country organized the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Tutsi, many in East Africa began to speak openly of the need to reconfigure the nations of that region in ways that would separate historically antagonistic groups, such as the Hutu and Tutsi, or give badly needed breathing room to densely populated and unstable countries such as Rwanda and Burundi.

Talk of creating separate "Hutulands" and "Tutsilands" quickly dissipated after the Rwandan genocide. But two years later, in late 1996, Rwanda and Uganda teamed up to launch an invasion of Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), whose aim was to stop cross-border raids in Rwanda by Hutu refugees settled in eastern Zaire.

Other African countries, which had come to regard the Zaire of the longtime dictator Mobutu Sese Seko as a permanent source of regional instability, quickly began to back the joint Rwandan-Ugandan invasion of Zaire, and in a matter of weeks, the invasion had totally changed in nature to become an outright bid for power by an African-backed Zairian rebel movement.

By May 1997 the rebels, known as the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo, had swept across the breadth of Zaire, capturing the capital, forcing Mobutu into exile, and changing the name of the country to the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

The Congo's new leader, Laurent Kabila, was widely supported by other African leaders, who saw in his rapid conquest of power an example of how African countries can successfully join efforts to resolve festering problems in neighboring states.

About the author: Howard W. French covered West Africa for The New York Times from 1994 to 1998.