As an aspect of the wider spatial turn in African studies, the revitalization of African borderland studies as a subfield has in recent years become manifest in the remarkable growth of the African Borderlands Research Network (ABORNE) and numerous scientific meetings and thematic publications resulting from the network's activities. This special issue, which is comprised of four individual articles, seeks to make a further contribution to several debates in this dynamically evolving field.
Highly simplistic ideas of all-powerful Europeans drawing the boundaries of Africa on a blank slate, without pre-existing concepts and practices of territorial imagination, control and demarcation, have been dispelled for some time (and this work continues, as the article by Gerald Chikozho Mazarire in this issue shows). But another highly simplified and static reading of boundary-making in Africa has only been challenged more recently: the idea that the famous Organization of African Unity (OAU) decision of 1963–1964, which resulted in the principle of acceptance of Africa's colonial boundaries at independence, somehow represented the end of history regarding this matter. From the collective work of scholars investigating the broad spectrum of social phenomena in the areas where these boundaries are an aspect of everyday life, an interdisciplinary consensus is emerging that the poorly tailored suit, which Europe's colonial partitioning of Africa created, has been worn in by Africans during the decades since independence. The seams may in many cases not be well made, or sit in uncomfortable places, but they have become part of everyday life and its constraints as well as its opportunities. To study these borderlands is to discover highly diverse aspects of social, political, and entrepreneurial creativity and negotiation between citizens and states, and is therefore not just an empirically but also theoretically and methodologically rich ground for scholarly activity and exchange. The four articles in this issue represent different areas of this evolving field and thus serve to illustrate its great conceptual and empirical diversity.
Mazarire's contribution to the study of pre-colonial African ideas and practices of territoriality shows that discrete political entities amongst the Karanga of southern Zimbabwe can be identified in the written historical and archaeological record. He demonstrates that the Karanga notion of gadzingo (political centres) combined the significance of the material qualities of the granite landscape they inhabited with politico-religious practices in which the spheres of influence of neighbouring polities were fluid and overlapping, despite the existence of stationary administrative centres. Mazarire thus shows that Karanga boundaries clearly did exist, illustrating the larger, implicit point that pre-colonial African politics did incorporate a complex politics of land and territoriality, as well as of people and populations, even if this later remained elusive to colonial efforts from the 1890s onwards, to map and concretize a European kind of cadastral politics for its own administrative purposes. Importantly, and pointing to longer continuities across the ruptures of colonialism and independence, the notion of gadzingo continues to inform ideas and practices of territoriality in this part of Zimbabwe in the present day, as land ownership and control are again at the centre of intense ongoing political negotiations.
In his article, Lee J.M. Seymour returns to the question of why, despite the evident frailty of so many African post-colonial states and the external imposition of their borders, there was no widespread process of territorial renegotiation after independence, and especially following the end of the Cold War period. While he focuses largely on the secessionist deficit thesis by Pierre Englebert, and the view that Eritrea and South Sudan still represent the only exceptions that confirm the rule, Seymour presents a more nuanced argument in which the internal redistribution of power in African post-Cold War states is taken into account. Inside the largely static lines of the continent's political map, he argues that there have indeed been significant changes. The boundaries of existing African states have more often been redefined rather than redrawn, along with – in some cases significant – redistributions of authority within states. Meanwhile, Seymour observes, polities like Somaliland which lack juridical sovereignty have been endowed with degrees of informally legitimated authority by an international society accepting, for whatever reasons, to allow pragmatic solutions to what are seen as pressing problems of ungoverned territories turning into ungovernable spaces.
Lindsay Scorgie turns to the case of the Great Lakes region to argue that the currently dominant analytical model of regional conflict is inadequate for explaining the spread and cross-border nature of conflict in Africa. Due to its overwhelmingly state-centric orientation, she argues, the Regional Conflict Framework that has been developed by the International Relations literature, and widely employed by policy-makers, clings to outdated notions of internal civil wars, with questionable distinctions as to who and what qualifies as ‘state/non-state’, ‘domestic/international’, ‘informal/formal’ and ‘illicit/licit’. She suggests that the concept of borderlands can help analysts to move beyond tired, established views of border areas as passive, or at best reactive, peripheries, or even mere geographic locations where states come into contact with each other. Instead, Scorgie stresses the need to recognize the potential of borderlands as political units in their own right, which can be central to destabilizing socio-political and military–economic networks and therefore deserve a prominent place in regional conflict analysis. The extreme regionalization of conflict in areas such as the Great Lakes of central Africa, Scorgie argues, cannot be adequately understood without consideration of the role played by borderland dynamics.
In the last article in this special issue, Morris Adam Nsamba examines the importance of internal administrative boundaries and the politics of their establishment in Uganda. Rather than unmaking of colonial boundaries, he shows that the considerable number of new administrative subdivisions created by previous and current post-colonial governments have taken place entirely within the administrative boundaries that existed at independence. Although the current government has justified creating new voting districts as vehicles for social service provision and participatory democracy, Nsamba argues there is little empirical evidence to suggest that the results have done more than merely increase the number of local elite able to cash in on their status as representatives of new voting districts. In some cases, however, the creation of new districts has also established public spaces for citizens to voice their frustrations with poor government services, and boundary-making has therefore not always played into the hands of Uganda's ruling elite.
The politics of territoriality were not exclusively colonial introductions in Africa, even though the Europeans' transfer of their own cadastral politics to the continent dominates the conventional map of independent African states to this day. Yet both the results of pre-colonial and colonial territorial politics have been further transformed in the post-colonial era at regional, national and local levels. To refer to African boundaries as ‘arbitrary’ and ‘artificial’ is not entirely incorrect, but rather stuck in a time which, for much of the continent, was roughly five decades ago, without acknowledging what came before and after. When scholars such as the contributors to this special issue look closer, they find that the boundaries from the time of independence have engendered and animated a great diversity of social phenomena on multiple scales. These sometimes challenge, sometimes reinforce, and often transcend the official expressions of territorial politics, thus making sure that boundaries in Africa and their borderlands will remain an exciting field of scholarly scrutiny for the foreseeable future.