By Moses Desire Kouyo
In the quiet town of Elubo, on Ghana’s western edge, life moves to the rhythm of the border. Traders cross daily into Côte d’Ivoire to sell goods. Families are split across nationalities. Children grow up speaking both Twi and French. But for many, the border is more than a checkpoint, it is an invisible wall that shapes every aspect of their existence.
Over a century after European powers carved Africa into fragments at the Berlin Conference of 1884-85, the scars of artificial borders still pulse beneath the continent’s surface. The lines, drawn without regard for ethnic, linguistic, or cultural continuities, were not just geographic, they were ideological. And today, they continue to dictate how Africans move, trade, communicate, and even love.
The Human Cost of Arbitrary Lines
Take the story of Mariam and Joseph—siblings born just ten kilometers apart but under different flags. Mariam lives in Togo, while Joseph is in Ghana. Both are Ewe, speak the same language, and share the same traditions. Yet they require passports, visas, and sometimes bribes to see each other. Their story is not an exception, it is a norm for many families living along borderlands from Senegal to Somalia.
For nomadic groups like the Tuareg or Fulani, whose livelihoods depend on transhumance—seasonal migration with their livestock, national borders often criminalize their way of life. What was once a communal land system stretching across regions is now a bureaucratic maze of permits and suspicion. These ancient communities are forced to justify their existence to modern state systems that neither understand nor value their traditions.
When Borders Kill Trade
In East Africa, a Maasai herder in Kenya may be blocked from grazing lands a few kilometers away in Tanzania, though his ancestors moved freely across both. In West Africa, delays at border posts can hold up goods for weeks—costing small traders dearly. And despite the formation of economic blocs like ECOWAS and the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), national governments still enforce protectionist policies that contradict the spirit of continental integration.
Border towns like Aflao (Ghana–Togo), Busia (Kenya–Uganda), and Gisenyi (Rwanda–DR Congo) offer a paradox: they are vibrant hubs of exchange yet constantly disrupted by customs delays, language barriers, and political tensions. Smuggling, bribery, and corruption thrive where formal systems fail ordinary people.
Language, Identity, and Belonging
Language is another casualty of the colonial border logic. Africa is home to over 2,000 languages, many of which spill across borders. Yet in most African schools, children are taught in colonial languages—English, French, Portuguese—that divide them from their neighbors. A child in Francophone Benin may share more with a Yoruba-speaking cousin in Anglophone Nigeria than with a Parisian, but the linguistic wall remains.
Colonialism didn’t just split territories—it also fragmented identities. Many Africans today grow up identifying more with their European-given nationalities than with their ethnic or regional affiliations. This has implications for governance, civic trust, and conflict. In places like Cameroon or Sudan, post-colonial national projects built on arbitrary borders have bred deep ethnic resentments that occasionally explode into violence.
Toward a Borderless Future?
Africa’s political leadership has long acknowledged the damage of these imposed borders. As early as the 1960s, Kwame Nkrumah and Julius Nyerere called for African unity that transcended colonial boundaries. Today, the borderless Africa agenda, championed through AfCFTA, AU passport initiatives, and regional visa-free regimes, seeks to heal these divides.
But the process is slow, uneven, and often symbolic. While the AU dreams of free movement, many African states still maintain rigid visa policies against fellow Africans. As of 2024, an African passport is more powerful in Europe than in half of the continent.
The real work lies not just in policies but in reimagining the continent. African unity cannot be built on paper alone, it must live in infrastructure, language policy, education, and above all, in trust between states and people.
Stories from the Edge
For now, the people at Africa’s borders continue to build unity from below. In Goma and Gisenyi, across the DRC-Rwanda border, young musicians collaborate on songs that blend Lingala and Kinyarwanda. In Aflao, market women teach each other phrases in French and Ewe to survive. In the Sahel, nomads still defy checkpoints to uphold ancestral rhythms.
They are living proof that Africa was always borderless, before maps, before fences, before colonizers. And perhaps it is in their stories, not the conference halls of Addis Ababa or Abuja, that the dream of a truly united Africa will be reborn.