Question

Which of the following borders were commonly used to draw national boundaries in Africa at the end of the colonial era?

Answer 1

The correct answer is - Superimposed.

The nations in the African continent that gained independence had borders set by their colonial rulers, borders of the superimposed type. This basically means that the borders were set without taking in consideration the cultural heritage, history, ethnic groups, religious groups.

This type of border creation for the newly formed African nations created a lot of problems, problems that are still present nowadays. The reasons for the problems were that people that historically had tensions and conflicts got stuck into the same borders, ethnic groups and religious groups that were not tolerant to one another also found themselves put together, the interest and culture of the people were differing a lot, and there were multiple languages used.

All of that led to lot of civil wars, tensions, conflicts, genocides, persecutions, forced assimilation, split of countries. Because of that most of the countries stagnated or even regressed after gaining independence, and in large portion of them the problems just seem to grow instead of stabilize.