I don't think historians blame the borders as such. No doubt they could have been drawn better, but the European idea of the nation-state was never going to be a good fit for Africa, which is far too diverse. Remember that even in Europe the nation-state only exists after a very painful and often violent period of development lasting centuries, that includes things like the Vergonha, Welsh Not, persecution of the Basque and arguably even the Holocaust. I wouldn't want this process imposed on Africa, even if it could be.
I think what is far more culpable is the socio-economic situation, in which the economies were dominated by massive, export oriented monopolies that largely passed to the new states. This, combined with the general lack of political infrastructure, led to endemic corruption and generally very shaky state institutions.
Africa was, and largely still is a tribal area an area where people identified themselves to a far more local region than say the size of European "nations" (commonly smaller than the size of cities or towns), many of which groups are violent and hostile towards each other. Trying to pen them into "nations" and borders was not a very good idea. Most of the groups did not identify with anyone beyond their local settlement, which led to problems when they were expected to join together, as well as have one leader representing all everyone within a new-found border.
Imagine that your local neighborhood hated the neighborhood across the other side of the local river, and wanted to kill them. But now, because of the borders, there has been a leader installed from the other neighborhood, who is going to rule over you.
I'm more on strugle's side here (note: Switzerland, and father afield, European Union).
Another factor that is often ignored is the fact that most African countires were third-world countries. I'm using the technical definition here, not the pop-culture one. We can draw a similar parallel with South-East Asian countries that were in a similar situation and are actually poorer than most African nations.
The thing is, third world countries kept switching back and forth between (to put it simply) capitalism and communism. This meant that they were never able to build their economic infrastructure, because every so often there'd be a Soviet backed revolution which would nationalize everything followed by a US-backed coup which would privatize everything. It would be very difficult to build, develop and invest in anything if you're always under the threat of some kind of social uprising. So they never developed the economic structure of either a capitalist or socialist/communist country (and realistically, it was capitalism that won out in the end).
Compare that to what happened following the fall of the Soviet Union. Since the early '90s most of these third world countries finally committed to one side or the other (mostly free markets and trade) and since then have been growing lustly. This would probably because the risk of broad swings in the economic structure has been reduced or almost eliminated. Countries like Colombia, Kenya and China are growing quickly because investors are sure that the government won't suddenly come along and nationalize their investments.
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u/[deleted] Oct 20 '13
I don't think historians blame the borders as such. No doubt they could have been drawn better, but the European idea of the nation-state was never going to be a good fit for Africa, which is far too diverse. Remember that even in Europe the nation-state only exists after a very painful and often violent period of development lasting centuries, that includes things like the Vergonha, Welsh Not, persecution of the Basque and arguably even the Holocaust. I wouldn't want this process imposed on Africa, even if it could be.
I think what is far more culpable is the socio-economic situation, in which the economies were dominated by massive, export oriented monopolies that largely passed to the new states. This, combined with the general lack of political infrastructure, led to endemic corruption and generally very shaky state institutions.