How Colonial Borders Drawn During the Scramble for Africa Continue to Shape Modern Africa.

Introduction

Although formal colonial rule gradually came to an end across Africa during the middle decades of the twentieth century, the structures created during the Scramble for Africa did not disappear with the lowering of European flags or the declaration of independence. The colonial partition of the continent had already reshaped political systems, economies, borders, identities, and patterns of governance so profoundly that many of its consequences would continue extending far beyond the colonial era itself. Independence therefore arrived not upon a blank historical canvas, but upon a continent already deeply transformed by decades of conquest, extraction, administrative restructuring, and imposed territorial division.

The legacy of the Scramble for Africa consequently remained deeply embedded within the political and social realities of modern Africa. The borders drawn by European powers during the late nineteenth century continued to define the territorial boundaries of most African states, while many of the administrative systems, economic structures, ethnic tensions, governance crises, and regional conflicts that emerged under colonial rule continued influencing the continent well into the twenty-first century.

However, the enduring consequences of the Scramble cannot be understood only through conflict and instability alone. Colonial conquest also unintentionally helped generate some of the political and intellectual forces that would later challenge imperial domination and inspire broader visions of African unity, sovereignty, and self-determination. The modern history of Africa therefore continues to unfold within the long shadow of the Scramble, where the boundaries, institutions, and systems imposed during the colonial era remain intertwined with the continent’s continuing struggles, transformations, and aspirations for renewal.

1.   The Colonial Border Legacy in Modern Africa

The most enduring legacy of the Scramble for Africa was not simply conquest, but territorial permanence. The borders drawn by European powers in the late nineteenth century outlived empire itself, surviving the collapse of colonial rule and passing almost intact into the hands of newly independent African states.[1] Independence therefore did not dissolve the territorial order created at Berlin; it transferred that order to African governments which now had to rule populations, economies, and political communities compressed within boundaries they had neither negotiated nor designed.[2]

That continuity became official in the early years of independence. Faced with the danger that reopening boundary questions might trigger cascading territorial wars, African leaders chose preservation over revision. The Organization of African Unity accordingly endorsed the inherited colonial map, not because it reflected historical legitimacy, but because dismantling it threatened even greater disorder.[3] The decision was pragmatic, yet its consequences were profound. It froze into permanence boundaries that had divided preexisting societies across multiple states while forcing others with distinct political histories into single postcolonial polities.

Politically, this inheritance placed enormous pressure on the new African states. In many territories, governments were expected to manufacture national cohesion inside borders that contained competing regional interests, uneven colonial investments, and communities whose prior loyalties had not been organized around the state that now claimed them.[4] The problem was not simply ethnic diversity, as diversity itself was not new to Africa, but the fact that colonial partition had converted administrative convenience into sovereign territorial fact. Postcolonial rulers were therefore compelled to defend fragile state units before they had fully consolidated national legitimacy within them.

Economically, the same borders preserved colonial patterns of dependency. Many had been drawn to secure spheres of imperial control rather than to sustain balanced internal development, linking mines, plantations, and export corridors to ports while neglecting wider regional integration.[5] At independence, African states inherited these externally oriented economies together with customs frontiers that often disrupted older circuits of exchange and separated complementary regions from one another. In that sense, colonial borders did not merely divide territory; they helped reproduce economic fragmentation by locking postcolonial development inside units originally designed for extraction rather than inter-African coherence.[6]

Socially, the consequences were equally enduring. Colonial lines cut through linguistic communities, pastoral zones, kinship networks, and trading systems that had long operated across fluid frontiers.[7] In some regions, families, ethnic communities, and commercial societies found themselves distributed across several states, each imposing its own legal order, administrative language, and political priorities. In others, communities with different histories were compelled into a single national framework and drawn into new struggles over representation, land, citizenship, and access to state power. The result was not that colonial borders mechanically caused every later conflict, but that they created the structural setting within which many later tensions became more combustible.[8]

For that reason, the significance of these borders lies not only in their survival, but in the way they continue to shape Africa’s future. They remain the territorial skeleton of the modern African state, framing debates over sovereignty, secession, regional integration, citizenship, and security across the continent. The great irony is that borders once imposed to serve empire became the indispensable framework through which postcolonial Africa pursued order, defended independence, and imagined unity. Yet the same inherited lines still carry the unresolved burdens of their origin, ensuring that the map drawn during the Scramble remains one of the most powerful forces structuring African political and economic life in the present.

2.   How Colonial Borders Reproduced Conflict in Modern Africa

As those inherited borders continued to shape the political, economic, and social life of postcolonial Africa, they also continued to shape the forms of conflict that unfolded after independence. Because most African states had entered independence within boundaries fashioned for imperial convenience rather than social coherence, many postcolonial conflicts unfolded not as accidental breakdowns but as struggles over how power, citizenship, territory, and resources would be negotiated inside states whose foundations had been historically distorted.[9] The issue, therefore, was not that colonial borders alone caused conflict, but that they created political containers in which older differences were recast, sharpened, and often militarized under modern state conditions.[10]

A recurring pattern across postcolonial Africa was the collision between territorial inheritance and the search for national legitimacy. In states such as Nigeria, Sudan, and the Congo, colonial rule had brought together regions with distinct political histories, uneven access to education and administrative office, and sharply unequal incorporation into the colonial economy.[11] At independence, control of the central state became exceptionally high stakes because the state now commanded access to revenue, patronage, coercive force, and international recognition. Where national integration remained weak, competition for state power could therefore assume regional, ethnic, or sectarian forms, not because such identities were newly invented, but because colonial territorial consolidation had made them contend within a single sovereign framework.[12]

The Nigerian Civil War offers one of the clearest examples of this pattern. The British amalgamation of diverse regions into one colony did not in itself make conflict inevitable, yet it produced a deeply uneven federation in which regional rivalry, ethnicized political competition, and mistrust of central power intensified after independence.[13] The attempted secession of Biafra in 1967 thus revealed more than a constitutional dispute; it exposed the fragility of a state whose territorial unity had preceded the building of an accepted national compact.[14] The consequences of the war were equally far-reaching. Politically, Biafra’s defeat strengthened the central Nigerian state and reinforced the tendency toward military domination in the years that followed. Socially, the war deepened intercommunal suspicion and left behind enduring memories of exclusion, starvation, and mass suffering. Economically, it devastated the eastern region while redirecting national reconstruction through an increasingly centralized, oil-driven state.[15]

A similar colonial pattern operated in Rwanda, though in a different form. There, the central issue was less the joining of distant regions than the colonial hardening of social categories within an already existing polity. Belgian rule racialized and bureaucratized distinctions between Hutu and Tutsi, transforming fluid social identities into rigid political classifications tied to privilege, exclusion, and administrative access.[16] By the time Rwanda moved into the postcolonial era, political competition had become inseparable from this colonial restructuring of identity. The genocide of 1994 cannot be reduced to colonialism alone, but the colonial state had decisively shaped the vocabulary through which power, belonging, and fear were later organized.[17] Its consequences were catastrophic: the destruction of social trust, the mass displacement of populations, the regional destabilization of the Great Lakes, and a long afterlife of trauma that extended far beyond Rwanda’s borders.[18]

The Democratic Republic of Congo illustrates another enduring pattern: the persistence of a territorial unit whose economic logic had been organized around extraction rather than internal cohesion. From the Congo Free State through Belgian colonial rule, the territory was governed less as a balanced political community than as a vast reservoir of labour and resources connected outward to global markets.[19] Independence transferred that same enormous and weakly integrated space to a postcolonial state with limited infrastructural reach and a political center vulnerable to both internal fragmentation and external intervention. Subsequent Congolese conflicts, especially from the 1990s onward, have therefore reflected the continued interaction of fragile sovereignty, regionalized armed power, and predatory competition over mineral wealth.[20] The impact has been profound: repeated state crisis, immense civilian suffering, displacement on a massive scale, and the normalization of war economies that erode both governance and social stability.

The Horn of Africa reveals the same larger truth from yet another angle. Here colonial boundaries, partitioned territories, and contradictory imperial legacies produced overlapping claims to sovereignty and belonging that outlived colonial withdrawal.[21] Somalia’s fragmentation, the Ethiopia-Eritrea dispute, and recurrent cross-border instability were shaped by the fact that colonial cartography had divided related populations while binding other territories to political projects they would later contest.[22] These conflicts carried effects that reached far beyond the battlefield. They militarized politics, diverted scarce resources toward security rather than development, fractured pastoral and trading systems, and generated protracted displacement that reshaped social life across the region.[23]

Taken together, these examples reveal a broader continental pattern. Modern African conflicts rooted in colonial borders were rarely just border disputes in the narrow territorial sense. More often, they were conflicts over authority inside inherited states: over who belonged, who ruled, who controlled resources, and whether the state itself commanded sufficient legitimacy to contain competition peacefully.[24] Colonial borders mattered because they fixed the territorial stage on which such struggles would unfold, while colonial administrative practice often determined the unequal distribution of power carried into independence. Their impact on modern Africa has therefore been simultaneously political, social, and economic. Politically, they have contributed to recurrent crises of legitimacy, secessionist pressures, and coercive state-building. Socially, they have sharpened contests over identity, citizenship, and historical belonging. Economically, they have preserved uneven development, disrupted older circuits of exchange, and concentrated wealth and violence around control of the state and its resources.[25]

For that reason, the history of these conflicts must be read not as a catalogue of isolated tragedies, but as evidence of the deeper afterlife of partition. The borders drawn during the Scramble did not simply survive into modern Africa; they continued to structure the pressures under which postcolonial states were forced to govern. The conflict they helped generate was therefore not incidental to the colonial map. It was one of the clearest signs that the territorial order imposed in the late nineteenth century remained alive long after empire itself had formally ended.

3.   Governance, Statehood, and the Question of African Identity

If colonial borders survived into independence and continued to reproduce conflict within the states they enclosed, they also carried forward the political grammar through which those states were governed. The postcolonial African state did not emerge in an institutional vacuum. It inherited territorial frameworks, administrative routines, legal hierarchies, and coercive habits fashioned under colonial rule, then had to reconcile those inheritances with the demands of popular sovereignty, national legitimacy, and the search for an identity rooted in Africa rather than empire.[26] The result was a long and uneven struggle not simply over who would rule, but over what form the African state itself should take and how far its governing logic could be made to reflect the societies it claimed to represent.[27]

In many parts of the continent, independence transferred power without fully transforming the colonial architecture of rule. Centralized bureaucracies, command-oriented administrations, and highly concentrated executive power remained embedded in the new states because they were the most immediate instruments available for governing large and diverse territories.[28] Yet those institutions had not originally been designed to cultivate citizenship in a democratic sense. They had been created to classify populations, secure order, extract resources, and mediate difference through unequal forms of authority.[29] Postcolonial governments therefore inherited a paradox: they were expected to build national belonging through institutions whose historical purpose had been domination rather than inclusion.

This tension was especially visible in the relationship between governance and identity. Colonial rule had reordered African societies through categories of tribe, race, custom, and native authority, fixing identities that were often more fluid before colonial intervention and attaching them to unequal political rights.[30] In the postcolonial era, those categories did not simply disappear. They remained entangled in struggles over citizenship, representation, land, indigeneity, and access to state resources, shaping how communities understood both themselves and the state above them.[31] The crisis, then, was not only institutional but moral and conceptual: could a state inherited from colonial rule become fully African in character if its languages of authority, territorial assumptions, and governing practices still bore the imprint of conquest?

The answer varied across the continent, and that variation helps explain the uneven development of postcolonial African identity. In some cases, African leaders sought adaptation rather than rupture. They retained the territorial state and many of its administrative forms, but attempted to infuse them with new ideological meaning through nationalism, developmentalism, or projects of civic integration.[32] Julius Nyerere’s Tanzania, for example, tried to soften the divisive legacies of colonial rule through Swahili-based national culture and a unifying political vision, while Kwame Nkrumah imagined a sovereignty that would be authentically African only if it transcended the narrow state forms bequeathed by colonial partition.[33] These efforts did not erase inherited structures, but they represented serious attempts to Africanize the state by aligning institutions with broader social belonging.

Elsewhere, however, the adaptation was far thinner. Colonial command structures survived beneath new national symbols, leaving many states independent in law yet colonial in administrative reflex. Where power remained narrowly centralized, where citizenship was unevenly distributed, or where governments continued to mediate society through exclusionary ethnic or regional logics, the postcolonial state often struggled to appear as the political expression of a shared African community.[34] Kenya, for example, carried into independence a colonial state deeply shaped by racialized land alienation, administrative centralization, and ethnically uneven access to power; as scholars such as Bruce Berman and John Lonsdale have shown, the result was a postcolonial politics in which state authority and ethnic competition became closely intertwined rather than fully nationalized.[35]

Côte d’Ivoire offers another illustration. What had long been presented as one of postcolonial Africa’s more stable states was eventually shaken by disputes over belonging and citizenship, especially through the politics of ivoirité, which exposed how fragile national identity could become when access to the state was tied to contested definitions of who counted as fully indigenous.[36] In such settings, identity could harden downward toward ethnicity, region, religion, or locality precisely because the national state had not convincingly become a common home above them. The persistence of authoritarian rule in some countries, together with recurrent disputes over belonging and legitimacy, revealed how incomplete the transformation of colonial governance could be.[37]

Yet the history of identity in postcolonial Africa cannot be reduced to failure alone. The very experience of colonial domination also generated wider intellectual and political efforts to imagine Africa beyond the colonial frame. Pan-Africanism, anti-colonial nationalism, and later projects of continental cooperation all emerged from the recognition that the colonial state had divided Africa politically while also provoking new forms of solidarity against that division.[38]

In that sense, African identity after independence developed along two intertwined paths: one rooted in the inherited state and the struggle to make it socially legitimate, and another reaching beyond that state toward wider visions of African unity, dignity, and self-determination.[39]

Going forward, the significance of governance and identity in Africa lies precisely in this unresolved tension. Modern African states continue to operate within colonial borders and largely through institutions first consolidated under colonial rule, yet their long-term stability depends on how successfully those institutions can be reshaped to reflect African social realities, historical memory, and democratic aspirations.[40] Where such adaptation remains shallow, the distance between state and society continues to generate crises of legitimacy. Where it advances, the postcolonial state moves closer to becoming not merely the legal heir of empire, but a genuinely rooted political community. The question inherited from the Scramble, therefore, is still alive in modern Africa: not only how African states should be governed, but how governance itself can be made to speak in an African voice.[41]

4.   The Shadow of Berlin and Africa’s Unfinished Future

The inherited borders, the conflicts they reproduced, and the governance crises they sustained have remained so central to modern African life that the Berlin Conference cannot be treated as a closed historical episode, but as a continuing political inheritance. The partition of Africa created territorial states that outlived colonial rule and passed into independence carrying structural burdens they had not resolved.[42] What emerged after empire was therefore not a continent freed from Berlin’s design, but one forced to build sovereignty, legitimacy, and development within institutions and frontiers profoundly shaped by it. The shadow of Berlin has endured because the colonial order did not vanish at independence; it survived in the map, in the state, and in the unequal patterns of power that the postcolonial era was left to confront.[43]

That long afterlife helps define both the difficulty and the urgency of Africa’s future. The central challenge before the continent is no longer whether colonial rule will end, but whether the political and economic structures inherited from it can be transformed deeply enough to serve African societies on African terms. So long as inherited borders continue to contain fragile states, so long as governance remains distant from social legitimacy, and so long as development remains trapped within extractive patterns first consolidated under colonial rule, the old architecture of partition will continue to reproduce instability in new forms.[44] Yet the future is not determined by that inheritance alone. The same history that left Africa with imposed borders also produced anti-colonial nationalism, Pan-African thought, and continuing efforts at regional integration through institutions such as the African Union and subregional blocs. The question, therefore, is whether these inherited states can be made more legitimate internally while the continent simultaneously builds wider forms of cooperation capable of softening the fragmenting legacy of Berlin.

Africa’s future will thus depend less on erasing the colonial map than on outgrowing the political logic that first produced it. That requires stronger institutions, broader citizenship, more inclusive national communities, and deeper regional integration across the boundaries once designed to divide.[45] It also requires historical clarity. The enduring lesson of the Berlin Conference is that borders imposed without regard for societies do not cease to matter simply because time has passed; they continue to shape power, belonging, and possibility long after the conference halls have fallen silent. Modern Africa still lives with that inheritance, but it is not condemned to remain enclosed by it. Its future will be decided by how far it can transform the territorial and institutional legacies of partition into foundations for stability, dignity, and self-determined continental renewal. 

End Notes:

[1] Jeffrey Herbst, States and Power in Africa: Comparative Lessons in Authority and Control (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 35–58.

[2] Pierre Englebert, Stacy Tarango, and Matthew Carter, “Dismemberment and Suffocation: A Contribution to the Debate on African Boundaries,” Comparative Political Studies 35, no. 10 (2002): 1093–1118.

[3] Saadia Touval, The Boundary Politics of Independent Africa (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), 3–29.

[4] Christopher Clapham, Africa and the International System: The Politics of State Survival (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 1–23.

[5] A. I. Asiwaju, Partitioned Africans: Ethnic Relations Across Africa’s International Boundaries, 1884–1984 (London: C. Hurst, 1985), 1–18.

[6] Jeffrey Herbst, States and Power in Africa: Comparative Lessons in Authority and Control (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 143–173.

[7] A. I. Asiwaju, Partitioned Africans: Ethnic Relations Across Africa’s International Boundaries, 1884–1984 (London: C. Hurst, 1985), 1–18.

[8] Pierre Englebert and Rebecca Hummel, “Let’s Stick Together: Understanding Africa’s Secession Deficit,” African Affairs 104, no. 416 (2005): 399–427.

[9] Crawford Young, The African Colonial State in Comparative Perspective (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 221–258; Frederick Cooper, Africa Since 1940: The Past of the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 156–190.

[10] Crawford Young, The African Colonial State in Comparative Perspective (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 221–258.

[11] Jeffrey Herbst, States and Power in Africa: Comparative Lessons in Authority and Control (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 89–136; Christopher Clapham, Africa and the International System: The Politics of State Survival (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 15–23.

[12] Crawford Young, The African Colonial State in Comparative Perspective (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 283–308; Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 13–36.

[13] Elizabeth Isichei, A History of Nigeria (London: Longman, 1983), 322–325; Toyin Falola and Matthew M. Heaton, A History of Nigeria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 158–173.

[14] Frederick Cooper, Africa Since 1940: The Past of the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 187–190; Toyin Falola and Matthew M. Heaton, A History of Nigeria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 172–180.

[15] Toyin Falola and Matthew M. Heaton, A History of Nigeria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 180–187.

[16] Gérard Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 23–39; Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 87–114.

[17] Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 8–27, 99–114.

[18] Gérard Prunier, Africa’s World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 1–32.

[19] Crawford Young and Thomas Turner, The Rise and Decline of the Zairian State (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 3–35; Crawford Young, The African Colonial State in Comparative Perspective (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 249–258.

[20] René Lemarchand, The Dynamics of Violence in Central Africa (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 3–41; Gérard Prunier, Africa’s World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 181–246.

[21] Saadia Touval, Somali Nationalism: International Politics and the Drive for Unity in the Horn of Africa (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), 1–24.

[22] Christopher Clapham, Africa and the International System: The Politics of State Survival (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 181–208; Saadia Touval, Somali Nationalism: International Politics and the Drive for Unity in the Horn of Africa (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), 122–170.

[23] Christopher Clapham, Africa and the International System: The Politics of State Survival (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 181–208.

[24] Pierre Englebert, Africa: Unity, Sovereignty, and Sorrow (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2009), 45–71.

[25] Pierre Englebert, Africa: Unity, Sovereignty, and Sorrow (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2009), 71–98; Jeffrey Herbst, States and Power in Africa: Comparative Lessons in Authority and Control (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 89–136.

[26] Frederick Cooper, Africa Since 1940: The Past of the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 151–190; Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 1–23.

[27] Crawford Young, The African Colonial State in Comparative Perspective (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 283–308.

[28] Frederick Cooper, Africa Since 1940: The Past of the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 151–169.

[29] Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 16–25.

[30] Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 22–37; Crawford Young, The Politics of Cultural Pluralism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1976), 47–69.

[31] Crawford Young, The Politics of Cultural Pluralism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1976), 69–96; Bruce Berman, Dickson Eyoh, and Will Kymlicka, eds., Ethnicity and Democracy in Africa (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2004), 1–27.

[32] Frederick Cooper, Africa Since 1940: The Past of the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 66–115.

[33] Julius K. Nyerere, Freedom and Unity/Uhuru na Umoja: A Selection from Writings and Speeches, 1952–1965 (Dar es Salaam: Oxford University Press, 1966), 141–170; Kwame Nkrumah, Africa Must Unite (London: Heinemann, 1963), 131–157.

[34] Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 24–66; Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 285–301.

[35] Bruce Berman and John Lonsdale, Unhappy Valley: Conflict in Kenya and Africa, Book One: State and Class (London: James Currey, 1992), 1–33, 303–338.

[36] Ruth Marshall-Fratani, “The War of ‘Who Is Who’: Autochthony, Nationalism, and Citizenship in the Ivoirian Crisis,” African Studies Review 49, no. 2 (2006): 9–43; Richard Banégas and Ruth Marshall-Fratani, “Côte d’Ivoire: Negotiating Identity and Citizenship,” in African Guerillas: Raging Against the Machine, ed. Morten Bøås and Kevin C. Dunn (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2007), 81–111.

[37] Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 66–102.

[38] P. Olisanwuche Esedebe, Pan-Africanism: The Idea and Movement, 1776–1991 (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1994), 165–191; Ali A. Mazrui, The Africans: A Triple Heritage (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1986), 281–316.

[39] Kwame Nkrumah, Africa Must Unite (London: Heinemann, 1963), xi–xv, 131–157; P. Olisanwuche Esedebe, Pan-Africanism: The Idea and Movement, 1776–1991 (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1994), 165–191.

[40] Pierre Englebert, Africa: Unity, Sovereignty, and Sorrow (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2009), 99–127.

[41] Frederick Cooper, Africa Since 1940: The Past of the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 193–216; Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 102–141.

[42] Frederick Cooper, Africa Since 1940: The Past of the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 151–190; Pierre Englebert, Africa: Unity, Sovereignty, and Sorrow (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2009), 1–18.

[43] Crawford Young, The African Colonial State in Comparative Perspective (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 283–308; Ali A. Mazrui, The Africans: A Triple Heritage (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1986), 281–316.

[44] Jeffrey Herbst, States and Power in Africa: Comparative Lessons in Authority and Control (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 251–272; Frederick Cooper, Africa Since 1940: The Past of the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 193–216.

[45] Kwame Nkrumah, Africa Must Unite (London: Heinemann, 1963), 217–239; Pierre Englebert, Africa: Unity, Sovereignty, and Sorrow (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2009), 127–153.

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Research by: Atwiine Emmer
Paper by: Ezron Kaijuka