Country borders often mark the site of a culture transition. It's not necessarily a black and white difference from one side to the other, but the borders still mean something for most western countries at least.
However, when European colonists were dividing up the continent of Africa, they weren't taking the already decided boundaries into consideration. Instead, they were focused on maximizing the area of economically profitable land. So, today, because of nineteenth century geopolitical interests, the borders are splitting up homogenous areas, be it ethnicity or topography.
I was thinking about this because of our conversation of coat switching. Because of these poorly placed borders, not only do these people feel pressure to assimilate into western culture because of the colonists, but even between clans, tribes, or villages the pressure presents itself as groups of people are separated from each other.
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2 comments:
This is a great point because we have discussed how important the community is to many African ethnic/tribal groups: "I am because we are; and since we are, therefore I am." This identification with one's own tribal group extends to village communities, also known as "kinship ties":
"The kinship system is like a vast network stretching laterally (horizontally) in every direction, to embrace everybody in any give local group . . . each individual is a brother or sister, father or mother, grandmother or grandfather, or cousin, or brother-in-law, uncle or aunt, or something else, to everybody else . . . everybody is related to everybody else, and there are many kinship terms to express the precise kind of relationship pertaining between two individuals" (John Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy).
We see this idea of an extended family in Things Fall Apart where Chielo calls Ezinma her "daughter" and Ikemefuna calls Okonkwo his "father," even though he came from another tribe.
I think we can also extend this idea of nonsensical borders to slavery. Slavery teared apart communities with more destructiveness than borders. It was essentially an invisible border that destroyed kinship communities.
I think it's worth adding to Jun's point here that slavery not only tore apart communities, but did so intentionally in order to more effectively destroy social structures in slave communities. I find the deliberate intent behind doing this to show another way that the slave trade was truly terrible, and I think this also can be a reminder of how planned out the terrors of the slave trade were. It was an entire system that necessitated the deliberate dehumanization of entire groups of people and this was not done on accident. I think this deliberateness also relates to discussions of how the slave trade was clearly inhumane even in the context of past centuries.
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