New World Disorder? : More Chaos, Violence Looms in Further Fragmentation of States

By JOY ASCHENBACH

Jan. 31, 1993 12 AM PT

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC

Africa, which already has more independent countries than any other continent, is in danger of splitting again, with potential untold violence on the chaotic horizon.

Will Eritrea be its 53rd nation-state, or western Sahara, southern Sudan or northern Somaliland?

Africa’s 52 countries--most attained sovereignty from European control in the 1960s--make up about 30% of the world total. Six African countries are perennially among the 10 poorest on Earth, according to the World Bank. United Nations peacekeepers and observers are now stationed in more African countries than ever before.

“The legacy of colonial rule helped create the present instability, but who knows what it would have been otherwise?” said Richard Roberts, director of the Center for African Studies at Stanford University. “If every ethnic group were a nation-state, there would be 850 to 1,000.”

The Organization of African Unity, established at a conference in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa 30 years ago, agreed not to interfere with the colonial political demarcations. “If it hadn’t honored them,” said an American geographer, “Africa would blow up.”

“But we are now reaching a point in which a new generation of African leaders recognizes that irrational borders--if they can change in Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union--can change in countries like Sudan,” said geographer H. J. de Blij of the University of Miami. “The pressure on African boundaries will increase as time goes on.

“Most in danger,” he said, “are Ethiopia, Somalia, Sudan. The whole Horn of Africa is so rife with unreasonable borders that it is incomprehensible that in the next 10 years they will still be there.”

Also threatened with fragmentation are equatorial Africa if Zaire collapses, De Blij said, and southern Africa. “I’m not sure South Africa will survive its transition in one piece,” he said. “In Natal (a province), the Zulus might opt for secession.”

“Africa is going to have more problems than the Middle East. Africa has more potential boundary conflicts than any other part of the world,” said geographer George J. Demko, director of the Rockefeller Center at Dartmouth College.

Seven European powers--France, Britain, Germany, Portugal, Spain, Italy and Belgium--partitioned Africa, the world’s second-largest continent, at the Berlin Conference in 1884-85, launching its colonial era. Otto von Bismarck, the “Iron Chancellor” of the German Empire, who convened the conference, declared: “My map of Africa lies in Europe.”

The competing powers gerrymandered the landmass with their own political boundaries, which often divided language and cultural groups. The resulting ethnic fragmentation helped touch off some 50 successful coups during the post-independence period. Today, in the post-Cold War era, loss of superpower support has helped fuel the strife.

Among the many colonial legacies is language. French is the official language in 18 countries. In 15 others, it’s English. In Cameroon and Seychelles, it’s both.

In Africa, whose population today is more than 650 million, people shift like the sands. “It’s impossible to map,” said William Zartman, director of African studies at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies. “All maps we ever have of ethnic locations are wrong. There are no clear, defined boundaries. Where do you stop the clock?”

Starving Somalia was a homogeneous (common language and Muslim religion) nation-state, but the active basis of its politics is clan families. The former British north, now dominated by the Issak clan, declared itself the independent Somaliland Republic in 1991. Its breakaway status has not yet been recognized.

Ethiopia endured Africa’s longest-running civil war, 30 years. In May, 1991, this resulted in future independence for the Red Sea province of Eritrea. The provisional government’s mission in Washington already is requiring and issuing visas for entry into Eritrean territory.

A referendum scheduled for April will determine whether Muslim Eritrea becomes Africa’s 53rd country or remains part of Christian-dominated Ethiopia.

The Tigreans and the Oromos, who make up 40% of Ethiopia’s population, are also seeking sovereignty. “There’s no way to draw a line and contain the Oromos in the south,” Zartman explained. “There’s no boundary to the Oromo land; other ethnic groups are in there.”

Sudan, geographically the largest African country, has lived in a violent state of civil war for most of its 37 years of independence. A north-south split is likely. The black Christian and animist south feels rejected by the Arab Muslim north.

Fighting is expected if embattled, longtime President Mobutu Sese Seko is toppled in Zaire. The former Belgian Congo, whose official language is French, has 250 ethnic groups.

“If ethnically homogeneous states were created, you’d have a lot more landlocked African countries, which are traditionally poor and have no access to the sea without the goodwill of neighbors,” Zartman said. “One positive side effect of colonialism was the reach from the coast to the interior.”

“All across the Sahara, there are boundary disputes. Boundaries were not drawn on pre-colonial logic,” said Richard Roberts of Stanford. “The Senegal River was used as the border between Mauritania and Senegal, but there was a constant flow of people back and forth across the river. All of a sudden, they belonged to different countries.

“There’s the fascinating case of the border between Nigeria and Benin. The line was drawn in the middle of the Yoruba state, in the middle of a coherent pre-colonial state,” Roberts said. “Now you have two national Yorubas. In Nigeria, where English is the official language and in Benin, where French is.”

“The only way to have Nigeria governable,” Zartman said, “is to have three or four Nigerias.”

Libya and Chad are competing over the mineral-rich Aozou region on their border. The United Nations is expected to try again this year to hold a referendum in western Sahara (former Spanish Sahara) on its status with Morocco, which annexed the territory in 1976.

In Mali last summer, Roberts said, the nomadic Tuareg demanded a state of their own, which reaches into parts of Mauritania and Niger. “Originally,” he said, “the nomads in search of grass moved their herds back and forth across borders that had no bearing to them.”

Africa: A Continent in Turmoil

The political face of Africa might have looked like this if boundaries had been based on historical allegiances of major ethnic and tribal groups. The arbitrary divisions of the colonial era, which often split ethnic lands, have helped touch off the strife that continues today.

Seven European colonial powers--France, Britain, Germany, Portugal, Spain, Italy and Belgium--controlled most of the world’s second-largest continent.

Legacy of colonialism, 46 independent countries share the tense African mainland.

Source for Tribal Africa: JRO Kartografische Verlagsgesellschaft mbH