Introduction
Events of the last few weeks has
galvanised opinion in Europe and amongst Westophiles around the world. These
views are not necessarily in regard to the status or legitimacy of government in a
country rather on the apparent sanctity of boundaries albeit in Europe. While the last few decades have presented
Europe as a space with frozen boundaries until 1991 dismemberment of USSR and
later demise of Yugoslavia, the subject remains unchallenged. Now Crimea has
seceded from Ukraine and joined Russia and we are now concerned with potential
lesson for imposed boundaries of African countries.
Brainwashing Incorporated
Relationship between Europe and
Africa in the last century and continuing is that of master-servant or master-client.
The dominant forces (masters) whose unreconstructed appeal continues to
resonate are the French and the British. The Portuguese and Spanish were already
on death throes before the Scramble though left they their ugly marks. Part of this relationship architecture is sustained by an imposed education culture that diminishes or
eliminates the essence of the ‘servant’ or ‘client’. The French had a
sophisticated method for it called assimilation which absorbs and eliminates
prior existence of the African, allowing the emergence of New Man & New
Woman as French Man/French Woman with total ignorance or disdain for
himself/herself only looking forward to metropolitan validation.
Part of fertile ground for
sustaining infamous imposition includes but not limited to unquestioned reception and consumption
of boundaries set by Berlin Conference 1884 against peoples oblivious to it.
For as much as many Africans boisterously declaim their Pan-Africanism, the
Berlin Conference boundaries remain sacrosanct, immutable and indissoluble
except on the pain of death. If you closely review northern African countries
and notice the straight lines of Egypt, Algeria, Libya, Mali, Chad, Mauritania
and Western Sahara; a few things start making sense.
These are arbitrary lines drawn
by European ignorami at the time and now are held in the highest esteem by most
knowledgeable Africans. With justification to boot as dividers of nations,
communities and peoples without their consent! Organisation of African Union
(OAU) and its successor in African Union (AU) have the single objective of
maintaining the fixity of these boundaries. They cannot be enlarged or diminished even
legally in new artificial construction called states. Now US AFRICOM is the
caretaker of tokens of nation-state boundaries as structure for recolonisation of
Africa.
Pre-Berlin Conference
When a person is dumped down so
badly, such individual sees nothing positive about his/her existence, history,
essence and ontology. Only the external, imposed value and potential for
full agency of cultural imperialism along the lines beautifully analysed by
Edward W Said’s Culture and Imperialism
suffices. So it is that empirical evidence of empires of large and small
territories including but not limited to Oyo, Kamen-Bornu, Ghana, Mali,
Songhai, Great Zimbabwe empires failed to flag up the dumped down African
mind. You can identify other empires
across Africa and review their territorial and geopolitical achievements in Destruction of Black Civilisation by Chancellor Williams. Most
of these empires grew organically through conquest and or colonisation. The
fixity of boundary is not part of human territorial aspiration &
implementation and Africa is no different.
Conditions, situations and change warrant or necessitates emergence of
territorial equilibrium which ultimately changes the balance of power.
One of the greatest difficulties
for many Africans in appreciating the pre-colonial achievement borders on
imposed education based on eviscerated history curricula and temporal
dislocation between colonial generation and their past. The carelessness with which heritages are
abandoned in the name of modernity and new religion based on foreign
history/genealogies sealed many fates. This is beautifully captured in R S Sugirtharajah’s
Bible and the Third World. Such lunatic attitudes to history have seen
many project their origin to be away from their immediate neighbours rather to strikingly questionable affinity with peoples in far distance lands. This
is while everyone in the world emerged from lower East Africa!
Arise O Compatriots
With all the noise about African 'independence' propounded by those with little or clue to its implications;
boundary and geopolitics escaped their horizons. While many of them erroneously
ended up realising that some of their ‘compatriots’ are hardly their ‘neighbours’
or that their brothers/sisters lived across the border. The continuum of
political ignorance was sustained in denying self-determination in the name of ‘Africa
doesn't need further balkanisation’ without considering the rights of the same
Africans to determine their territorial futures. Except in few countries and instances where
population transfers were legally mapped such as exchanges between Nigeria and
Cameroon, other attempts were forestalled with industrial-scale violence and
genocides. Eritrea, South Sudan,
Namibia, Western Sahara are few successful outcomes.
Unsurprisingly the same power
elites who gladly denied their peoples self-determination appreciated their
client role to London and Paris later Washington DC before executing any
policy. The question one should rightly ask is, what is the essence of
‘independence’ if policy must be approved by London/Paris? Of course there will
be contrary argument supporting anti-balkanisation but the issues remain that
the opposite case can be pursued if peoples are allowed to discuss, agree or
disagree. Self-determination doesn't always suggest independence. Bloating Interior Ministries
and military budgets are deployed to forcibly eliminate any idea of
self-determination in order to maintain imposed territorial integrity and
continental shelves.
Beyond Washington DC, London
& Paris
One side effect of one-sided
knowledge is determinism; attributing events/effect to single variable.
Dominance of global affairs by those capitals for many centuries didn't create
any homogeneity rather generated differentiated responses at various levels.
When first signs of US hegemony emerged at the end of WW1, it was expressed
with re-drawing of European boundaries on the altar of Woodrow Wilson 14 Points.
Russia lost territories, Poland emerged and other areas remained in wait for
later Bolshevik explosion. Moscow never went aground but her story was and is still light-weighted.
When Lenin painfully accepted
1918 Brest-Litovsk Treaty, his eyes focused on the future in regaining lost
territories of Russian Empire which he and Bolsheviks forcefully took over in
1917. The ‘breathing space’ of the bad treaty allowed his party to consolidate
power to re-project it later through ‘world revolution’. Read Wheeler-Bennett’s
Brest-Litovsk The Forgotten Peace.
Despite 1939 Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact between Germany and USSR which effectively dissolved Poland, Hitler’s
Operation Barbarossa which invaded USSR via Ukraine in 1941 confirmed the spirit of
Brest-Litovsk in Kremlin hence full mobilisation of Soviet forces to recover and
extend their territories in Europe. This was summarised in 1945 Potsdam
Conference Stalin’s famous phrase on Germany, “Germany is, as we say, a geographical concept...Let us define the
western borders of Poland, and we shall be clearer on Germany”.
Truth is that contrary to the
nonsense dumped by western intellectual elite, at this time Kremlin was doubly
betrayed and already surrounded by an iron curtain despite her huge WW2 sacrifices. No country suffered less in
lives and assets. When one is eating with the devil, long spoon becomes the best
kit, hence the size of USSR including buffer zones (East Germany & Baltic
States), fresh water ports (Odessa, Crimea, Murmansk& Vladivostok) and unpredictable
underbelly (Caucasus). Subsequent Soviet
leaders continued this hegemony with rather ossified & unreformable governance
already in decline before Mr Gorbachev arrived.
Inheritors of post-USSR
leadership may have previously advocated her demise in a similar way as Lenin but lacked his intellectual and geopolitical astuteness. So ‘breathing space’
and geopolitics was absent for Boris Yeltsin and his lot in the ‘near abroad’ countries
that had no clear, defined and delineated boundaries. Remember that USSR had only an (Moscow) international
airport in her lifetime. A hungry man is
an angry mind so most of the post-USSR leaders mortgaged their strategic assets
to the West and created a new powerful elite sell-out class called oligarchs.
It was expected that geostrategically Moscow will be weak for a long time in fulfilment
of Brzezinski’s prediction laid out in Grand
Chessboard – American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives.
This conclusion meant that Europe
as a space of US hegemony now extends to Russia from Moscow to Vladivostok. Putin thought otherwise. What it is even
baffling is how current European leaders seem to absolve the opportunity of
marginalising US by forging closer and balanced emergence of Euro power with Moscow.
Crucially it is no more relevant
that Texas was annexed from Mexico by United States in 1845. It is no longer of
importance that UK went half way around the world in 1982 to secure Malvinas
(Falkland) islands. Owners of Diego
Garcia Island have been uprooted from their homeland for nearly 2 generations by
London with no prospect of return in sight.
Conclusion
Africa has rich history of
politics and geopolitics. Boundaries are not constant and territorial integrity
is subject to agreement and disagreement. Recent Crimea integration to Russia carries
huge message more as a symbolic sign of US weakness with attendant hegemonic
implications & consequences. African peoples have opportunities to
reactivate intellectual & cultural activities on the flexibility of
boundaries for reduction or expansion, with or without consultation. Self-determination is sacred but can only be
instrumented in praxis depending on prevalent geopolitical winds. Moscow has confirmed that way of course on
the heels of Kosovo. With the foregoing it is obvious that Berlin Conference
boundaries never had life. Finally, states are artificial constructions to be
sacrificed positively by its true owners/peoples or negatively by impostor-pretenders
in time. On this last point, Africa not only has something to say, but equally something
to do by choice.
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