Unlimiting the Limits of African Borders: The Case of Cameroon-Nigeria Border Towns of Abongshe and Abong

The notion and function of boundary differed fundamentally in the European and African contexts. In traditional Africa, the concept of boundary was expressed in terms of neighbours with whom the particular polity shared a territory and such a boundary was conceived of in terms of a region or a narrow zone fronting the two neighbours marked off by it. Thus, the boundary was the zone where two States were joined together, not separated. In other words, African boundaries were usually rooted in ethnic and social contact. But European partition of Africa conceived boundaries as physical separation points. Africans who had become frontiersmen had no immediate knowledge that their lands and kin divided by the boundary were now “foreign”. They did not know that the new boundaries functioned differently from the traditionally familiar ones. They thought the former was only for the white men until they were checked at crossing points. Its impact on their relations with their kin and neighbours made them to create secret routes across the frontiers. But these new borders soon faded in their minds in favour of their familiar economic and socio-cultural interactions, and providing favourable breading spaces for new border stakes, namely, prostitution, smuggling and child trafficking. Often, the border regimes participated and surrendered their authority to the overwhelming influence of these phenomena. This paper, therefore, attempts a theoretical approach to the notion of boundaries, the valorisation of ethnic rather than international prescript boundaries by the inhabitants of Abongshe and Abong, and shows how their activities render this Cameroon-Nigeria frontier line a cooperating and blending zone. It, of course, brings to book the famous African-frontier- prone-conflict paradigm.