It was no one's empty land
Nineteenth-century European maps painted the interior of Africa white. That blank was a convenient fiction: the doctrine of terra nullius made it possible to present conquest as the occupation of "empty" spaces. In reality, the continent was full of political systems: caliphates such as Sokoto, empires such as Asante or Lunda, kingdoms such as Buganda or Kongo, Swahili city-states, trading confederations and thousands of societies that organised themselves without a centralised state.
On the 1880 map, the hatched areas are not empty: they are societies the dataset does not show, often without a centralised state, but also kingdoms and sultanates that the dataset leaves out . African borders were often flexible, negotiated, overlapping. Colonial borders, by contrast, were rigid, exclusive and drawn from outside.
Straight lines over peoples
Many borders were drawn along meridians, parallels and rivers on maps no one had checked on the ground. The result: peoples with a shared language and history — Maasai, Ewe, Bakongo, Somali, Hausa, Tuareg — were split between two, three or even five states, while within a single colony societies with no previous ties were lumped together.
The violence did not end with the conquest. Genocides, forced labour, concentration camps, cultural plunder and wars of liberation marked the whole of the twentieth century. Many later conflicts have their roots in this design.
An untouchable legacy
In 1964 the new Organisation of African Unity decided to respect the inherited borders: redrawing them could have opened wars across the continent. This is the great paradox of decolonisation: the independent states had to preserve the division imposed by the colonisers. Only Eritrea (1993) and South Sudan (2011) have managed to change it.
Remembering this process is not nostalgia for an idealised past. It is acknowledging an injustice that still has consequences, and that still awaits reparation, restitution and remembrance.