Why do borders bother us?
Why Do Borders Bother Us? In my humble opinion, this may not necessarily be the most profound summary of the total life work, academic engagements and impressive public service record of Professor Anthony Asiwaju, for the sum total of both the man and the scholar/intellectual is vastly more than can be so casually pigeon-holed. Although […]
Why Do Borders Bother Us? In my humble opinion, this may not necessarily be the most profound summary of the total life work, academic engagements and impressive public service record of Professor Anthony Asiwaju, for the sum total of both the man and the scholar/intellectual is vastly more than can be so casually pigeon-holed. Although primarily an historian by training, the eclectic span of his research work, the diversity of his methodologies and the multiplicity of his publications easily show him as a multi-perspective scholar who straddles the disciplines of history, geography, political science, sociology and anthropology, and economics with remarkable ease. The range of his scholarship demonstrates the criticality of his mindset, an incurable intellectual curiosity that makes it difficult for him to be confined or straitjacketed within the narrow bounds of a single discipline. While it is true that he cut his academic teeth in the discipline of history, the unmistakable evidence of the multi-disciplinarity and trans-disciplinarity of his intellectual exertions are there for all to see in his numerous works on borders, boundaries and regional integration. The contemporariness of his scholarship is also evident from the contents of the second book edited by him.
Some people are destined to be trailblazers who have to chart the course and provide illumination for others to follow. Professor Asiwaju undoubtedly belongs in that category; he is an intellectual progenitor whose work has produced, sadly I must admit, only a few specialists who are advancing the frontiers of borderlands and regional integration studies. Some of them are contributors to the two volumes under review. Being both a product and a victim of cynically created borderlands, he chose early on in his career or perhaps was compelled to concentrate his prodigious scholastic and intellectual energies towards critically interrogating and explicating the problematic of African boundaries and borders with the ultimate purpose of attenuating their ruinous effects on African peoples, especially those whom colonially imposed artificial boundaries have partitioned into two or more sovereign states. Solving the problems created by borders has been a passion all his life.
Africa is a continent of 54 sovereign states. These states are separated by borders created not by the will of the African peoples but by foreign colonial adventurers with scant sensitivity to ethnographic and existential realities and who went ahead to partition the same peoples among different states. The decision of Africa’s immediate post-colonial ruling elites to retain and consolidate the colonially determined borders (officially reiterated at Addis Ababa in 1963 and Cairo in 1964) appeared commonsensical at first, but subsequent attempts at erasing or de-emphasising them for the ultimate goal of continental integration have been vitiated by their reluctance to let go. In the process, these borders have become real hindrances to both sub-regional and continental integration. Successive ruling elites in the different countries, having strategically retreated behind these artificial borders and hidden behind individual state sovereignty as the last refuge of the scoundrel that most of them are, promptly instrumentalised their states for personal aggrandisement.
A few critical questions that reverberate prominently across the vast range of Professor Asiwaju’s scholastic engagements can be summarised to include:
Why do borders have to bother so much?
• Why are borders so burdensome?
• Why can’t Africans utilise borders as bridges and not as obstacles?
He is uniquely placed to explain these issues. Being compelled by circumstances of ancestry and place of birth, he has placed a high prominence on the issue of borders, boundaries and borderlands studies and he has devoted his entire career to studying and understanding the politics, economics, sociology, dynamics as well as the intricacies, complexities and complications of borders. In short, his energies have been devoted to the desirability of Africans becoming one, and if not, that at least that borders may bother us less. The title of this review only vaguely summarises him, for it merely pretends to cover the major theme of his research and publications which are being celebrated today.
It does not require any oracular profundity to detect the man’s irrepressible concern, deep passion, a clear vision, a tall dream and definite hope for an African continent united by its peoples, a borderless African continent, or at least an Africa where borders will not be so bothersome or incommodious, an Africa where artificial borders that so cruelly partitioned peoples into inconvenient post-colonial states will no longer lead to war and insecurity but be utilised for people to live in peace, in harmony and concord; in short, he envisages a fully integrated Africa where perhaps the Marxian conception of the ‘withering away of states’ may eventually be realised. This is also the underlining concern of the editors and contributors to these two volumes. The first book explores notion that Africans ‘may be one’ through regional integration, while the other focuses more narrowly on a particular manifestation of the problems and conflict that artificially drawn borders have created, the claims and counter claims of ownership of the Bakassi Peninsula by Nigeria and Cameroon.
The quest for the understanding and resolution of Africa’s boundary problems has been the kernel of most of his research and writings on borders, boundaries, and borderlands studies, as he passionately seeks to find ways to convince Africans to reconceptualise borders as bridges for the facilitation of the dream of continental integration. Anthony Asiwaju has brought his formidable intellect and profound convictions to bear on what is currently a topical issue in Africa: continental integration and fast-tracking the evolution of a United States of Africa being championed by current AU chairperson, Muammar Gaddafi of Libya. It is in the dogged and relentless pursuit of this noble dream and sublime conviction that Professor Asiwaju eminently qualifies to be placed in the pantheon of great scholars, thinkers and great African visionaries such as Kwame Nkrumah and other apostles of pan-Africanism who powerfully ventilated the notion of a united Africa even at a time when it doing so seemed far-fetched, if not absolutely preposterous.
William Miles in his profound reflections on his research and field survey in the borderlands between Nigeria and Niger Republic discovered the pre-eminence of nationality over ethnic solidarity among the Hausa in both countries. Consciousness of national identity is a significant determinant of the consolidation of artificial division into different countries as is evident in the erection of official barriers, immigration and customs posts along important border crossings. While not necessarily preventing trans-border relations among the people, they nonetheless significantly regulate them.
Professor Nugent’s analysis also discovers the existence of a network of trans-border relations and interactions, commerce and trade, smuggling and corruption across the artificial borders even in spite of official barriers.
While Akinyeye’s contribution takes one through the historical and general trajectory of the integrative idea in Africa and what he describes as “robust attempts” and moves, he cannot help lament that the continent continues to lag behind in the area of regional integration in spite of the dynamics of globalisation which makes integration an imperative. As one of Asiwaju’s faithful disciples, he goes ahead to recommend ways by which Africa may become one.
Tayo Adesina’s contribution offers a critical insight into the theory and praxis of integration in West Africa, focusing more specifically on the relationship between Nigeria and its immediate Francophone neighbours of Benin and Togo, and concludes that vertical integration is over-emphasised to the detriment of horizontal integration. He believes that genuine integration is a mirage unless and until the people themselves are involved, a conclusion which tallies with Asiwaju’s own that the process of regional integration can only be meaningful if wrenched from the vice grip of the state. The other contributions by Browne Onuoha, Maryam Quadri, Abiola Lipede, Blankson Ekpe, M.B. Ahmed and Rufus Akinyele provide additional illumination on different aspects of integration, the dynamics as well as the challenges to overcome if the vision of united Africa is to be realised.
The book edited by Professor Yomi Akinyeye is an invaluable collection of critical essays, a profound work of scholarship by some of the finest scholars in the diverse but inter-related disciplines of history, borderland studies and regional integration from across the globe, each of them having been impacted one way or another by Professor Asiwaju and his works.
Professor Asiwaju himself is a living negation of the ballad of the old soldier, so famously alluded to by US General Douglas Macarthur, which contends that “old soldiers never die, they just fade away”. Although the old soldier in Professor Asiwaju formally retired from active university service on attaining the mandatory age of 65 years, he has refused to fade away. Instead, he is like the good wine that matures with age. His continued intellectual engagements after formal disengagement from the university led him to the establishment of the African Regional Institute at Imeko, an institute that seeks to enhance research and training and manpower capacity building. There is no surer testimony to the continued vibrancy of this man’s scholarship than his edited book, Peaceful Resolution of African Boundary Conflicts: The Bakassi Peninsula Dispute Settlement published in 2009 by the African Regional Institute, Imeko.
The book is an edited volume of the papers presented at a workshop on the “Bakassi Peninsula Dispute Settlement as a Model for Africa” organised by the African Regional Institute in 2006. The main title of the book, edited by Professor Asiwaju himself, Peaceful Resolution of African Boundary Disputes, testifies to the professor’s passion for the imperative of converting borders into facilities for integration by advocating pacific alternatives to resolving inter-state disputes caused by artificial borders. I must emphasise that the professor’s advocacy of the peaceful option clearly predated the judgement of the International Court of Justice which awarded the ownership of the disputed peninsula to Cameroon. But once the judgement was given, and realising that there are complex issues to be worked out before the judgement could be implemented, the professor proceeded to organise a national workshop to design the best pacific methods of resolving the crisis.
This concern might not have been unconnected with the swift and outright rejection of the judgement by the Nigerian government and the rising sentiments at home against both the judgement and Cameroon whose gendarmes had always caused havoc on Nigerian soil. If not properly managed, the situation could deteriorate to armed conflict between the two neighbours, and so the Professor stepped in to offer a peaceful way forward through the instrumentality of a scientific platform for the proper interrogation and provision of enlightenment of the issues involved in the dispute. The book, apart from the chapters which elucidate the various issues and dimensions of the dispute, also contains important documents such as the ICJ’s press release on the judgement, Nigeria’s official press release on the judgement, the famous Green Tree agreement, amongst others, and also makes wide-ranging recommendations which would ensure peaceful coexistence. It is undoubtedly a collector’s item on the Bakassi Peninsula dispute which scholars, researchers, students, policymakers and everyone in border issues in Africa will find useful.
In concluding this review, I must say that it is quite disheartening that the post-colonial state has become more of a problem than a blessing in most of Africa. The question that is begging for answer is whether a borderless Africa and the cobbling together of a gigantic continental state as a replacement for the multiplicity of unviable states that currently dot the African landscape will necessarily make a positive meaning to the long-suffering people. This poser, I hasten to add, is not for Professor Asiwaju to answer, for the man has not only courageously blazed the trail for others to follow, he has relentlessly championed the cause for decades. To expect him to answer it would be putting too heavy a burden on his aged shoulders and of course it would amount to wanton intellectual laziness on the part of the rest of us to do so.
While sharing Professor Asiwaju’s vision and those of the contributors to the book ‘that they may be one’, I cannot totally shake off the pervasive sense of cynicism that, notwithstanding Col. Gaddafi’s current grandstanding on the matter, African rulers are merely paying lip-service to the idea of regional integration. In any case, since the most critical issues towards integration have yet to be properly addressed, Gaddafi’s intention to fast-track the achievement of a United States of Africa is merely a giant leap in the dark. Africa may not necessarily become borderless in the immediate future, but Africans should at least endeavour to make them bother us less. It is only in this regard and in a hopeful future that the essence of the life time work and intellectual exertions of this great scholar can become truly appreciated.
But again, it is regrettable and also a serious matter for concern that not many younger scholars are following his footsteps in borderland studies, as the first chapter of this edited book lamented. Could this failure be because the new generation of scholars cannot see any worthwhile prospects in the study? Or could this also be because the old man has left behind shoes that are simply too big for the younger ones to step into? If the latter is the case, then we have Professor Asiwaju to blame for being larger than life in the discipline of border studies. Whilst it is true that Professor Asiwaju, literally speaking, ‘wrote the book’ on borders and boundaries in Africa, must we also allow him to have the last word? That should not be, for I know the hope of this great trailblazing scholar would be to leave behind a horde of disciples to whom would be entrusted the job of advancing the frontiers of knowledge in the discipline. Professor Asiwaju has thrown down the gauntlet, let others find the courage to pick it up!
Fawole, a professor of International Relations and Dean, Faculty of Administration, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria, presented this review at the public presentation of the books. E-mail: [email protected], [email protected]