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1 Borders, identities, the‘northern problem’and ethno-futures in postcolonial Africa Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni and Brilliant Mhlanga African leaders must now organise a new Berlin conference on their own continent . While the decision to freeze the map of Africa in the 1960s was wise in a sovereignty-obsessed era, Africans must now muster the ingenuity to negotiate new arrangements that reflect their own current realities better. Federations and regional trade blocs must be negotiated and territorial concessions made which reflect better the political, socio-economic, and cultural realities of a vast continent and help avoid future conflicts. After detailed planning, African leaders must proceed to the ancient empire of Ethiopia – the seat of African diplomacy – and reverse the scandalous act of cartographic mischief inflicted on the continent by European statesmen in Berlin over a century ago. African leaders should invite the ancestors to this continental diplomatic feast, so that Nkrumah can hand over the torch of Pan-Africanism to Mbeki, and the curse of Berlin on Africa can be finally lifted (Adebajo 2005: 98). This book is written at a crucial time in African history. Across the continent there are visible initiatives towards regional integration and ultimately towards the pan-African continental unity that Kwame Nkrumah fought for in the 1960s. But according to Geshiere (2009) this pan-African spirit is gaining new momentum at a time where there is increasing ‘return of the local’ and ‘the perils of belonging’ engulfing both Africa and Europe. There is indeed an increasing rise of manufacturing of ‘strangers’ as causalities of citizenship and autochthonous struggles in Africa. John Comaroff and Jean Comaroff (2009: 1) have also noted that there is ‘a lot of ethnic awareness, ethnic assertion, ethnic sentiment, ethno-talk; this despite the fact that it was supposed to wither away with the rise of modernity, with disenchantment, and with the incursion of the market.’ This introductory chapter carries out three tasks. The first task is that of providing a framework on the debates on borders and identities that far transcended the curse of Berlin. The second task is to map out the key contours of African contemporary political situations with a specific focus on what is termed ‘the northern problem’ and the concomitant issue of ‘ethno-futures,’ INTRODUCTION 2 INTRODUCTION as themes that have been hostage to the Organisation of African Unity (OAU)’s traditional view of linking self-determination to decolonisation and rejection of other internal manifestations and embers of self-determination of dominated and abused minority African peoples. The right to self-determination needs to be reviewed by the African Union (AU) with the goal of liberating it from the old view of linking it only to juridical political independence. The final task is to briefly introduce the subject of each chapter constituting this book. The AU approach to the question of self-determination must reflect current African realities of a people that have experienced exclusion, marginalisation , and abuses within imposed colonial borders that were used by dictators to peddle ideas of sovereignty while committing a myriad forms of violence, massacres and genocides on those people who can be categorised as ‘the toxic Other’ of Africa, a word that is borrowed from the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek. The AU cannot afford to perpetuate the blunders of the OAU of failing to decolonise the borders and bow to the Berlin consensus as though it was a commandment from the Almighty who dwells in Europe and America, nor can it afford to bow down to the whims and interests of African dictators as though their views came from the nemesis of the Almighty who dwells in Africa. The popular argument on the subject of African borders is that they are artificial and arbitrary. This is said to be so because the borders were drawn by European men sitting at the Berlin Conference of 1884 to1885 in Germany who did not take into account the ethnographic, demographic, and other local African realities. This popular argument is very useful in so far as it helps us understand that borders were and are by their nature creations and constructions rather than natural order of things. To Herbst (1989: 674–692) borders were always drawn on the basis of their usefulness to those who created them and are the creation of powerful and dominant human elements meant to serve their particular interests. But subaltern groups also create borders informed by language, gender, religion, culture and other differentiating social vectors, while at the same...

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