'Good fences make good neighbours'. Agreement on where the fences should stand and good maintenance all help keep the peace. It's a hopeful sign of political maturity that we have had so few border conflicts in post-colonial Africa. After all, where the colonial powers put the fences is often absurd. However, perhaps the fact that they insouciantly plonked international borders in the middle of homogeneous communities was so absurd that the people never took them seriously and just walked through holes in the fences to see their friends and family– no passport necessary!

A statement of this maturity was made by the Kenyan Ambassador to the United Nations when Russia recognised the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts of Ukraine as independent states as a preliminary move to its full-scale invasion. Ambassador Martin Kimani said, “This situation echoes our history. Kenya and almost every African country was birthed by the ending of the empire,”...  “Our borders were not of our own drawing. They were drawn in the distant colonial metropoles of London, Paris and Lisbon, with no regard for the ancient nations that they cleaved apart.” ...

“At independence, had we chosen to pursue states on the basis of ethnic, racial or religious homogeneity, we would still be waging bloody wars many decades later,” he said. “Instead, we agreed that we would settle for the borders that we inherited, but we would still pursue continental political, economic and legal integration.” 

It is true that changes have been made to some post-colonial African borders by successful breakaway movements, such as Eritrea or South Sudan, but partition rarely has happy outcomes. No sooner had South Sudan broken away than it was plunged into a power struggle between two 'big men' and, in a horrible mirror-image, the same is now happening in Khartoum. 

It is also true that borders have been violated elsewhere in the post-WWII era - by Turkey in north-east Cyprus, by Israel in Syria's Golan Heights and East Jerusalem, the USA in Afghanistan and Iraq. However, the USA never tried to annexe their conquests and eventually had to withdraw, and the Turkish and Israeli annexations have never found international acceptance. The principle of territorial integrity stands just, but with Putin's invasion of Ukraine, it is under the greatest threat since Hitler.

The problem is that when the levers of power fall into the hands of the wrong people, you can kiss international law goodbye. Some of the current crop of world leaders are utterly contemptuous of international law and will flout it where they can get away with it. Thus, it could become possible and even fashionable to violate international borders, a problem for Africa where frontiers are fragile. 

The war in Ukraine seems remote, a proxy conflict between Russia and the West, the outcome of which we cannot do much to influence. However, its outcome might actually prove to be crucial for the future stability of this Continent. If Putin successfully swallows a slice or all of Ukraine, who can doubt that some other dictators, perhaps with Russian military and diplomatic support, will be tempted to do the same? A straw in the wind was Venezuala's Mr Maduro who was recently threatening to march into neighbouring Guyana. Unfortunately, we do have some local Maduros, and some of them in West Africa are being propped up by Russia's Wagner mercenaries.

If it sounds fantastical to envisage an attempted annexation of Lesotho by a populist South African leader, or the taking of a slice of Eastern Congo by Rwanda or the swallowing up of The Gambia by Senegal (note the maps!), we should recall how unlikely an old-fashioned European war of annexation seemed three years ago, and yet here we are.

Hence, I wonder if, in southern Africa we aren't being geographically complacent on this issue. Is our 'neutrality' in regard to the Ukraine invasion perhaps a cop-out, a dangerous ambiguity and a potential own goal against our precious principle of the inviolability of borders, a principle that if weakened, could cause us to be drawn into endless, retro, European-style wars of conquest?