By MACHARIA MUNENE (email the author)
A number of African countries are celebrating 50 years since attaining political independence.

This calls for reassessment in the form of media stories on individual countries as well as conferences where African, Latin American, and European scholars compare notes.

Spain, a minor colonial player, that wants to stake a higher claim to the future of Africa, has held conferences, the latest being early in July in Madrid at the Universidad Complutense, the centre for Euroforum engagements.

Among the countries examined was Equatorial Guinea which raised contradictions in the construction of Spanish identity.

In Spain, many people from this former Spanish colony consider themselves Spaniards only to be socially rejected and dismissed as immigrants.

Being Spanish, it seems, is a color issue.

Reassessment also brings into focus general challenge facing new African countries at independence.

One of them was on the conception of what a state should be and there were two competing concepts.

One was on whether a state can be elastic and therefore expand or inelastic and accept its size as colonially designed.

The second, and related to the first, was whether a state can contract and be reduced in size by splitting into various parts to create new states.

Believers in the elasticity of states were those who wanted to rearrange colonial boundaries to suit their expansionist dreams.

Those holding to the inelastic concept wanted the new states to uphold the sanctity of colonial boundaries, irrespective of how illogical they were.

Among those who believed in the elasticity of states were Morocco that wanted to expand to Western Sahara, Algeria, and Mauritania and ultimately annexed Western Sahara, and newly created Somalia.

Somalia was unique in that it was one of the countries created out of two colonies, Italian and British Somalilands.

Independence for Italian Somaliland was mandated by the United Nations but that of British Somaliland was a gift to the Somali Youth League so as to unite the two.

The union of different colonies to create one country inspired the concept of an elastic Somali state in which the new leaders wanted to expand Somalia to incorporate territories that were not part of the two colonies.

The failure to implement the elastic theory eventually led to the collapse of the Somali experiment as the country fragmented into more than the two former colonies.

While Somalia was experimenting with uniting two colonies in an elastic state, Congo and Nigeria believed in inelasticity and had no desire either to expand or to contract the state.

The two could not hold people together by promising to annex neighboring territories in the name of Greater Congo or Greater Nigeria.

Instead, they worried about becoming “Smaller Congo” or “Smaller Nigeria.”

This was particularly the case with secessionists’ movements in Katanga and Biafra, which nearly split the African continent with debates on whether a state can contract and give birth to a new state.

The three countries, Nigeria, Congo, and Somalia, thus represent different independence scenarios.

Nigeria’s independence was shrouded in the mystery of demographic manipulations as part of British election rigging and harp on ethnicity. The effects were felt later.

Somalia experimented with uniting two colonies and failed. Congo was a neo-colonial misfortune right from the start.

The application of the two competing concepts of state size, whether elastic/inelastic or contractible have had mixed fortunes in the last fifty years.

Somalia’s failure to expand produced the opposite effect in that it ended up contracting and breaking into small, albeit unrecognized, states.

Similarly, in the 1960s, the notion of contracting states was rejected in Congo and Nigeria.

Yet something happened after the 1990s because Ethiopia conceded the separation of Eritrea and there is the likelihood of Sudan contracting in 2011.

Although accepting that states can contract is growing, part of the 50-year reassessment, it is not fully embraced in Congo or Nigeria.

Prof Macharia teaches at USIU-Nairobi.

Source: Business Daily

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