Read the text on the right and then review the Documents below:

•	European colonizers for the most part created current African political configurations. For the contemporary political make up of Africa see Image 1.
•	Yet, Europeans new little about Africa, especially the interior when the "Scramble for Africa" began in earnest. For European maps of Africa from the nineteenth century see Image 2 (1824) and Image 3 (1867). What mistakes did these cartographers make? With what areas of the continent did they have the least information?
•	When Europeans had finished carving Africa between themselves, they created new boundaries and polities. For maps depicting European imperialism see Image 4.
•	How well thought out and cogent were this new political entities? Did they reflect ethnic and linguistic groupings? Did they mirror previous political regimes? Did they make sense considering historical economic patterns in Africa? To answer these questions, review the following maps at Image 5, Image 6, Image 7, Image 8, Image 9 and Image 10 (Ethnic Groups) Compare and contrast these maps with the new political entities that Europeans created in the late nineteenth century. (See Image 4.)
•	The results of European map making in Africa has proved catastrophic for post colonial Africa. For dates of African colonies' independence, see Image 11. For insight into how colonial boundaries have led to instability in post colonial Africa read the essays in Document 1 and Document 2. How has European divisions of the continents affected current instability and violence in Africa? How should Africans and the world address these problems?

Drawing the Boundaries of Africa

The political boundaries of contemporary Africa are largely those drawn by European colonizers. So far, the new African leaders have elected to change the names of their countries (Ghana for the Gold Coast and Zimbabwe for Southern Rhodesia, for example), but they have altered few of the boundary lines. Boundaries invariably connect and disconnect people. How well, then, did the European cartographers do? The easy, yet correct, answer is poorly. The European colonizers knew little about the geography of the interior of Africa, still characterized by them as "the dark continent," and were utterly lacking in information about Africa’s ethnic groups, its long-distance trading networks, and its history. Lord Salisbury, who was British prime minister while the partition was underway, aptly summed up the problem: "We have been engaged in drawing lines upon maps where no white man’s feet have ever trod; we have been giving away mountains and rivers and lakes to each other, only hindered by the small impediment that we never knew exactly where the mountains and rivers and lakes were."

Salisbury’s statement reveals the European boundary making dilemma. The colonizing powers had to lay down the basic lines of the partition-those that would separate British colonies from French and German colonies-even before their armies and colonial officials, let alone their mapmakers, had arrived on the scene. European knowledge of the interior of the continent did not extend much beyond the rivers and their basins, which had attracted much attention from earlier European travelers. European mapmakers accordingly drew the new boundaries to take account of river basins. Thus, for example, the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan and the Belgian Congo followed the river basins of the Nile and Congo Rivers. The results of such mapmaking were often catastrophic for later-day independent African states, as is clear in West Africa, where the French colony of Senegal completely surrounded the tiny British colony of Gambia (see Map A below). This geographical anomaly merely reflected pre-partition conditions, since the British had been preeminent on the Gambia River, and the French everywhere else. But what a dilemma it has made for the modern leaders of Senegal and Gambia!

Nigeria is Africa’s most populous state today, with a population of over 100 million. Its tangled postcolonial history of civil war, civil violence, and frequent military coups d’état is a direct result of the boundary-making decisions made by the British, French, and Germans as they divided up the Niger River basin area before World War I. The final arrangements turned large and powerful ethnic groups like the Ibo, Yoruba, and Hausa-Fulani peoples into bitter competitors for power in a single state. They also sliced apart large communities and even small villages that had long histories of dwelling together.

Contemporary Nigeria is surrounded by four states- Benin in the west, Niger and Chad in the north, and Cameroon in the east. The primary decisions about these borders were made between 1880 and 1900 at a time when the British, French, and Germans were only just pushing into the West African interior. These original boundaries were entirely geometrical, consisting of a series of straight lines and arcs, ignoring conditions on the ground. But they did have the advantage to the European powers of resolving the question of how far the individual European power’s authority would extend. Only after the colonizers had drawn these lines did they set about the task of demarcating them on the ground and in detail. This entailed what the colonizers liked to refer to as boundary rectifications. But these could only be small adjustments; they could not overcome major problems that might have occurred as a result of the original boundary determinations. The results were altogether dismaying to many groups, such as the Mandara peoples of northeastern Nigeria and Cameroon (see Map B below). These peoples had formed a unified Islamic kingdom before the arrival of the European colonial powers; now they were split between Nigeria and Cameroon. This was not an unusual occurrence, and the number of African states that found themselves under two, or even in a few cases, three colonial administrations was quite substantial.

Map A	Map B