Challenge- MUCH more organized Africa

As you know, most of Third World countries were actually regions in Europe's empires. Look at all the "clean" borders at Afrika to see what I mean. This creates a very bad situation, where diffrent Ethnical groups and religions are stuck in a single country while others are splitted.
Now, imagaine to yourself that during the De-Colonization there was an expedition, painting a map of new African states that their neighbors are the most close together by Culture, Ethnical origins, Religion, etc. Minor Transfers to let the states have sea access and territorial sequence are allowed. If they would give the map they drew to the UN, how would it look like?

Good luck!
 

abc123

Banned
As you know, most of Third World countries were actually regions in Europe's empires. Look at all the "clean" borders at Afrika to see what I mean. This creates a very bad situation, where diffrent Ethnical groups and religions are stuck in a single country while others are splitted.
Now, imagaine to yourself that during the De-Colonization there was an expedition, painting a map of new African states that their neighbors are the most close together by Culture, Ethnical origins, Religion, etc. Minor Transfers to let the states have sea access and territorial sequence are allowed. If they would give the map they drew to the UN, how would it look like?

Good luck!


Africa with 500- 800 countries???:eek:
Hardly a improvement.
 
Even though the Europeans made some bad choices, many African kingdoms were already multi ethnic.

Of course, but as there are today no kingdoms that can force such a thing, more orderly african states is a requirement for a stable Africa. I mean, look at Africa today! It's a one big civil war! Well, Let's begin with OTL countries that can stay. All OTL Northen-African states has a history of its people stick in the OTL states, so they can stay. Also ancient empires like Ethiopia and rich colonies like South Afrika. Ghana is surprisingly very stable... Why?
 

yourworstnightmare

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Donor
Of course, but as there are today no kingdoms that can force such a thing, more orderly african states is a requirement for a stable Africa. I mean, look at Africa today! It's a one big civil war! Well, Let's begin with OTL countries that can stay. All OTL Northen-African states has a history of its people stick in the OTL states, so they can stay. Also ancient empires like Ethiopia and rich colonies like South Afrika. Ghana is surprisingly very stable... Why?
Ghana is stable now, but has had it's share of instability and dictators.
 
Of course, but as there are today no kingdoms that can force such a thing, more orderly african states is a requirement for a stable Africa. I mean, look at Africa today! It's a one big civil war! Well, Let's begin with OTL countries that can stay. All OTL Northen-African states has a history of its people stick in the OTL states, so they can stay. Also ancient empires like Ethiopia and rich colonies like South Afrika. Ghana is surprisingly very stable... Why?

to be fair, while Africa is the most poverty-stricken and conflict-ravaged region of the world, things there are a lot better than they were 15 years ago. In addition to South Africa, other Southern African countries, Namibia and Botswana, are doing very well, while neighboring Zimbabwe is in shambles. It has more to do with leadership and institutions than ethnic makeup IMO.
 
And still- things would go much much better if the contries weren't made of Empire's regions and more related to the cultural diversity of Africa. What are the major ones, and where is their concentrations?
 

yourworstnightmare

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To be honest, many colonies were based on old African kingdoms, while other were just based on geographical areas. Both those colonies based on former kingdoms, as well as those based on geographical areas failed equally after independence.

I wonder if Nigeria would be a tad more stable if Britain hadn't unified their South Nigerian Protectorate with their North Nigerian Protectorate. If South- and North Nigeria had been separated, the Biafra conflict in South would probably still have happened, but the Muslim North would be it's own nation, and wouldn't cause problems for the Yorubas in the South.
 
And still- things would go much much better if the contries weren't made of Empire's regions and more related to the cultural diversity of Africa. What are the major ones, and where is their concentrations?
I fail to see how having hundreds of totally unsustainable probably warring near-micro nations astride the continent is an improvement. To have mono-dominant cultural nations in this situation, would require mass movement of people and changing of territory. And any minorities left in these new territories would be rife for outright persecution and genocide.

In other words a thousand mini partition of India/Cyprus/Palestine/Ireland with the same sort of results.

The independence of Africa was far from perfect, but the notion that creating micro culturally-mono-dominant states is failed thinking at the utmost, usually resulting from a 'blame the Europeans for all of Africa's modern problems' mindset and thinking pattern.
 
I mean, look at Africa today! It's a one big civil war!

I'm sorry, but are we looking at the same continent? Because in my timeline, the great majority of African countries are currently at peace.

There are 47 countries in Africa. Depending on how you define "civil war", there's between two and eight civil wars going on right now. Which means that between 82% and 95% of African countries are not having a civil war.

Incidentally, the majority of these conflicts are not ethnic.


Well, Let's begin with OTL countries that can stay. All OTL Northen-African states has a history of its people stick in the OTL states, so they can stay. Also ancient empires like Ethiopia

Umm. Ethiopia has some fairly sharp internal ethnic divisions.


Doug M.
 

yourworstnightmare

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Donor
And Ethiopia wasn't really a beacon of stability during the 20th Century, heck they became somewhat stable in the mid 90s, before that they were fighting civil wars, or were very close to do it.
 
Gambia serves no useful purpose and could be merged with Senegal without serious loss.

Congo's Katanga province probably should have been part of Zambia; it would have been better for all concerned. (Note that OTL Katanga tried to secede and was de facto independent for several years in the 1960s.)


Doug M.
 
I'm not talking about Sudan alone. I speak about Africa as a whole.

There's not really an obvious "good" way to do it.

Dividing along ethnic lines not only gives you several hundred tiny little countries, it gives you /more/ conflicts and wars. The ethnic groups aren't distributed neatly across the territory in discrete lumps. They intermingle -- you have places where two or three or four groups live on the same land -- and there are all sorts of enclaves and exclaves, with isolated groups inside a bigger group's territory, or territories that are split in two or three.

Also, "ethnicity" is a slippery damn concept; ethnogenesis has been happening in Africa in real time. There are ethnic groups today that only came into existence in the last century.

Then there's religion. The Baganda are the biggest group in Uganda, but they've been divided since the late 19th century between a Protestant majority and a Catholic minority. Over in Senegal, the Wolof are the biggest group; most Wolof are Muslim, but about 10% -- mostly urban, living in Dakar -- are Catholic.

So while the OTL system was pretty bad, it's hard to imagine a plausible one that would be /much/ better.


Doug M.
 

yourworstnightmare

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There's no good way. The African states got the borders of the Colonies, and there was no alternative. The way the Colonial borders were arrenged differed, sometimes they corresponded with an old kingdom, and sometimes they were drawn according to the geography. I think the British should never have unified the Nigerias. Sudan is trickier, since it was conquered by the Egyptians, and administered jointly by Britain and Egypt.
 
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