Practice question · Select all that apply
What is the honest account of Africa’s colonial borders?
Hints
- The damage is real but the single-cause claim is not supported.
- Post-independence states chose to keep the inherited lines.
Show the answer
- B. Post-independence states almost universally kept them as a founding principle
- C. About 30% are straight lines drawn by people who had not been there
- D. They partition ethnic groups roughly 40% of the time
Why
The damage is real and the causal claim is oversold: partitioned groups are not reliably more conflict-prone, and the OAU kept the inherited lines on the sane grounds that reopening the question would be worse than the answer.
Practise Political Geography and Borders
The app has 5 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. History I is free to start.
More questions on Political Geography and Borders
- How does a line drawn in ignorance become real?
- A border drawn arbitrarily in 1890 is defended a century later as a national frontier worth dying for. What…
- Sort each statement: a geographical constraint or a policy in geographical clothing?
- The effects of a border abolished generations ago can still show up in voting and wage data today.
- Complete the argument.