Cynthia Thanda

Faulty lines. A term I have heard quite a few times, and I always wonder if my ancestors were geographically clueless. Were they wandering around without knowing where their world started and ended?

But maybe my question isn’t wrong, just a tad bit ignorant and arrogant. Our ancestors did know where their land ended, but they measured it in people and rivers rather than in latitudinal degrees. The tragedy isn’t that we had no borders, but that our functional borders were overwritten by foreign lines.

On February 25th, 2026, His Excellency Advocate Duma Gideon Boko, President of Botswana, and His Excellency Hakainde Hichilema, President of the Republic of Zambia, jointly officiated the launch of the Kazungula Bridge Authority, a milestone for both countries.

The Kazungula Bridge Authority is a joint bilateral body established by Botswana and Zambia to manage the operations, maintenance, and trade activities of the Kazungula Bridge and its One Stop Border Post to optimise regional transit along the North-South Corridor.

However, we have to remember the long border dispute sparked by the construction of the Kazungula Bridge — a dispute that, as it turns out, was never really just between two countries. Kazungula Bridge is a road and rail bridge over the Zambezi River linking Zambia and Botswana. During construction, a bridge originally planned at 600 metres had to undergo design alterations, bending away from Zimbabwe, curving into Zambia and stretching to 923 metres.

The reason for the bend is the strangest part of the story. Kazungula sits at what maps have long called a quadripoint — the only place on the continent where four countries, Zambia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, and Namibia, appear to meet at a single point on the Zambezi.

Zimbabwe has long argued that no direct Botswana–Zambia border exists and that any bridge between them would have to pass through Zimbabwean territory. Botswana and Zambia disagreed, and eventually secured Namibia’s agreement that a narrow stretch of river between the two tripoints belonged to Namibia, giving them room to curve the bridge around Zimbabwe’s claim entirely.

So the bridge doesn’t just avoid Zimbabwe out of caution. It avoids Zimbabwe because the four countries have never agreed, on paper, where their borders actually meet.

An attempt to resolve this dispute occurred in December 2023, when Zimbabwe’s Minister of Lands, Agriculture, Fisheries, Water and Rural Development, Anxious Masuka, met with Botswana’s then Minister of Lands, Management, Water and Sanitation Services, Kefentse Mzwinila, at the Kazungula border post.

The meeting ended in a deadlock. The bridge itself did not cause the dispute; the problem is that there was never a formally surveyed boundary. The curve is a compromise borne of confusion — the invisible, undrawn line in the Zambezi that colonial powers never bothered to define.

When we look further across the continent, the pattern repeats. The Nigeria–Cameroon dispute over the Bakassi Peninsula stretched from the 1900s into the 2000s, and eventually went to the International Court of Justice because colonial-era treaties were so vague and contradictory that both nations believed the land was theirs. The Court’s 2002 ruling handed Bakassi to Cameroon, but Nigerian communities living there never fully accepted the transfer.

Sudan and South Sudan carry a dispute that refuses to end: Abyei, a resource-rich region straddling their shared border, was promised a referendum on which country it would join, and that referendum has never happened. Migingo Island, a tiny outcrop in Lake Victoria barely large enough to stand on, has been claimed by both Kenya and Uganda for nearly two decades, with fishermen from both sides caught in between.

As for the Kazungula Bridge, they say we solved it. But did we really solve anything? Did a few minutes of conversation between the presidents of Botswana and Zimbabwe end a decade-long dispute, without a written treaty settling where the border actually runs?

The bridge still bends around Zimbabwe’s claim, using a strip of river that Zambia, Botswana, and Namibia simply agreed among themselves was Namibian. That is a workaround, not a resolution. The bridge is open. The trucks are crossing. But the border — the very line that defines where one country ends and another begins — is still in dispute. We didn’t solve the fault line. We built a detour around it.

All these examples show how colonisation played a part in not only destroying lives, but shaping the future of many independent countries. Did we really get freedom? Or is the colonial map still governing us through faulty lines?

As new disputes surface and old ones resurface, conflict will keep cropping up, and somehow we will keep needing outside help to manage the very lines the outside world drew.

This is not only an African story. The India–Pakistan border was drawn in weeks by a British lawyer who had never set foot in the subcontinent, and it still divides Kashmir today.

The 1917 Balfour Declaration and the boundaries Britain left behind in Palestine still shape the conflict between Israel and Palestine now unfolding. Different continents, same inheritance: lines drawn by people who were leaving, for people who would have to stay.

In Botswana, we bent a bridge. In Abyei, they bent to armed groups. In Lake Victoria, fishermen bent under the weight of confiscated nets. The line on a colonial map may be over a century old, but its weight is measured every day.