The Line We Did Not Draw

Borders are meant to be for administration, not objects of love and loyalty.

Men who had never seen Africa, gathered in Berlin, in 1884, to draw lines through a map that would settle the disputes they had with each other. There was no African at the table, no kingdom was represented, no caliphate, no city-state that had governed itself for for centuries before Europeans ever knew that Africa existed. These men simply wanted to organise taxation, , to establish jurisdiction enforceable through their own courts and to mark for their own posterity, where one European nation could plunder and another could not and where their armies could be stationed to protect the arrangement of their spoil of conquest.

That is the easy part. It is the story that gets told the most to Africans. The other story came much later, in 1963. This was when the Organisation for African Unity decided to keep the lines. They could have could have redrawn the lines to align better with history, but the men who inherited the colonial states chose to freeze colonial borders in place. Perhaps out of greed, but definitely out of fear, they chose the doctrine of uti possidetis — as you possess so shall you continue to possess. They feared that opening up negotiations about historical borders would plunge the continent into unending violent conflict. Perhaps they were right, but it was a lazy option and so we have what we have — an administrative fiction.

That is the second inheritance that we rarely talk about. Our borders were not just a colonial choice, they were also a post-colonial choice. They were arbitrary but African leaders thought they bought us sovereignty and two generations later, we believe it implicitly and kill each other for these borders.

We kill each other for boundaries drawn to collect taxes and to station troops. We build our primary identity around them, discard our languages and ancestral heritage and let them dictate who we are. Citizenship, rights and opportunities come from within these borders who original purpose had nothing to do with ensuring our dignity and everything to do with what could be extracted from the territory they enclose, including our labour.

But there is more. The borders demand our loyalty. The deliver no covenant make no promise of reciprocity but we must defend them, sometimes even kill for them. As Benedict Anderson said, nations are an imagined community. Yet these imagined communities command our reality. If perchance its institutions serve us, we consider anyone seeking to leave its borders, to seek domicile in other nations, traitorous. When these imagined borders govern us badly, we forgive more easily than we would a citizen who refused to stay to build with us. Afterall, loyalty follows identity.

And that is really the tragedy. The border excludes the outsider, but it also disciplines the insider who tries to move. Once a person leaves, they become the reference point for everything that was ever wrong with the nation, all the structural failures of the state. Then there is all the risk attached to leaving when you become desperate enough. For some that means throwing yourself at the mercy of traffickers that imperil your life through deserts, over seas and more ungodly terrain than can be imagined. Other surrender dignity at check points and risk incarceration, all for exercising a fundamental human right of free movement. Still the nation to which the accident of birth delivered and to which you owe all loyalty provide no floor beneath you.

My confusion rises from knowing that everyone can pay tax wherever they are. Of course they will also use publicly provided services like roads, clinics, schools, etc. Crime will happen everywhere, and we expect that it would be treated as such for everyone however they came to arrive within the territory. There is really no need to amplify panic by pinning the blame on foreignness or laundering seriousness of the crime through the lens of citizenship or indigeneity. Every human life must be mourned as a human life even if it is filed as a statistic.

Still not to sound facetious. The issue of representation is real. It must be possible to find any government and its institutions, to name them and hold them to account. This requires a territory with borders. Also, public service requires a budget and so taxes must be collected and revenue earned, also within set borders. But this is about jurisdiction, not the Human Being. There truly is no need to make an administrative convenience determine identity, belonging and the value of life. Borders should not decide what level of dignity is accorded to individuals, why one death is worth mourning and another is not.

This is probably what ECOWAS was trying to achieve through its Protocol on Free Movement. Never mind that Ghana, and earlier Nigeria, signatories to the same Protocol conveniently set it aside when it served their purpose to do so. The Protocol stresses that the border shall organise administration, but it shall not, within the ECOWAS community, determine who may live, work, and belong.

The Protocol may not provide an answer to the dilemma created by borders, because it does not address the errors of 1884 and 1963. But it does name the correct target of borders and their administration. How do you separate humanity with imaginary lines and allow the reallocation of blame for poor public stewardship to individuals perceived as foreign?

Borders should never become an altar of belonging. They should remain an instrument of administration.

For us, we inherited these borders from men who drew it without involving us. We inherited loyalty to it from men who chose to keep it, knowing better, but fearing what its absence might unleash. But we can still build. It will however take the courage to name structural failings for what they are, not just blame people who are simply looking to build a life and a future.