Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics

by Tim Marshall

Africa is three times bigger than the USA.

You could fit the USA, Greenland, India, China, Spain, France, Germany and the UK into Africa and still have room for most of Eastern Europe.

The top third begins on the Mediterranean coastlines of the North African Arabic-speaking countries. The coastal plains quickly become the Sahara, the world’s largest dry desert, which is almost as big as the USA. Directly below the Sahara is the Sahel region, a semi-arid, rock-strewn, sandy strip of land measuring more than 3,000 miles at its widest points and stretching from Gambia on the Atlantic coast through Niger, Chad and right across to Eritrea on the Red Sea. The word Sahel comes from the Arabic sahil, which means coast, and is how the people living in the region think of it – as the shoreline of the vast sand sea of the Sahara.

Africa’s head start in our mutual story did allow it more time to develop something else which to this day holds it back: a virulent set of diseases, such as malaria and yellow fever, brought on by the heat and now complicated by crowded living conditions and poor healthcare infrastructure. This is true of other regions – the subcontinent and South America, for example

the mighty Zambezi may be Africa’s fourth-longest river, running for 1,600 miles, and may be a stunning tourist attraction with its white-water rapids and the Victoria Falls, but as a trade route it is of little use.

it wasn’t until the Arab conquests of the seventh century CE that the scene was set for a push southward.

When the Europeans finally made it down the west coast in the fifteenth century they found few natural harbours for their ships. Unlike Europe or North America, where the jagged coastlines give rise to deep natural harbours, much of the African coastline is smooth.

Back in the great capital cities of London, Paris, Brussels and Lisbon, the Europeans then took maps of the contours of Africa’s geography and drew lines on them – or, to take a more aggressive approach, lies. In between these lines they wrote words such as Middle Congo or Upper Volta and called them countries. These lines were more about how far which power’s explorers, military forces and businessmen had advanced on the map than what the people living between the lines felt themselves to be, or how they wanted to organise themselves. Many Africans are now partially the prisoners of the political geography the Europeans made, and of the natural barriers to progression with which nature endowed them. From this they are making a modern home and, in some cases, vibrant, connected economies.

The ethnic conflicts within Sudan, Somalia, Kenya, Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nigeria, Mali and elsewhere are evidence that the European idea of geography did not fit the reality of Africa’s demographics. There may have always been conflict: the Zulus and Xhosas had their differences long before they had ever set eyes on a European. But colonialism forced those differences to be resolved within an artificial structure – the European concept of a nation state.

However, one of the biggest failures of European line-drawing lies in the centre of the continent, the giant black hole known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo – the DRC. Here is the land in which Joseph Conrad set his novel Heart of Darkness, and it remains a place shrouded in the darkness of war. It is a prime example of how the imposition of artificial borders can lead to a weak and divided state, ravaged by internal conflict, and whose mineral wealth condemns it to being exploited by outsiders.

The DRC is neither democratic, nor a republic. It is the second-largest country in Africa with a population of about 81 million, although due to the situation there it is difficult to find accurate figures. It is bigger than Germany, France and Spain combined and contains the Congo Rainforest, second only to the Amazon as the largest in the world.

Belgian colonial rule made the British and French versions look positively benign and was ruthlessly brutal from start to finish, with few attempts to build any sort of infrastructure to help the inhabitants. When the Belgians went in 1960 they left behind little chance of the country holding together.

In 2014 the United Nations Human Development Index placed the DRC 186th out of 187 countries it measured.

The wars have killed, at a low estimate, tens of thousands of people, and have resulted in the deaths of another six million due to disease and malnutrition. The UN estimates that almost 50 per cent of the victims have been children aged under five.

In addition to its natural mineral wealth, Africa is also blessed with many great rivers – although most of its rivers do not encourage trade, they are good for hydroelectricity. However, this too is a source of potential conflict. The Nile, the longest river in the world (4,100 miles), affects ten countries considered to be in the proximity of its basin – Burundi, the DRC, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda and Egypt.

Without the Nile, there would be no one there. It may be a huge country, but the vast majority of its 97 million population lives within a few miles of the Nile. Measured by the area in which people dwell, Egypt is one of the most densely populated countries in the world.

Modern Egypt now has the most powerful armed forces of all the Arab states, thanks to American military aid; but it remains contained by deserts, the sea and its peace treaty with Israel. It will remain in the news as it struggles to cope with feeding 97 million people a day while battling an Islamist insurgency, especially in the Sinai, and guarding the Suez Canal, through which passes 8 per cent of the world’s entire trade every day. Some 2.5 per cent of the world’s oil passes this way daily; closing the canal would add about fifteen days’ transit time to Europe and ten to the USA, with concurrent costs.

In 2011 Addis Ababa announced a joint project with China to build a massive hydroelectric project on the Blue Nile near the Sudanese border called the Grand Renaissance Dam. In 2017 the dam was almost complete, but it will take several years to fill the reservoir with water. The dam will be used to create electricity, and the flow to Egypt should continue; but in theory the reservoir could also hold a year’s worth of water, and completion of the project would give Ethiopia the potential to hold the water for its own use, thus drastically reducing the flow into Egypt.

By size, population and natural resources, Nigeria is West Africa’s most powerful country. It is the continent’s most populous nation, with 191 million people, which with its size and natural resources makes it the leading regional power.

The kidnapping of foreign oil workers is making it a less and less attractive place to do business.

when the Nigerian military come looking for them Boko Haram are operating on home ground. Much of the local population will not co-operate with the military, either for fear of reprisal or due to a shared resentment of the south. Despite several major operations against it by the army, the group looks far from defeated. In 2017 it was still strong enough to go on the offensive, killing dozens of civilians in a series of raids. Since it first appeared in 2009 more than 20,000 people have been killed and thousands more abducted. The territory taken by Boko Haram does not yet endanger the existence of the state of Nigeria. The group does not even pose a threat to the capital Abuja, despite it being situated halfway up the country; but they do pose a daily threat to people in the north and they damage Nigeria’s reputation abroad as a place to do business.

Further south, down the Atlantic coast, is sub-Saharan Africa’s second-largest oil producer – Angola. The former Portuguese colony is one of the African nation states with natural geographical borders. It is framed by the Atlantic Ocean to the west, by jungle to the north and desert to the south, while the eastern regions are sparsely populated rugged land which acts as a buffer zone with the DRC and Zambia.

Angola is another country familiar with conflict. Its war for independence ended in 1975 when the Portuguese gave up, but it instantly morphed into a civil war between tribes disguised as a civil war over ideology. Russia and Cuba supported the ‘socialists’, the USA and apartheid South Africa backed the ‘rebels’. Most of the socialists of the MPLA (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola) were from the Mbundu tribe, while the opposition rebel fighters were mostly from two other main tribes, the Bakongo and the Ovimbundu.

the Chinese are everywhere, they mean business and they are now every bit as involved across the continent as the Europeans and Americans. About a third of China’s oil imports come from Africa, which – along with the precious metals to be found in many African countries – means they have arrived, and will stay. European and American oil companies and big multinationals are still far more heavily involved in Africa, but China is quickly catching up. For example, in Liberia it is seeking iron ore, in the DRC and Zambia it’s mining copper and, also in the DRC, cobalt.

China’s state-owned China Road and Bridge Corporation is building a $14 billion rail project to connect Mombasa to the capital city of Nairobi. Analysts say the time taken for goods to travel between the two cities will be reduced from thirty-six hours to eight hours, with a corresponding cut of 60 per cent in transport costs.

Tanzania looks as if it will be the second-tier power along the east coast. Kenya’s economy is the powerhouse in the five-nation East African Community, accounting for about 40 per cent of the region’s GDP. It may have less arable land than Tanzania, but it uses what it has much more efficiently.

In Luanda CREC is constructing a new international airport, and around the capital huge apartment blocks built to the Chinese model have sprung up to house some of the estimated 150,000–200,000 Chinese workers now in the country. Thousands of these workers are also trained in military skills and could provide a ready-made militia if China so required.

Chinese involvement is an attractive proposition for many African governments. Beijing and the big Chinese companies don’t ask difficult questions about human rights, they don’t demand economic reform or even suggest that certain African leaders stop stealing their countries’ wealth as the IMF or World Bank might. For example, China is Sudan’s biggest trading partner, which goes some way to explaining why China consistently protects Sudan at the UN Security Council and continued to back its President Omar al-Bashir even when there was an arrest warrant out for him issued by the International Criminal Court.

South Africa is more developed than many African nations, thanks to its location at the very southern tip of the continent with access to two oceans, its natural wealth of gold, silver and coal and a climate and land that allow for large-scale food production.

Because it is located so far south, and the coastal plain quickly rises into high land, South Africa is one of the very few African countries that do not suffer from the curse of malaria, as mosquitoes find it difficult to breed there. This allowed the European colonialists to push into its interior much further and faster than in the malaria-riddled tropics,

On the downside, economic growth in many countries is dependent on global prices for minerals and energy. Countries whose national budgets are predicated on receiving $100 dollars per barrel of oil, for example, have little to fall back on when prices drop to $80 or $60. Manufacturing output levels are close to where they were in the 1970s. Corruption remains rampant across the continent,

Sub-Saharan Africa currently holds 1.1 billion people, by some estimates – by 2050 that may have more than doubled to 2.4 billion.

The notion that a man from a certain area could not travel across a region to see a relative from the same tribe unless he had a document, granted to him by a third man he didn’t know in a faraway town, made little sense.

When the Ottoman Empire began to collapse, the British and French had a different idea. In 1916 the British diplomat Colonel Sir Mark Sykes took a chinagraph pencil and drew a crude line across a map of the Middle East. It ran from Haifa on the Mediterranean in what is now Israel to Kirkuk (now in Iraq) in the north-east. It became the basis of his secret agreement with his French counterpart François Georges-Picot to divide the region into two spheres of influence

Prior to Sykes–Picot (in its wider sense), there was no state of Syria, no Lebanon, nor were there Jordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Israel or Palestine. Modern maps show the borders and the names of nation states, but they are young and they are fragile.

perhaps 85 per cent of the total, although within some of the Arab countries the percentages are less distinct. The name comes from ‘Al Sunna’ or ‘people of tradition’.

Shia Islam has three main divisions, the best known of which is probably the Twelvers, who adhere to the teaching of the Twelve Imams, but even that contains divisions.

Iraq is a prime example of the ensuing conflicts and chaos. The more religious among the Shia never accepted that a Sunni-led government should have control over their holy cities such as Najaf and Karbala, where their martyrs Ali and Hussein are said to be buried.

more Arabs, most of whom were Shia. They ruled this space accordingly, dividing it into three administrative regions: Mosul, Baghdad and Basra. In antiquity, the regions very roughly corresponding to the above were known as Assyria, Babylonia and Sumer. When the Persians controlled the space they divided it in a similar way, as did Alexander the Great, and later the Umayyad Empire.

The smallest minorities in a dictatorship will sometimes pretend to believe the propaganda that their rights are protected because they lack the strength to do anything about the reality. For example, Iraq’s Christian minority, and its handful of Jews, felt they might be safer keeping quiet in a secular dictatorship, such as Saddam’s,

the Kurds were geographically defined and, crucially, numerous enough to be able to react when the reality of dictatorship became too much.

Kurdistan is not a recognised sovereign state but it has many of the trappings of one. However, a move towards full independence via a referendum in 2017 backfired badly. Baghdad sent in the Iraqi military, backed by Shia militia. They confronted the Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and took control of the city of Kirkuk after just a few days of fighting. The Kurds had taken it from Islamic State and had hoped that the city, which lies adjacent to a huge oil field, might one day be their sovereign capital. But with their common enemy routed, the rivalry between the Kurdish regional government and the Iraqi capital soon resurfaced. Now the Iraqi flag once again flies over Kirkuk and the oil revenues once again flow to Baghdad. Without a fully independent Kurdistan carved out of Iraq, the chances of a ‘greater Kurdistan’, stretching from the Iraqi mountains to

The Hashemite Kingdom, as Jordan is also known, is another place that was carved out of the desert by the British, who in 1918 had one large piece of territory to administer and several problems to solve.

The Saudi leader eventually landed on a name for his territory, calling it after himself, hence we know the area as Saudi Arabia – the rough equivalent would be calling the UK ‘Windsorland’.

Amman became the capital of Transjordan, and when the British went home in 1948 the country’s name changed to Jordan.

the majority of Jordan’s 9.7 million citizens are Palestinian, many of whom do not regard themselves as loyal subjects of the current Hashemite ruler, King Abdullah. Added to this problem are the one million Iraqi and Syrian refugees the country has also taken in who are putting a huge strain on its extremely limited resources.

Until the twentieth century, the Arabs in the region saw the area between the Lebanese mountains and the sea as simply a province of the region of Syria. The French, into whose grasp it fell after the First World War, saw things differently.

There has only been one official census in Lebanon (in 1932), because demographics is such a sensitive issue and the political system is partially based on population sizes.

what some historians call the first Lebanese civil war broke out in 1958 between the Maronite Christians and the Muslims, who by this time probably slightly outnumbered the Christians. They are now in a clear majority but there are still no official figures, and academic studies citing numbers are fiercely contested.

The Lebanese army exists on paper, but in the event of another civil war such as that of 1975–90, it would fall apart, as soldiers in most units would simply go back to their home towns and join the local militias.