David Pilling writes:
It is a minor miracle that countries have kept to their borders as resentments simmer
A remarkable thing about Africa is just how stable its borders have been. Unlike Europe, where frontier-altering wars raged for centuries, where Yugoslavia shattered into pieces just a generation ago, and where even today the integrity of countries such as Spain and the UK is hardly settled, Africans have mostly accepted their borders — for good or ill. This is despite the fact that the continent’s modern states were carved out at the Berlin Conference of 1884-85 by colonialists with little knowledge of the ethnic, political or geographic realities...[more]