Different colonial frontiers

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I take in as given that one of the problems with C21 Africa is that the states that exist are often arbitrary collections of peoples within lines drawn on maps by officials thousands of miles away......

How might Africa have looked if boarders had been drawn such that ethnic groups were not split up. Colonies might still have two or more ethnic groups within them but resulting in a more 'European' style national identity?

Obviously this limits the divide and rule option of colonial 'management' - unless they federated colonies and moved military units around a bit like the Romans but that ios a whole different ant hill
 
There's a rather famous map done some years ago, you might want to check it out. Its names are upside down because the map was actually drawn with the south oriented to the top, and there is clearly a heavy Islamic influence (so it might not be exactly what you are looking for). It is, nevertheless, an interesting assessment to the question of Africa without European colonization.

Africa_North_Up.jpeg


I would like to point out that, depending on the PoD, some measure of European colonization is inevitable: since the 17th Century, at least, it increases the likelyhood of having an European power in the Cape of Good Hope (the Dutch or the British), as well as Portugal in Angola and Moçambique (necessary due to their interest in India), and the Ottomans in northeastern Africa.
 
I take in as given that one of the problems with C21 Africa is that the states that exist are often arbitrary collections of peoples within lines drawn on maps by officials thousands of miles away......

How might Africa have looked if boarders had been drawn such that ethnic groups were not split up. Colonies might still have two or more ethnic groups within them but resulting in a more 'European' style national identity?

Of course, this is also quite true of Europe, historically speaking, as well. Many ethnic groups were split up: consider the Basques (Spain and France), the Catalans (Spain and France), the Frisians (Netherlands/Germany), the Galicians/Portuguese, and so forth. And countries often had heterogenous populations where many languages were spoken. Two centuries ago in France and Italy most people did not speak the standard forms of French and Italian, the Austrian Empire was a diverse mishmash, etc. The development of national identities was a slow process. Back when these countries were 50-60 years old (about as old as the average African country today) they were hardly monocultural.
 
Are some places better than others? The French owned a big, contiguous chunk of western Africa, how did that play out on post colonial borders? Would a German MittelAfrika creating a contiguous chunk of territory lead to somewhat better post colonial borders?
 
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You can see why carving off a new country for every single ethnic group might not be the best solution. Humanity started in Africa, so it makes sense that it's in Africa where the most genetic and cultural diversity exists. I don't think there's any real easy way to divide it up.

Someone made a map based on the first image:
0re4blE.png
 
The maps takes complexity and giving each remotly local group its own "totally distinct and legit ethnolinguistic border", tough.

Not that post-colonial borders couldn't have been vastly different with the right PoD, but not only these weren't that arbitrarily drawn (straight lines in a desert aren't that of an unconcivable way to delimit borders, especially when they generally join distinct geographical points) but African states rarily followed ethno-linguistic lines : they more generally followed historical, economical and political reasoning.

In fact, the argument can be easily done that most of African states created or allowed the creation of distinct ethnic groups out of a collection of entiere or parts of cultural groups that preceded or were conquered by said states (for instance the Bambara ethny is mostly a legacy of Malinke Empire) : exactly like it happened in Europe and Asia. Pretend that African states should have followed quasi-tribal groups and technical border is nothing but perpetuating of the eurocentric take on African history as made of tribal history.

Nations do not exist eternally, incarnating themselves into states. It's rather a dialectic relation between social and cultural feature from one hand, and institutional happenance from the other. To think that African states couldn't have reached which was a basic degree of cultural-political sophistication, and were stuck with an extremely pontillous definition to ethno-linguistic groups (which, applied to, say Britain, would probably cut it out in a dozen of groups) as political horizon seems really preposterous to me.

And I won't even go into the role of religion for what matter Sahelian/Sudanese African states appearance and cultural self-definition, rather than ethnicity.
 
I didn't mean to imply that Africa would, should, or even could develop entirely along tribal groups and tiny, divided ethno-states. I just wanted to show how difficult it would be to make colonial borders that would "better reflect ethnic lines", because where those lines are is incredibly blurry and highly divided. The borders could have definitely been drawn better, but I'm not sure how much better.

Another thing to consider is that it is the Europeans drawing the borders (as per OP), and we already know they couldn't have cared less about reflecting ethnic or religious realities on the ground. So on top of it being a difficult problem to solve, there probably wouldn't even be any will to try and solve it, or even any agreement that there's a problem in the first place among the ones deciding on the borders.
 
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