What Nation States Would Look Like In Africa

This is a map of Africa using ethnically drawn borders, rather than those drawn by imperial powers. Needless to say, an Africa made up of nation-states would have far more countries, almost all smaller than the existing ones, than the status quo does.

Indeed, ethnic division and small pre-colonial political units, none of which could on its own raise a large army or dominate trade in a region, were factors in addition to "Guns, Germs and Steel" that allow made colonial rule possible in Africa.

In contrast, in much of Europe and mainland Asia, wars of conquest gradually produced larger and larger kingdoms that the rulers of these kingdoms eventually homogenized culturally and linguistically, a process that much of Africa didn't experience. And, in the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, and much of Oceania, European colonists with more homogeneity replaced or overwhelmed local populations through demic replacement and cultural and linguistic transitions.

Of course, there is a certain level of subjectively involved in any such map. For example, one level of generality above individual ethnicities and languages is language families, illustrated on the map below, and membership in the same language family often coincides with cultural commonalities as well.

In between, you can look at both language families and individual languages in the same map (from here) in an image that captures not just those too levels of analysis but also the relative similarity of languages in the same family as a function of color shades:

Any map assigning a single language to a geographic area, of course, also fails to represent the fact that multiple languages are often spoken by people in the same vicinity, even the same village or neighborhood, and that in many places, multi-lingual individuals are common - often speaking one or more local languages and a national European colonial language as a lingua franca, albeit with a distinctive local dialect of that language.