Africa, make love, not war

By Peter Wanyonyi

These pesky colonial borders! Where we once happily fished and hunted side-by-side with only the occasional spearing of wayward warriors to slow proceedings down, these days border disputes in Africa turn into real wars.

The softest of them all is between Kenya and Tanzania over our long, eventful border. Tanzanian tour operators are miffed that Kenyan tourism brochures invariably have a picture of Mt Kilimanjaro on them, to the extent that the lucrative European tourist today believes that Mt Kilimanjaro is in Kenya.

Anyone looking at the Kenya-Tanzania border on a map will see that the venerated mountain should, of course, be in Kenya. The border takes a nifty detour to specifically leave the mountain in Tanzania. Apparently, so the fable goes, Queen Victoria so liked her cousin, the German Emperor Kaiser Wilhelm, that she decided to let Kilimanjaro be part of the then-German colony of Tanganyika, in return for some flowers or something. Women!

Jealousy

Ever since that thoughtless act, relations have never been good. The Tanzanians even refuse to let Kenyans operate hotels on their side of the border, apparently out of jealousy for the large number of tourists that Kenya gets, and because tourist-laden Kenya Airways planes land in Nairobi rather than Dar es Salaam.

Tanzania, meanwhile, is close to war with Malawi in a border dispute that should not really be happening. When those same colonials drew the boundary between the two countries, they left all of Lake Malawi in Malawi, ensuring that the border gave nothing of the lake to Tanzania.

Dar es Salaam wants a share of the lake — and with good reason: It is rumoured that massive oil and gas deposits sit at the bottom of that water body, and Tanzania is looking for all manner of legal excuses to grab a chunk of it.

Chaotic

There have even been whispers of the two countries going to war. Tanzania’s ambassador to Malawi has been reportedly expelled in the melee.

Even chaotic old Somalia has border issues — with Kenya. The East African coast is home to untold riches in oil and gas.

Kenya has been late to the table, but we are now poking drilling rigs into the Indian Ocean with unseemly haste. Somalia is alarmed that we might be drilling into its share of the ocean, and has threatened to sue us at some international joint.

These unseemly border issues — all consequences of silly borders drawn in a Berlin bar a century and a half ago by drunken colonial officers — would go away if we just agreed that no one should marry a fellow citizen.

That’s right. It would be much harder for Tanzanian President Jakaya Kikwete to threaten invading Malawi if he was married to Malawian President Joyce Banda. There would be no saber-rattling by Somalia over the Indian Ocean if all Somali men were required by law to source brides from Kenya, and vice versa.

Africa needs such a “make love, not war” continent-wide marriage pact if we are to avoid ruinous wars over our borders!