What even is a border? A line on a map. A checkpoint with armed guards and passport checks. Maybe a river or the crest of a mountain chain. Or just a stretch of scrublands or desert. Maybe even a village that’s been there since before someone decided that the barbershop is part of country A, and the market is part of country B.
Nigeria gone did an interesting thing this autumn. They closed their land borders. Completely. Not like what western countries sometime espouse doing. No, Nigeria went all in. A land border of some 3700 kilometres (or 2300 miles for the imperials out there) at that! Just close that shit right down, with no uncontrolled passage or trade permitted.
Why? Well, it’s a bid from Nigerian president Buhari in a bid to stem the “illegal” trade and barter that, according to him, had been draining Nigerias resources for decades. Any country aiming to become great, according to Buhari, needs to be able to see to its own needs first. China closed its borders for a decade or so back in the mid 19-hundreds. It worked out great for them. Why wouldn’t it work out great for Nigeria?
African borders are a mess. Most of them look all neat and straight when you see them on a map, so it’s easy to assume that they have their shit covered border-ways. But they don’t. You see, life isn’t a straight line. Nor is geography. Ethnic groups usually form around valleys, rivers, hinterlands, fertile flood plains, nothing of which forms along straight symmetrical lines. Thus, borders that have developed organically, along with the people living in the area, are very rarely straight and neat. No, Africa’s borders where carved up, not by the indigenous peoples, but by rich aristocrats and businessmen of 1880’s Europe. And if you don’t care about the people living there, or by lay of the land, if you care only about imperialistic pursuits and gains, then straight lines seem ever so easy.
It’s just a shame that societies don’t form along straight lines.
The idea to retain the old imperialistic demarcations of Africa back in the 60’s, when the continent slowly started to become “independent”, was to avoid all the bloodshed and conflict that had sculpted the European nations before them. It worked… unwell. And a large part of the work of the African Union, a joint congregation not dissimilar to the European Union, was to validate and naturalize the very unnatural borders that their predecessors had left them with.
Which is why I said that Buhari’s effort to close the borders is interesting. Not just stupid, reckless, crazy, or genius. But interesting. It seems impossible at first. 370 metric miles of scrublands, forests, deserts, fields, and sometimes villages, closed to any and all traffic. The prospect of allotting resources to such a momentous task appears plain stupid. But the Nigerian border patrol seems to have done it. Reports are coming in of economic tragedies along the Nigerian border, in neighbouring Benin and Niger. So clearly the shut-down has an effect.
Which brings us to why this decision is not just callous and reckless, but, as previously noted, interesting too. A large part behind the continuous failure of African nations to become self sufficient has been a linger colonialist agenda embedded in the international effort of leading the new nations into the modern future. With ever shifting development goals, with resource-extraction clauses hidden away within foreign aid agreements, with unwritten ultimatums with regards to foreign investment, and with western sponsored corruption on the highest state levels. Even though African nations are (with one weird exception) independent nations, they never quite got out from under the colonial yoke.
Because nearly all sub-Saharan countries are rich in resources. In one way or another. Perhaps richer than European, American, or Asian counterparts by ways of magnitude.
So why can’t they just shrug off western and eastern dependencies, if they’re so rich? Because much like a veteran vampire victim, they’re drained. Drained, but angry. Distrustful. And African isolationists have long pondered the idea of collectively shutting themselves off from the rest of the world. To build themselves up, without foreign intervention. Without colonialist interests guiding their evolution.
Which is why Buhari’s decision to close the borders are interesting. Even though, according to reports, he’s missing the point by not closing himself off to global business interests, but just to neighbouring countries. To cut down on the informal (untaxed) trade conducted daily in most sub-Saharan countries. There has been no talk of shutting down Biafran oil fields or foreign development projects. His aim is instead to shut down trade with his neighbouring compatriots. To enforce the rule of some 130 years-since-dead gents in a Berlin conference hall, and to punish people that just want to live their lives according to cultural and ethnic association rather than nationalistic ones.
Buhari’s move to centralize trade through Nigeria’s ports may seem like a mad move that you might expect from the likes of the Orange Hydra. Surely the policy will be devastating, maybe even murderously so, to thousands, if not millions of people, both within Nigeria and without. But there is a kernel of an interesting prospect somewhere inside. Like a little nugget of something shiny baked into a turd of ill-advised nationalism.
Because what do you think would happen if all sub-Saharan countries, young nations and post-colonial territories all, would come together and close off their resources from the economic vampires surrounding them? What would happen if they decided to stop exporting most of the world’s rare earth minerals, most of the world’s oil reserves, and most of the world’s precious metals?
It’d probably make for a rough few years for the world’s largest continent. But it would probably hammer out a new, constructive status quo within itself. It has the resources, and now also the knowledge, to make the best of it.
Can the rest of the world really say the same?
/Sebastian Lindberg 18/11-2019
WastedWords 