Colonial Boundary-Making and Arbitrary Borders

Colonial borders were, in the great majority of cases, negotiated between European diplomats around tables in London, Paris, Berlin, or Lisbon, using maps that were often inaccurate or blank in their interior detail, and settled through straight lines of latitude and longitude, arcs of a fixed radius from a reference point, or watershed lines rather than through any survey of the ethnic, linguistic, or political geography on the ground. Geographers who have measured African international boundaries after independence have found that close to half of them run as straight lines rather than following a river, coastline, or mountain range, a proportion far higher than on any other inhabited continent and a direct fingerprint of the treaty-room diplomacy that produced them.