Nigeria and Violence
BBC's Map
Five hundred people are believed to have been killed so far in violent clashes in the Nigerian city of Jos. BBC explains the complicated religious and ethnic fault lines here:
Some Christian farmers feel they are under threat, as Hausa-speaking Muslims come down from the north looking for pasture for their animals. But any disputes over access to land or power quickly take on a religious dimension. Jos, the state capital, is now divided into Christian and Muslim areas.
The obvious solution to many Westerners is secession: why don’t the Muslim north and the Christian south simply split? The reason is that African boundaries are not like European boundaries, which mostly make some sense–more so, after the ethnic cleansing at gunpoint we saw in the 1944-47 period. African boundaries are purely arbitrary, so once you open one to redrawing none are safe.
Consider this analysis from Daniel Moran at the Naval Postgraduate School, in his book, Wars of National Liberation:
To this day, most of those borders reflect the results of a conference held at Berlin in 1885, at which no Africans were present. There is an argument to be made that this imperial legacy is a disastrous burden, and more broadly that the idea of the nation state is irrelevant to Africa conditions — but…it is not an argument that has much standing in Africa itself. Few of its social and economic problems would be more easily addressed by governments made smaller and weaker by endlessly recursive subdivision…There is no morally convincing, theoretically grounded reason why Bangladesh should be a nation but not Biafra, Katanga, or even Cabinda. It is just that, in Africa especially, you have to draw the line somewhere. (p. 151, emphasis added)