Was the OAU right to keep Africa’s colonial borders?

The short answer

• The border decision of 1964. In 1964 the OAU chose to protect inherited colonial borders under uti possidetis. The reasoning was preventive: once one frontier was reopened, other governments and movements might press rival claims, bringing secession and irredentist war. Keeping the lines had consequences of its own. Somalis across five states, the Igbo and the Ewe remained divided, and citizens stayed in countries they had never agreed to form. The choice put stability ahead of justice; whether that bargain was wise remains unsettled.
• Economies shaped for export. A government could change the flag at independence more quickly than it could change the economy beneath it. Many states relied on a single commodity whose price was set in London or New York. They had no manufacturing, few skilled workers, and transport routes designed to carry resources to the coast. The 1960s “development decades” brought ambitious efforts to alter this inheritance: Nkrumah's Volta dam, Tanzania's villagization and Senegal's groundnuts. Many schemes failed or disappointed. Falling commodity prices then reduced government revenue, making political stability harder to maintain.
• Why armies took power. More than forty coups had taken place by 1970. Armies could intervene because colonial governments had often left them better organized and resourced than other national institutions. Civilian politicians lost standing when economies failed, while single-party rule removed peaceful routes to a change of government. Ethnic and regional rivalries contained within colonial borders found no other outlet. Officers could present a takeover as a way “to restore order”. Some sought reform; more often the result was another strongman.
• Françafrique and dependence. A formally independent government could still depend heavily on a former colonial power. France maintained influence through the CFA franc, defense pacts, troops and the personal networks known as “Françafrique”. These connections helped install and protect friendly rulers and allowed intervention against unfriendly ones. Nkrumah called the wider condition neo-colonialism: a country had a flag of its own while remaining economically subordinate. Several “independent” states were clients in practice, a relationship the map's red cannot show.

What it changed

Biafra and the cost of unity. When Biafra seceded, most African states supported the Nigerian federation. Defenders of the blockade presented it as the price of national unity; a million people starved. The war set a precedent against recognizing secession that held until Eritrea and South Sudan decades later. That political outcome cannot diminish the suffering of the children of Biafra.

The one-party argument. Nyerere, Kaunda and other leaders saw a danger in parties competing along the divisions of fragile new nations. They argued that one movement could provide the unity needed to govern. Some offered that argument in good faith; others used it to justify dictatorship for its own sake. Tanzania held together where other countries fractured, yet one-party states mostly failed to provide the development or unity they had promised.

Frontiers that largely held. Despite violence within states, Africa's international borders changed remarkably little after independence. The Somalia-Ethiopia and Uganda-Tanzania wars ended with frontiers restored rather than redrawn. The 1964 bargain thus helped preserve the boundaries its makers wanted to protect, even as conflict continued within them. Those boundaries also preserved injustices inherited from the colonial map.