4 - Borders as Bridges, not Barriers

Abstract

In the year 1960 alone, a total of 17 African countries gained flag independence, followed in quick succession by many others in the following years, invariably validating the euphoria that the 1960s was the decade of independence for Africa.With a plethora of former colonial possessions of European countries gaining independence, there was palpable anxiety,if not outright expectation, that the new African nation-states would explode, combust and convulse violently in an orgyof inter-state bloodbath on a continental scale. It was apparent that the territorial states that colonial adventure had created and bequeathed to Africans were anything but durable,1 and the boundaries that separated or ‘sliced’ (apologies to Nobel Laureate, Professor Wole Soyinka) them into new nation-states were not only artificial and arbitrary but had scant regard for ethnographic realities on the ground, often splitting or sundering the same peoples between several territorial states and corralling diverse and hitherto un-integrated ethnic nations into the same compact. Hence what Professor Anthony Asiwaju has famously referred to as ‘partitioned Africans.’