What if African borders were redrawn doing Decolonization?
by u/Aofen
It is a popular trope on reddit to blame Africa’s problems on the arbitrariness of its colonial era borders, and how they do not follow ethnolinguistic lines. In our timeline, African nations have almost overwhelmingly agreed to respect their colonial borders out of fear of conflict, and border changes have been remarkably rare since independence. In this timeline, the UN, in collaboration with the main colonial powers, agreed to redraw Africa’s borders on ethnolinguistic lines in preparation for independence.
The borders that the UN committee, which meets for 10 months in 1955 in Grenoble, France, decides are controversial from their inception. Many countries have very large ethnic minorities, while others have large numbers of their ‘titular ethnicity’ outside of their borders – the Fula Republic, in addition to being split in two by Manding, contains less than a quarter of the Fula, while others like Guria or Nilotica are based on large pan-ethnicities with little common identity. In the decades following independence many African countries quickly slide into dictatorship and chronic ethnic conflict, with frequent border disputes and wars between nations.
Independent Africa has several large ethnic conflicts during the 20th and 21st centuries. Ethiopia, unchanged by the Grenoble Conference, breaks apart on ethnic lines during a brutal war in the 1980s following a 1974 socialist coup and invasion by Somalia two years later. Portugal withdraws from their colonies in 1975 following a revolution in Portugal. Mozambique quickly falls apart on ethnic lines. While Angola tries to preserve its borders in the face of an invasion by Kongo and a separatist movement in the interior. Apartheid South Africa breaks off parts of itself as nominally independent black ‘Homelands’, before losing much of the country following the South African Wars of the 1980s and 90s.
