Different African colonial borders

JJohnson

Banned
A general question is, did our current African borders mostly arise from the Berlin conference of the 1880s? If that's so, could a different pattern of claims give us a wildly different border situation than OTL?
 
Divide it according to the actual ethnic/cultual/lingual border of Africa, this will save lots of lives.

murdockmapbound.png

murdockmapbound.png
 
The problem is that the ethnic groups of Africa are so many in number, most small in population and largely fluid. Dividing Africa along ethnic lines would not make sense.
 
Some of the borders did, but many borders were created as internal borders, with quite a few following ethnic or tribal regions, geographic features in places that it made the most sense and in others they were artificial either because of the geography (straight lines going through uninhabited desert) or because their were no major geographic features to follow and the ethnic and linguistic demography of the area was to diverse and interlinked to try to create borders based on.


Divide it according to the actual ethnic/cultual/lingual border of Africa, this will save lots of lives.

View attachment 193590

While I'd have to compare the entire thing to toher maps, I can tell you right now in several places that map does not follow ethnic or linguistic patterns.
 
i've been working on alternate borders for Africa as part of my ASB ATL, and partly for Anglo-American Rivalry as well, though its still very much incomplete and is being drawn as it would be in the present-day. im trying to avoid convergent borders with OTL, though some are in there, like Danish Southwest Africa for instance, while some of them (Kinchassa near the center there and Hausaland west of Lake Chad) are me kind of cheating because i'm using OTL borders (present-day ones, no less!) even though they aren't part of their actual countries; all the subdivisions of Hausaland are parts of Niger and Nigeria which my research turned up as being part of the Hausa kingdoms but put together to form a country which has international borders unlike any in OTL

remember, this map here is part of a WIP. also, please ignore the parts in white; those are just non-African states that happen to still be in the cropped part of the larger map

WIP Africa.PNG
 
If the borders are redrawn as per the ethnic map shown here, almost all the present countries will cease to exist and Africa will become a continent of a thousand countries. Will it solve the ethnic problems or create more new problems? Only solution appears to be more unification than divisions and formation of autonomous regions based on ethnic groups.
 
If the borders are redrawn as per the ethnic map shown here, almost all the present countries will cease to exist and Africa will become a continent of a thousand countries. Will it solve the ethnic problems or create more new problems? Only solution appears to be more unification than divisions and formation of autonomous regions based on ethnic groups.

The real issue is that you can't draw border in Africa based on ethnicity since, aside from the fact Ethnic groups as we understand them are a completely Indo-European concept, Africa's Ethnic groups are either really small, numbering a few hundred in a few villages or really large and dispersed in such a way that you'd have to create a dozen enclaves and exclaves, including some the size of small countries themselves, or in alot of cases, you have a situation where they live together in the same area.

And to show what I mean, the below is an ethnolinguistic map of West Africa;

West Africa Language Map 2005.png
 
Anthropologists of the era hadn't even gotten around to categorizing all the ethnic groups, to say nothing of convincing the statesmen in Berlin of organizing such a division.
 
If the borders are redrawn as per the ethnic map shown here, almost all the present countries will cease to exist and Africa will become a continent of a thousand countries. Will it solve the ethnic problems or create more new problems? Only solution appears to be more unification than divisions and formation of autonomous regions based on ethnic groups.
personally, some of what i've been doing is looking at historical borders for a given region; the borders of the country along the west and north shores of *Lake Victoria are based on OTL historical countries in the area, combining their extent into one big country
 
i've been working on alternate borders for Africa as part of my ASB ATL, and partly for Anglo-American Rivalry as well, though its still very much incomplete and is being drawn as it would be in the present-day. im trying to avoid convergent borders with OTL, though some are in there, like Danish Southwest Africa for instance, while some of them (Kinchassa near the center there and Hausaland west of Lake Chad) are me kind of cheating because i'm using OTL borders (present-day ones, no less!) even though they aren't part of their actual countries; all the subdivisions of Hausaland are parts of Niger and Nigeria which my research turned up as being part of the Hausa kingdoms but put together to form a country which has international borders unlike any in OTL

remember, this map here is part of a WIP. also, please ignore the parts in white; those are just non-African states that happen to still be in the cropped part of the larger map
For Nambia just keep South African's most western border going north In a straight line and perhaps do something similar with Angola. Depends if it was part of a trade by the British for their islands and forts in India, the Carribean, and West Africa.
 
For Nambia just keep South African's most western border going north In a straight line and perhaps do something similar with Angola. Depends if it was part of a trade by the British for their islands and forts in India, the Carribean, and West Africa.
well in that particular case, the reasoning is more that the Danes colonize OTL Namibia because the Germans are disunited. i was just posting what i have so far as an example of differences from the OTL colonization ;)

another that i've been working on as a possibility is what i like to call the "African Band", basically the rough area of Angola, Mozambique, and the former Rhodesia as a single colonial entity, going to any particular colonial power. for Anglo-American Rivalry, i was planning to give this area to Portugal due to butterflies, since they had wanted to create such an entity IOTL but then the British established Rhodesia and cut off Angola from Mozambique

another idea is a British transcontinental empire in Africa which goes from South Africa to a different location on the Mediterranean coast, such as Tunisia or Morocco rather than Egypt, while France gets most/all of the rest of North Africa due to previous changes in the TL


as for any particular divergence, when it comes to building up a country from scratch based on ethnic lines, what i like doing in any given TL or scenario is looking up all the peoples in an area (say, the Songhai) and researching not only what defined entities preceded them (in the case of the Songhai, that would be the Mali and Ghana empires) as well as what other peoples they are related to
 
I've wondered about this a few times before. The conclusion I usually come to is that while you will reduce Civil War by about 90% across Africa, you will probably match that by increasing actual national war by about 500%. Sure, there won't be the problems of ethnic genocide and seeking to suppress the rival ethnicities in your own borders (or, as much) but several of the tribes still hate each other, and are going to attack each other just as often - especially if you make Africa a patchwork of that many countries, as the rest of the civilised world will view the combatants as so insignificant that they will largely just ignore them entirely and let them get on with it. The difference is that this time you're giving both sides a national defence budget, rather than one side having the 1960s tanks and the other just having scrounged AKs and machetes.
 
I've wondered about this a few times before. The conclusion I usually come to is that while you will reduce Civil War by about 90% across Africa, you will probably match that by increasing actual national war by about 500%. Sure, there won't be the problems of ethnic genocide and seeking to suppress the rival ethnicities in your own borders (or, as much) but several of the tribes still hate each other, and are going to attack each other just as often - especially if you make Africa a patchwork of that many countries, as the rest of the civilised world will view the combatants as so insignificant that they will largely just ignore them entirely and let them get on with it. The difference is that this time you're giving both sides a national defence budget, rather than one side having the 1960s tanks and the other just having scrounged AKs and machetes.
Oooooooh!Ideas!Ideas!Ideas! This gives me some inspiration for the African Crimson Skies TL I was thinking about doing. Thanks!
 

scholar

Banned
A general question is, did our current African borders mostly arise from the Berlin conference of the 1880s? If that's so, could a different pattern of claims give us a wildly different border situation than OTL?
Any significant change to the economic situation or geopolitical arena inside of Europe will have substantial consequences for the division of Africa on the colonial table. Even a native African state resisting conquest or becoming a protectorate early on to prevent their complete annihilation will provide change.
 
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