Redraw The Post Indep Map Of Africa On Tribal Lines

I think the speed we got Portugal to give up their colonies speaks for itself on out hideous efficiency. HIDEOUS! *Throws holy water around*

Yes.

The French and British would otherwise have stayed in Africa long past the 1960's.

We forced the French out of Algeria because they hadn't finished infrastructure build-up.

Portugal and Spain spent a lot of money on their colonies before we forced them to abandon the uneducated dark-skinned people.
 
As has been said, using tribal lines is one of the stupidest ideas their is.

Africa's problems are'nt its borders (apart from one or two specific cases), it's problems are that America's idological idiocy lead to decolonization happening before the European powers (who by that point already knew they'd have to be given independence eventually) could actually build up infrastructure and create a functioning civil society.

That is utter pish-posh. Are you actually saying that Africans were better off remaining under imperial rule longer, and we were wrong to apply pressure for decolonization? The European powers made virtually no effort to create a civil society - in fact they had spent the entire colonial period systematically destroying the underpinnings of such. The deliberately disassembled educational infrastructure and bureaucracies in favor of tribalism, in many cases reviving tribal entities that had either disappeared or declined into irrelevance.

They also imposed on their colonies autocratic legal systems to facilitate their rule. It's only a pity that imperial rule didn't end earlier, before the Cold War was in full swing.

Dividing along tribal lines is of course a bad idea, but there is no good solution because all the native polities had already been torn asunder.

There are regions that have strong and ancient political, economic, and social links that could have worked as states: Bornu, which has been split between Nigeria, Cameroon, Niger, and Chad; The Swahili/Zanzibar zone, Kenya, Tanzania, some surrounding areas and part of Somalia, etc.

The problem is the arbitrary lines drawn have in most cases little geographic, cultural, historical, or economic significance, leaving strange states like Niger, which is two totally different countries stapled together.

Sudan could have worked, had the British not totally isolated the South from the North and kept it entirely undeveloped in every way. It was more important to stunt the region than risk Islam spreading there.
 
Well, yes and no.

Part of what is now South Sudan was administered as part of Uganda, but overall Sudan, since it became a colony had been administered more or less as a single unit.

Their were some attempts to split the South off to form a seperate colony, the Equatoria idea being the most famous and lasting.

Absolutely untrue. South Sudan was kept entirely separate from North Sudan, even economically.

Uganda was a total disaster. The British used Buganda as its proxy, obliterated the other kingdoms, and installed Bugandans as overlords of everyone else, with genocidal results.
 
Anyway, I don't think splitting Africa further is a solution. For example, if the French had left West Africa as a single nation rather than splitting it up into all those arbitrary countries, you would have had a much stronger and successful whole. When you have tons of little countries, too much wealth is wasted on military spending and tariffs.
 
@#$%.!!! Four Paragraphs and then this erases it all. Anyways, it has some chances if the factions of the Soviets/Cubans, the French, the Commonwealth, and the United States play more off the border issues between Sudan and Egyp, Sudan and Ethiopia, Ethiopia and Somalia, Chad and Libya, and allow Angola to utterly split up. I personally would prefer to simply have had Bechuanaland and Angola to have straightened their borders with Nambia after WWI but that seems unrelated. Oh, and having the Soviets keep supporting the Somali instead of the Ethiopians and for the U.S. to support quasi-Christian and ancient Christian groups in the area to create a bulkwark against leftist Arabs and Somali.

It may be possible to alter the borders to reflect ehnic realities in a few instances, but not systematically without an earlier POD.
 
Anyway, I don't think splitting Africa further is a solution. For example, if the French had left West Africa as a single nation rather than splitting it up into all those arbitrary countries, you would have had a much stronger and successful whole. When you have tons of little countries, too much wealth is wasted on military spending and tariffs.

I'd like to agree, but a single state in French West Africa would also be burdened with the problems of the whole, undermining the advantages of its parts.
 
I actually used historical maps for the borders. South Sudan's borders have always been like that and they do actually conform pretty well to the general ethno-religious divide in the Sudan.

Darfur's borders are the ones I took from the 1916 map, hence no Greater Darfur.
South Sudan had its northen extension in 1916?

As for Ghana - well, I guess The Genocide is ridiculous, but I can only give names off what I can find and for Ghana, the northern Ashante provinces, were called Asanteman until they lost their independence in 1896. Given that the Asante and Fante languages are related Akan languages it wasn't unreasonable to assume that "Fante Union" would take on the same form as "Asante Union" ("Asanteman"). Again I used historical maps which showed the northern protectorate portion of the Gold Coast colony as being somewhat separate from the southern full colonial portion.

If it is incorrect though and the Asante do not live in the north and Fante (among other Akan groups) do not live in the south and the historical Asante state was not called Asanteman, then I would welcome your concrete suggestions as to who actually lived where and what the historical state was called and how one would call an independent Fante (or more generally Akan) state in the Fante dialect.......

The Asante and the Fante are both Akan peoples, but even the map at the start of this very thread shows that your division is wrong. The Dagomba are the dominant group in Northern Ghana, and IIRC, they are a Gur people like the Mossi of Burkina.
 
I'd like to agree, but a single state in French West Africa would also be burdened with the problems of the whole, undermining the advantages of its parts.

Like what? Part of the problem with today's African states is that there are tribal or ethnic groups battling for dominance. In states with too many such groups for any to gain predominance, balances occur and people have to work within a state framework.

A single state would be a larger economic block, the poorer areas could be supported by the smaller, and the aggregate would have more revenue for development projects (and much less spent on militaries).

The transportation infrastructure is decent and requires only a few inexpensive and easy-to-build connecting lines (they are all of the same gauge), and there's even some important river transport. What civil class there is can intercommunicate with French, and a problem all the northern countries have - the Tuareg and other nomads, can be addressed by the whole, whereas today they are used as pawns in national rivalry and can escape state action by moving into adjacent states.

Further, even having been constituted independent states, they are moving together towards a union today.

I don't see any downside.

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South Sudan had its northen extension in 1916?

Not sure how you misread that, but what I said was the Darfur borders were taken from a 1916 map. As far as I've been able to determine, the non-Muslim provinces of southern Sudan have had the same basic borders since the British took over. The number of provinces changed (at one time I think there were as few as 3) but the borders haven't changed as far as I know. If you have information pertaining to these borders why don't you share instead of asking questions about specific portions of the map? In any case I'm fairly sure that before Sudan became independent there were 3 southern provinces whose combined border with the north matched the current South Sudan border (since in 1940s there was an abortive British attempt to separate the 3 southern provinces from the northern provinces). The previous incarnation of the Southern Sudan autonomous entity (the Southern Sudan Autonomous Region) was formed in 1972 from the provinces as they existed in 1970. Whether they were even the same in 1916 isn't relevant if the British had succeeded in partitioning off the southern 3 provinces from the 1940s, just as long as it was before Sudan became independent in 1956 (and prior to independence there was the possibility of a union with Egypt).

The Asante and the Fante are both Akan peoples, but even the map at the start of this very thread shows that your division is wrong.

So why don't you make a map?

As I've previously stated I've based it off historical borders. Didn't say I drew it off exact tribal borders. Not sure if you've been following the "Base Maps from 550 BC to Modern Day, all in UCS!" thread, but if you go from page 70 until the most recent page you can see the historical borders I'm talking about.
 
Like what? Part of the problem with today's African states is that there are tribal or ethnic groups battling for dominance. In states with too many such groups for any to gain predominance, balances occur and people have to work within a state framework.

A single state would be a larger economic block, the poorer areas could be supported by the smaller, and the aggregate would have more revenue for development projects (and much less spent on militaries).

The transportation infrastructure is decent and requires only a few inexpensive and easy-to-build connecting lines (they are all of the same gauge), and there's even some important river transport. What civil class there is can intercommunicate with French, and a problem all the northern countries have - the Tuareg and other nomads, can be addressed by the whole, whereas today they are used as pawns in national rivalry and can escape state action by moving into adjacent states.

Further, even having been constituted independent states, they are moving together towards a union today.

I don't see any downside.

I think this topic came up a few weeks ago. Like you, I thought that there was something to this idea, but after that, I'm not so sure. Incidentally, a unified French West Africa would have one language that would be spoken by significant populations in every state: Fula.
 
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So why don't you make a map?

As I've previously stated I've based it off historical borders. Didn't say I drew it off exact tribal borders. Not sure if you've been following the "Base Maps from 550 BC to Modern Day, all in UCS!" thread, but if you go from page 70 until the most recent page you can see the historical borders I'm talking about.

I have seen the borders they use for Darfur and on the quality maps there, the only ones with that South Sudanese border depict the area from after World War II to the present day.
 
I think this topic came up a few weeks ago. Like you, I thought that there was something to this idea, but after that, I'm not so sure. Incidentally, a unified French West Africa would have one language that would be spoken by significant populations in every state: Fula.

Fula would almost certainly be one of the official languages, and would be spoken by a large number of people spread throughout the area, at least as a second language.
 
Southern Sudan has had that thing jutting up the Nile since the Egyptian period. It wasn't ever so squared-off and irritatingly-shaped, but it's been there.

The shape of Darfur is largely irrelevant. The "Mega-Darfur" of today is just Darfur with some uninhabited desert attached to it for administrative reasons.
 
I have seen the borders they use for Darfur and on the quality maps there, the only ones with that South Sudanese border depict the area from after World War II to the present day.

Nice enough map. Differs from what Gold Coast looked like by 1900 though. Not sure why anyone would a map like the one I drew for fun is based on a pre-1945 POD though.


Again though if you have any evidence of the borders of the provinces of southern Sudan being different why don't you post it? You keep questioning it but have yet to present an iota of evidence that the borders were in fact different. Incidentally you talk about the Southern Sudan having that border from World War II, but didn't I already point out that the southern provinces of the Sudan were likely to have had the same borders before Sudanese independence in 1956? If so, what's the problem? Are you assuming some kind of pre-1900 POD for such a map? If not, then again why question Southern Sudan's northern projection if you know that it was likely to be like that before the date of Sudan's independence and in the time when Britain had made the most recent attempt at splitting the South from North?

Once again, you are quite welcome to draw your own map if you are so inclined.
 
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Fula would almost certainly be one of the official languages, and would be spoken by a large number of people spread throughout the area, at least as a second language.

Even if a united independent FWA is possible, I suspect that the POD for such will have to be before 1950.
 
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