Africa has seen multiple civil wars and assorted secessionist movements arising from the illogicality of these borders. In the immediate aftermath of independence, both Katanga, the mineral-endowed Congolese province, and Biafra, in south-east Nigeria, sought to break away. When Biafran independence was crushed by the Nigerian military in the war of 1967-70, it sent a message around the continent about the high cost of separatism.
In Cameroon, long-simmering resentments between the English-speaking minority and the French-speaking majority have bubbled over. English speakers, who make up roughly a fifth of the population, have long felt marginalised, a sentiment that has intensified with crude central government attempts to flood the courts and schools with French speakers. As in other regions where one group feels discriminated against, culturally or economically, moderates have pushed for greater federalism while hardliners, unfurling the blue flag of Ambazonia, are urging all-out independence.
Though each situation is different, all stem from a failure of the central government to give political, economic and cultural expression to groups that find themselves outside the fulcrum of power
After their defeat, Biafrans mostly got on with living in a unified Nigeria, a particularly contorted creation of British colonialism. But recently, Biafran secessionism has reawakened and been met with the full, often vicious, force of the state. Wole Soyinka, the Nobel laureate in literature, spent two years in solitary confinement for saying Biafran secessionism could never be defeated. Last week, he told me he stuck by those words. “I wasn’t speaking militarily. I meant the notion had entered the bloodstream and you cannot expunge it.”
Mr Soyinka does not favour Nigeria’s break-up. But he rejects President Muhammadu Buhari’s assertion that the sovereignty of Nigeria is non-negotiable. It is, he argues, being “constantly negotiated”. Under such circumstances, he says, the only way of preserving Nigeria’s integrity is to restore the genuine federalism eviscerated by successive military regimes. Even then, he says, the need for “self-identification” runs deep. “Look around you. It cannot be wished away, this movement to a retreat into micro-nationalities.”
In Kenya, the domination of national politics by Kikuyu and Kalenjin has persuaded minority groups they will never gain representation in a winner-takes-all system. That is what lies behind the current electoral stalemate in which Raila Odinga, who represents the Luo and other smaller groups, refuses to concede defeat. It is also what has stirred unusual calls (admittedly by only a few) for a breakaway western state. “We have a majoritarian system which does not work in heterogeneous African societies,” says John Githongo, a prominent Kenyan rights activist.
Given such realities, it is a minor miracle that African states have held together. Porous borders and a sense of pan-Africanism help. But states cannot take their integrity for granted. All must strive to make minorities feel part of a greater whole. If they do not, the centre will not hold forever.