There are times where there are multiple nations in one state. These are known as multinational states. One of the most intimate examples for us all would be the United States. More broadly, the two biggest trends that created multinational states occur when: (1) multiple nations immigrate from other states to create a new one (i.e. the United States), and (2) colonial or imperial borders were drawn to clump together a lot of nations into one governmental unit. Examples of the latter include most states on the continent of Africa.

There are many multinational states across the African continent. This is because Africa has thousands of nations. Early migration patterns of humans both across the continent led to the formation of at least six major linguistic branches (i.e. Afro-Asiatic, Nilo-Saharan, Niger-Congo, Khoisan, and Austronesian, and Indo-European).

The Afro-Asiatic linguistic branch can be found across the northern Saharan region, southward to the Sahel, and eastward to the Horn of Africa. The Nilo-Saharan, meanwhile, was the language spoken of the who migrated east to west across the Saharan desert. The Niger-Congo language branch includes all those in the direct interior of the continent, while the Khoisan branch is in South Africa with a small pocket Tanzania predominantly. Amazingly, the Austronesian language branch includes a language spoken in Madagascar that is similar to the languages spoken in Malaysia (Malay), Indonesia (Indonesian), and the Philippines (Tagalog or Filipino). Finally, the Indo-European languages are spoken throughout Africa (e.g Afrikaans in South Africa) are the result of colonization, which drew the state boundaries we see today.

The six linguistic branches, however, are only the beginning of the division of the continent. As just one example, the Afro-Asiatic language branch has six large ethnic branches that can be further divided up into almost 100 identifiable nations. Across all of Africa, there are more than 30 large ethnic branches with well over 1,000 identifiable nations (see map below on left). When you try to draw state boundaries around these nations (see map on right), this inevitable will divide some nations, while pushing certain nations that have very little in common together.

One of the strangest things in human history is how the Renaissance (beginning in the 14th century) led Europeans to view their fellow European humans with more care. The language we see within the founding documents of the United States echoed these sentiments of universal worth and thus equality for all. And yet, as leaders throughout Europe were agreeing to consider the people within their states more than they had (formerly treating them as serfs), these leaders began expanding into other territories are dehumanizing other groups outside of their own nations. That is, the trends of humanism and colonialism worked at the same time, though at cross purposes in human history. Below is a brief overview of the history of colonies and how the impact of these colonies created lasting tensions within and across states today.

The Portuguese Begin the Slave Trade

The Kingdom of Portugal was founded in the 12th century by French nobles. As the Portuguese were relatively late to the Mediterranean trading game, they chose to head elsewhere, around Africa to get to the East. They hoped to cut off the time of trading over land (e.g. Old Silk Road) and maybe even beat the Italians who cut through the Mediterranean and then to the Red Sea to get access to East Asia.

In 1488, the Portuguese successfully sailed around the southernmost tip of Africa, the Cape of Good Hope. From there, they began to create trading posts around Western Africa that were heavily guarded garrison trading posts. As a result, the Portuguese are considered the first colonizers. As warring groups in West Africa would offer prisoners from other tribes as slaves in return for luxury items, pretty soon the Portuguese began to trade slaves in high demand.

Originally, slaves were imported to Portugal to serve in nobles’ houses. When the Portuguese, however, traveled further west from the West African coast on some trips when they intended to go south (going north to south with the jet streams in the Atlantic can send boats farther west than intended), they found new islands (e.g. Azores, Madeira, & Cape Verde) and in one particularly big wrong turn, they found Brazil. It was in these places in the 16th century that they began creating sugar plantations and using slave labor to make them profitable.

The Spanish

The Spanish, having been enslaved by the Roman Empire, were initially anti-slavery (at least on paper). Originally, the plan was to focus on spices. When, however, they reached the New World and realized this would not, in fact, take them to India (though Columbus died still blindly asserting that he had found Asia and thus calling the indigenous people Indians), the Spanish decided to encourage nobles to move into territories conquered and set up fiefdoms, called encomiendas, which would be worked by the indigenous populations "willingly." Though the Spanish employed brutal conquering strategies in the New World, the most deadly was an unintended one: the spread of their diseases to a population that had not been exposed to them. As just one example, it is estimated that the population of Mexico was halved in the 16th century with the introduction of Spanish diseases (i.e. this statistic does not take into account intentional genocidal acts).

As the indigenous population began dying out, Spain began bringing Africans as slaves to work the plantations in the Caribbean and Central and South America. Unlike the indigenous people in these regions, the Africans had been exposed (and were closer in origin story) to the Europeans and thus did not succumb to the same diseases.

Dutch Trading Companies

The Dutch are one of the Germanic peoples. For most of their time, they were fishing people, known for their strong shipbuilding skills. Over time, as the population increased, they began to use ingenious methods to reclaim much land from the seawaters (e.g dikes, windmills to pump water out of the soil, etc.). After they had land, they used it for sheep herding. With such little space, they needed to focus on an animal that could provide them with cheese, wool, and meat. The Dutch became well known for these products in trade.

The Netherlands was not an independent country before the Thirty Years' War, but it was instead a part of Spain. The Dutch (the people of the Netherlands) hated being under Spain for lots of regions. First, the people were a bunch of wealthy traders with independent duchies (i.e. dukedoms) in the territory that did not need or want to pay taxes to a distant foreign government. Second, the Dutch were increasingly Protestant and thus wished not to be ruled by the Catholic Spanish. Once finally free from Spain in a revolt, the Dutch began trading competitively against the Spanish.

Once independent, the Dutch Republic encouraged the formation of two monopolistic trading companies: the Dutch West India Company (which would focus on extracting goods from the New World) and the Dutch East India Company (which would overtake the Portuguese trading posts) to extract spices and to trade slaves with the Spanish and Portuguese who were now finding themselves dependent on the Dutch.

The Belgian Congo

Just as the Dutch had once been under the foot of the Spanish, the Belgians were under the Dutch until 1830. As the Dutch were at this point well established along the coast of Africa, the Belgians decided to push into the interior of the Congo Basin, extracting ivory and growing rubber trees. Though the constitutional monarch, Leopold II, stated that the Belgian presence in the Congo was for humanitarian purposes, reports from the Congo Free States suggested that people were forced into slavery and murdered in large numbers if they resisted or no longer were economically productive.

The Scramble for Africa & Beyond

By the late 1890s, competition among these European powers reached a fever pitch. Though Africa had been largely independent (only about ten percent was colonized by 1870), by 1914 the continent was fully colonized except for Ethiopia and Eritrea.

At the onset of World War I, the British had risen as an industrial and naval power and its empire stretched eastward across India and into Burma and Malay as well (more on Burma below), while the French moved into the rest of Southeast Asia (present-day Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam).

Post-Colonial Independence: What happened when colonies ended?

Colonies persisted around the world until World War II. At that time, the British and French were both exhausted by war and unable to control territories abroad and the smaller colonial powers (e.g. the Netherlands and Portugal) saw their claims overrun by the Nazis during the war or independence movements after it (e.g. Indonesia and Timor).

During colonial rule, governing boundaries were consistently drawn as a means to divide and conquer populations (e.g. allowing only one nation to hold positions of power over others or slicing up larger nations into different political units).

Once these colonial powers left, there was a strong question as to whether or not to continue with the administrative units as is or redo them completely. Either option created uncertainty and the likelihood of conflict increased.

The international community as a whole has tended to agree in principle on the right of nations to self-determination, or the right of a nation to govern itself.

In the 1960s, with colonialism formally coming to an end around much of the world, the United Nations passed Resolution 1541, in which it says self-determination by nations requires only “a freely expressed will and desire” of a people, which most interpret as a referendum vote. The issue, however, is how is this vote even managed in cases in which the government does not want it to happen.

Though many nations exist within Nigeria (left), the politics is dominated by the three largest nations: the Hausa-Fulani in the north, the Yoruba the west, and the Igbo in the southeast (right).

Independence, Unity, & Disunity (1950s & 1960s)

Though the British controlled the entire territory they called Nigeria, the three civilizations did not see themselves as parts of the same whole. In fact, it was the development of modern infrastructure (e.g. ports, roads, railways, etc.) to facilitate moving raw goods from the interior and north of Nigeria to the coast that worked to unify the distinct regions and create a more integrated Nigeria. Thus the imposition of colonial rule actually helped to facilitate the emergence of the idea of statehood.

As a colony, the British has recognized the three distinct regions of Nigeria and ruled them as separate administrative districts: Northern, Western, and Eastern with Hausa, Yoruba, and Igbo leaders respectively. At the time of independence, the Western and Eastern regions were considerable more educated than the North because they had accepted Christian missionaries' educational lessons while the Muslim northerners had not. The Hausa-Fulanis, however, outnumbered the Yoruba and Igbo, demographically.

At independence, a new constitution established a federal republic with a ceremonial presidency, a directly elected House of Representatives, a Senate elected by regional assemblies, and a prime minister chosen from the legislative branch. Finally, there would be a British governor-general to remain as the British government representative thus keeping Nigeria in the British Commonwealth.

Though the initial transition was void of the violence and destruction that plagued other independence stories, the new nation of Nigeria found that the Nigerian nationalism that had been a potent force for independence made way to interests that reinforced regional tendencies.

Nigerian Civil War (1967 to 1970)

When the first elections were held in in 1959, prior to independence, there were some 250 different political parties that formed. The three largest, however, were dominated by the three largest ethnic groups. The Hausa-Fulani formed the Northern People’s Conference (NPC), the Yoruba formed the Action Group Party (AGP), and the Igbo formed the National Council of Nigerian Citizens (NCNC).

As the Hausa-Fulani demographically held the majority, their Northern People’s Conference gained over half of the seats in government. Though they had internal divisions, after the NPC leader (Abubakar Tafawa Balewa) won the role of prime minister, the Igbo’s National Council of Nigerian Citizens joined forces with the Hausa NPC to form a large voting bloc in the federal government.

The joining of the northern and eastern political parties severely weakened the Yoruba’s AGP from the western region, which was already facing challenges from smaller ethnic groups in the western region that were protesting Yoruba control and calling for more representation within the government.

When elections in 1962 and 1965 in the west failed to be declared valid and credible, the Igbo decided to take matters into their own hands. Igbo army officers successfully assassinated the Hausa Prime Minister, a number of military officials from the north, and leaders of each of the political parties. They then suspended the constitution, banned all political parties, called for a new government that would be unitary (rather than federal) in structure to end northern domination.

The coup set off a civil war. The Hausa-Fulani from the north launched a countercoup to regain control of the federal government. After successfully overthrowing (and murdering) the Igbo officially, these Hausa-Fulani reinstated a federal (rather than unitary) government under military rule. In addition to the countercoup, the Hausa-controlled federal government launched a military attack from the north aimed at the Eastern Region, persecuting and killing many Igbo civilians. The new leader, Hausa General Yakubu Gowon, suggested that Nigeria would return to civilian rule after it underwent dramatic political reforms. It would not return to civilian rule until 1979.

In response, the Igbo-led eastern region seceded from Nigeria in 1967, declaring itself to be the Republic of Biafra. Although the Biafrans were outnumbered and outgunned, they held off the Nigerian military for three years, aided in part by international supporters who believed the Nigerian government was conducting a genocidal war against the Igbo. In 1970, however, the Biafra surrendered. When Nigeria was reunited, it was estimated that perhaps more than a million Igbo had died in the war.

Having run unsuccessfully in three elections prior as a member of a small northern political party against the larger PDP, Buhari was finally elected to presidency. Though he had ruled under the Hausa-Fulani military junta from 1983, he attested (and still does) to being an avowed democrat. Buhari’s victory was relative close and distinctly along regional lines.

Resource Curse: Oil

Nigeria began to discover its wealth of oil in the 1960s. By the 1970s, Nigeria was one of the top 10 oil-producing countries in the world. As is the concern of many states with abundant resources and internal political divisions, Nigeria experienced “a resource curse,” a term originally coined by Richard Auty in 1993 that encompasses the paradox in which a state has abundant natural resources (e.g. fossil fuels) but experiences negative or stagnant economic growth. As an example, Nigeria’s per capita GDP was $1,113 in 1970 and is estimated to have remained at US $1,084 three decades later. Moreover, the number of Nigerians who subsist on less than one dollar a day increased from 20 million to 80 million during the same period.

Though there are many causal factors attributed to the resource curse, one of the most straightforward is that those in power are not investing the wealth in public goods (e.g. infrastructure, education, the larger market economy), but are instead keeping the revenues for themselves and their most loyal supporters (i.e. patrimonialism).

In the late 1980s, in exchange for institution strong neoliberal reforms (e.g. lowering tariffs and export taxes, encouraging foreign private investment in Nigerian sectors such as oil, and slashing government spending), the government accepted IMF loans for Nigeria. Though this did jumpstart the economy, the individuals not benefiting from oil revenues suffered from this austerity program and personally fell into in a more dire economic situation.

Oil revenues are the key to a functioning government in Nigeria, and ten states in the Niger Delta region contributes over 90% of all of Nigeria’s oil exports. Currently, five international oil companies are operating in the Niger Delta: Royal Dutch Shell (British), Chevron & Texaco (American), Exxon-Mobil (American), Igip (Italian), and Elf (French).

Royal Dutch Shell is responsible for nearly half of the oil production in Nigeria (and has been in operation in Nigeria since oil was first extracted in 1956). Next, the two American companies are each responsible for about 20% of the oil production in Nigeria. Finally, Igip and Elf account for about 10% of the total oil production in Nigeria.

These international oil companies are required to contract with the Nigerian National Petroleum Company through joint ventures. In most cases, the federal government issues a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with each oil company. These MOUs state that the operating company in a joint venture receives a fixed sum per barrel provided the price of oil per barrel remains within certain margins. The risk and benefit of oil price fluctuations thus largely falls on the government.

Currently, the federal government obtains its share of oil revenue from the joint ventures with the foreign oil companies into one big Federal pot of money. Over the last few decades, oil revenue has accounted for between seventy and eighty percent of the federal government’s revenue base with agriculture and industry offering the other twenty to thirty.

The oil-rich areas in the southeast are predominantly occupied by nine minority ethnic groups - the Ogoni, Andoni, Brass, Dioubu, Etche, Ijaw, Kalibari, Nembe, and Okrika. These local communities have argued that the oil companies appear as external players who are taking the wealth from the region, sharing it with the federal government, and neither the government nor these companies are providing little in return. Further, these companies are seen as negatively impacting the environment within this region, which in turn hurts economic opportunities for fishermen and farmers as well as raising health, safety, and conservationist concerns.

Constitutionally, the federal government gets to keep 50% of the state’s total oil revenues made within the country for its own use (around $45 billion) and must then redistribute the other 50% across the states as it sees fit. Further, though constitutionally the federal government is required to return 13% of the oil revenue to the oil-producing states (mentioned above), the UN Development Program (UNDP) suggests instead that the oil revenue is being accumulated by the national government to be used for private goods for loyal followers of the key leaders, rather than reinvested in key areas around the Niger Delta.

The presence of oil production facilities in the Niger Delta has resulted in major negative environmental impacts in this region as well. Prior to oil extraction in the Niger Delta, the region was home to approximately 31 million people (and over 40 ethnic groups) and an estimated 75% of the Niger Delta population relied on farming and fishing as a means of sustaining their livelihoods. With these negative environmental impacts comes a decrease in the economic opportunities for these individuals.

Developed countries such as the United States require mud from drilling to be enclosed in a containment well or landfill to prevent seepage. However, the Nigerian government permits oil operations to dispose of the drilling waste directly into the river. As a result of dumping into the Niger River Delta, fishing is no longer an option. Further, the water is contaminated and is not safe for drinking. Finally, the rainwater cannot be collected for drinking because it falls as acid rain.

The air has also been severely polluted. As natural gas that is a byproduct of drilling, there is concern of explosions if the natural gas is not handled carefully. As a result, “flaring” is a standard practice in which the gas is collected in batches and then combusted. Though flaring prevents large explosions from occurring during drilling for oil, it emits massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and it combined with emissions of methane and soot produced by refineries produce low air quality linked to cancer, asthma, and other lung diseases.

The most immediate threat to this region is oils spills, which have damaged the land dramatically. At least one hundred pumping stations and pipelines crisscross the Niger delta, running over farmland and through villages, and leaks and spills are a common occurrence. From 1970 to 1982, 1,581 oil spill incidences were recorded in the Niger Delta.

Terrorism: Boko Haram

Boko Haram promotes a version of Islamic extremism that makes it "haram," or forbidden, for women to take part in any political or social activity associated with Western society. This includes voting in elections, women wearing pants, or receiving a secular education. Boko Haram regards the Nigerian state as being run by non-believers, even when the country had a Muslim president - and it has extended its military campaign by targeting neighboring states.

Originally founded in 2002, it began launching military operations in 2009 to create an Islamic state throughout Nigeria. In July of 2009, a clash with Nigeria’s security forces resulted in a death toll of more than 700. In the years afterward, Boko Haram had used hit-and-run strategies and kidnapping. Nigeria’s president declared a state of emergency in the north-western State of Borno on New Year’s Eve of 2011. Boko Haram was declared a terrorist group by the United States in 2013, and in 2014 it declared a caliphate in the three northeastern states of Borno, Yobe, and Adamawa. That same year, it began its strategy of kidnapping and then exacting ransoms, including the kidnapping of over 200 schoolgirls in the state of Borno. It is estimated that more than 20,000 people have been killed and 2 million forced to flee their homes in Nigeria since the jihadist group began an insurgency in 2009.

Women’s Rights

Many countries within the international community have insisted that education is a human right: an essential experience that enables both boys and girls to achieve their full potential in society. Yet millions of children in Africa – mostly girls – do not attend school. Across the continent, the need for true gender equality in education is attracting increasing attention. On 31 January 2015, the African Union annual summit ended with a public declaration that 2015 would be the “Year of Women’s Empowerment and Development.”However, despite the recent spotlight given to the importance of achieving gender equality, receiving a basic education is still an uphill fight for young girls living in Africa.

This is very clear in the northern region of Nigeria. The northern region’s predominantly Muslim population has been allowed to govern their states and local areas under Sharia law. Included in this is the tendency in some areas to disallow girls to attend school and to permit the practice of polygyny. In the west, however, the Yoruba have tended to encourage education for girls and many women play a role in businesses upon graduation. In the east, though education for girls is not prohibited, women are most often encouraged to engage in subsistence farming rather than seek an education.

Another key area of tension is around the issue of female genital mutilation (FGM). It is estimated that 20 million girls in Nigeria have undergone FGM, around 82 percent before their fifth birthday. Though it is widespread throughout Nigeria, it is prevalent in about 75% of the population in the Yoruba Christian population in the western region. Though the practice was outlawed in 2015, it is still practiced widely.

Population Boom

Nigerians account for nearly 2.6 of the global population and is the seventh most populated state. Further, most of the population lives in urban areas, such as Lagos in the southwest. Further, most of the country’s people are under the age of 25, yet there are limited opportunities for employment in a country where most of its revenue comes from oil and yet the majority of the population (two-thirds) are subsistence farmers.