Is Africa stable?

Africa’s Remarkable Stability

A few notable exceptions aside, Africa’s borders have remained remarkably stable. But that doesn’t mean the continent is immune from the types of independence movements that have long been a feature of Europe, writes David Pilling for the Financial Times.

“Unlike Europe, where frontier-altering wars raged for centuries, where Yugoslavia shattered into pieces just a generation ago, and where even today the integrity of countries such as Spain and the UK is hardly settled, Africans have mostly accepted their borders -- for good or ill,” Pilling writes.

“This is despite the fact that the continent’s modern states were carved out at the Berlin Conference of 1884-85 by colonialists with little knowledge of the ethnic, political or geographic realities. Countries were cobbled together from often dozens, even hundreds, of ethnic and linguistic groups, many of which, like the Ashanti, the Yoruba or the Buganda, had been distinct, sophisticated states in their own right before the arrival of Europeans.”

“Yet Africa today is not immune from the secessionist sentiment that has sprung up from Catalonia to Kurdistan and from Scotland to Quebec. In anglophone Cameroon, once again in Biafra and, unusually, even in western Kenya, separatist cries have gone up. Though each situation is different, all stem from a failure of central government to give political, economic and cultural expression to groups that find themselves outside the fulcrum of power.”

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