Africa is a continent where borders can get pretty complicated. The main reason for this is the colonial era where European nations divided the continent into spheres of influence by literally drawing the national borders as guided by their interests leaving some countries with peculiar national borders.

That’s why you will find some countries with clearly defined shapes while others not so much. Today we zoom in on some of Africa’s most egregious examples of border weirdness.

⁣In this video Dr Luyaluka join the audience of Ancestral Voices to share his views about the scientific nature of African traditional religion (ATR).


Thanks to a cosmological argument, he demonstrates that, in its original nature, ATR is an exact science.


Emphasizing the importance of this affirmation, Dr Luyaluka shows its relevance in the domains of African ethics, traditional technology, renaissance, etc.


The ideas of this video have been inspired by our book titled BUKÔNGO available here:
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?=-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=kiatezua

After years of talks, July 7 2019, marks the date when 54 individual African states signed the African Continental Free Trade Agreement, effectively making Africa the world’s largest free trade area by number of countries since the formation of the World Trade Organization. The goal of this was to establish a single continent-wide market for goods and services across 54 countries, allow the free movement of business travelers and investments, and spur economic growth and development, similar to how the European Union created a single market out of many different individual states. By increasing regional trade, lowering trade costs and streamlining border procedures, full implementation of the pact would be a huge step forward for Africa, demonstrating to the world that it is emerging as a leader in global trade. And So what if this giant African market gives rise to a new country.. A fusion of all 55 countries into one massive un-partitioned state called the United States of Africa?

Apparently the Sahara has not always been a searing wilderness with little to zero rainfall but was once a vast savanna, reminiscent of grasslands of the Serengeti. And I don’t mean just a few years of extra showers of rain, I mean a climate that was so wet for so long that humans and animals made themselves at home in the Sahara. The mystery therefore is HOW and WHEN this lush grassland turned into the barren wasteland we see today.

For over two decades, Somalia was at war with itself, a legitimate government was overthrown in 1991, plunging the nation into a deadly civil war. Amid the power vacuum warlords tore apart the Horn of Africa nation, and Somalia’s waters became free-for-all as unlicensed foreign fishing fleets went on an illegal fishing frenzy.

Foreign trawlers have been illegally taking millions of tonnes of Somalia’s fish denying the country millions of dollars in revenue and stirring deep-seated frustrations in local Somalis and eventually morphed into one of the world’s most dangerous maritime security threats that made Somalia's coastline one of the most dangerous in the world.

There is little doubt amongst Somalis that conflicts like these provided the original impetus for what became the piracy phenomenon. In the local setting, illegal fishing, and the economic damage it inflicted, left traditional fishing communities so angered and impoverished that they began attacking the illegal fishing vessels, acting as a sort of militia coast guard.

However, criminal gangs subsequently saw the profit potential and started hijacking more valuable commercial ships unconnected to illegal fishing. Thus the scourge of Somali piracy in the Gulf of Aden was born.

Africa's Largest Dam: Geopolitics of the Nile

The dam is at the center of Ethiopia’s bid to become Africa’s biggest power exporter. Economic growth in Ethiopia, which is Africa’s second-most populous nation, has been stifled by a lack of electricity. Industry revenues are decimated by the nightmare of daily, unpredictable power cuts. The dam’s power will also help with similar problems in Sudan, Kenya and Djibouti, all of which are connected to Ethiopia’s grid and will begin importing power from it in the coming years. Long but futile negotiations over the years have left Egypt and Ethiopia and their neighbor Sudan short of an agreement to regulate how Ethiopia will operate the dam and fill its reservoir.

Egypt, which is Africa’s third-most populous nation, relies on the Nile for more than 90% of its fresh water supplies and wants a legally binding treaty on how Ethiopia can use the Blue Nile’s waters. With the construction of the Dam (GERD) underway, a complex trans boundary water situation is at hand: the GERD is nearing completion, with no specific agreement yet on water sharing or reservoir operations. The dam can capture more than the average annual flow and can thus dramatically change the river’s flow. Although most Nile waters originate in Ethiopia, nearly all use occurs downstream in Egypt and Sudan. Egypt, fearing major disruptions to its access to the Nile’s waters, originally intended to prevent even the start of the GERD’s construction. In fact, Egypt has called the filling of the dam an existential threat. At this point, though, the GERD is nearly completed, and so Egypt has shifted its position to trying to secure a political agreement over the timetable for filling the GERD’s reservoir and how the dam will be managed, particularly during droughts. Thus the Geopolitics of the Nile has been a hot topic.

Sudan is caught between the competing interests of Egypt and Ethiopia. Although Khartoum initially opposed the construction of the GERD, it has since warmed up to it, citing its potential to improve prospects for domestic development. Nevertheless, Khartoum continues to fear that the operation of the GERD could threaten the safety of Sudan’s own dams and make it much more difficult for the government to manage its own development projects.

Low taxes have drawn many foreign companies to Mauritius and account for a huge portion of the country's $16 billion GDP. Mauritius is one of Africa's richest countries on per capita basis. However Mauritius long been shadowed by financial secrecy, with the island’s government overseeing LEGAL but QUESTIONABLE processes that have allowed global companies to siphon millions of tax dollars away from other African nations.

The Earth is a large, complex planet made up of many different systems that interact in countless ways, sometimes deep and often surprising ways. Take the Amazon tropical rainforest for example. There is no place on earth quite like it, it is one of the greatest natural habitats on the planet, it covers 40% of the South American continent, contains nearly 400 billion individual trees within the forest, and creates one-fifth of our planet’s oxygen.

As big and mighty as it is, the Amazon is sustained by the Sahara desert. It is nothing short of extraordinary. On one side of the Atlantic ocean is one of the most inhospitable and driest wilderness on Earth with searing temperatures and little to zero rainfall. On the other side is one of the wettest and most fertile locations on earth. Despite over 10,000 km of open ocean separating the world’s largest rainforest and the world’s largest hot desert, the two regions are intimately connected and do share a vital commonality, nutrient-rich dust