I recently had an interesting talk with my friend Chenjerai about borders. He is from Zimbabwe and I am from Botswana and so naturally we spoke about borders' cultural impacts pertaining to Southern Africa. ''You see, my brother, look at the map of Zimbabwe - it is like a teapot and you know British people like their tea,'' he joked about why it was in the interests of the first world to keep the borders intact.
He opined that they needed to be erased because they were not drawn by the southern Africans and they divided ethnic groups and were designed to keep the people there under colonial control, and so borders weakened the region's voice in world politics. He called what we know as countries in that region today as ''constructed nation states''. It is the classic divide and rule argument.
This got me wondering about how borders have exclusified languages or dialects...I hope there is such a word as exclusify, but what I mean is if a Shona person spoke Kalanga with a Shona accent in Botswana they would probably get flak for it, and if I as a Kalanga speaker have taken flak for speaking Shona ''funny.'' Shona and Kalanga are in some respects like Texan English and the English one would find in Wales, so they are not completely dissimilar. Once upon a time, they were the same language but a border ran through it and now it lives between them.
Now everyone holds onto their version of the language and makes it an exclusive mode of communication that the speakers of the other versions have no right to. Would this have happened due to natural migration without set territorialism through borders? I don't know. And is exclusivity bad? Does it assert new notions of identity and embrace that new cultures form over time?
I am still ruminating on this subject and what my fascination means, so feel free to scribble your thoughts aboutr borders in Africa...
