Kenya and Somalia row over offshore rights is rooted in the carve up of Africa

The borderlines separating Kenya and Somalia were first drawn in the late 19th century. Like everywhere else on the continent, this was the work of cartographers working for European colonial powers. Across the continent they replaced porous spaces in which people engaged openly across culture, language, religion, kinship, and ethnicity with straight-line geometrics.

East Africa was no exception. For ages, the borderlands in the Horn of Africa conformed to the adage: