It looks as though the South of Sudan is going to vote to secede from the North- who will let it happen, which is nice for genocidal maniacs. This is a very good step in the right direction, like many countries in Africa all that links the country is a colonial history not a sense of nationhood. In fact nations in the European sense of the word that emerged in the 18th and 19th centuries don't really exist in Africa.
Instead there are a hodge podge of multi ethnic polities based on who colonised them a 150 years ago, in which the prime goal of any aspiring is to improve the standing of his people relative to the other ethnicities. This breeds corruption and racial hatred. In Sudan the racial differences are obvious because the North is Arab and the South black African but the differences between different black groups in Nigeria or Zimbabwe are just as real.
Creating function ethnic based states won't be possible everywhere but in cases where it is it should be encouraged regardless of the vested interests opposed to reform.
Doleham: The least used station in East Sussex
2 hours ago
7 comments:
There's a difference between the nation and the state. As you say the idea of a nation emerged in the 19th century. Before that time rulers acquired and lost parcels of people and land with no regard for what nationality they happened to belong to. eg. The Normans were not the same nationality as the Anglo-Saxons. Or Belgium, Switzerland, Austro-Hungary, Russia, Germany, Ottoman's etc
So most modern states in the colonising world were once hodge podges of nationalities themselves. France was created from parts of the Holy Roman Empire. The Franks were foreign rules much like the Normans. That France now has a developed sense of nation (except regions like Brittany) is a product of history. Surely same possibility is open for any African country.
The illusion of nation is that we can create these homogeneous geographically contiguous sustainable entities. Surely history tells us we can't.
Your citing of Zimbabwe is particularly relevant. Mugabe is not one of the descendants of the original people of Greater Zimbabwe. Those people were driven out by successive waves of colonists from other parts of Africa. How on earth are we to fairly disentangle such a history?
I'm not sure most of the measures used to create nation in Europe could be used in modern Africa- for example replacing local languages and dialects with an official langiage would be near impossible both for political and technological reasons.
I'm not saying it would be easy. France has had a thousand years to get to where it is, Zimbabwe has had less than 30.
But I do think the nationalist ideal is an even more utopian idea.
So separation on racial grounds is fine in Africa but very taboo in the UK.
TDK:
"France has had a thousand years to get to where it is, Zimbabwe has had less than 30."
France also had the same religion for most of that period and whilst the languages weren't the same they were all Latin languages more or less on a continuum. This isn't the same in most African states.
Anon-
There is a difference between an ethnic state in which the state is the embodiment of whichever national group and an apartheid state where ethnic minorities are officially segregated and not allowed to adopt the national identity.
France also had the same religion for most of that period and whilst the languages weren't the same they were all Latin languages more or less on a continuum. This isn't the same in most African states.
Really, I didn't know that. I assumed that African languages could be grouped into linguistic families, as in Europe, with external influences like Arabic creating hybrids like Swahili.
Well most of the southern African countries speak Bantu languages although I'm not sure how mutually intelligble they are, but in West and Central African states there seem to be at least two language families present afaik.
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