Letter from Africa: Big walls can cause big problems Published duration 1 August 2015

image copyright AFP

In our series of letters from African journalists, Ghanaian writer Elizabeth Ohene looks at the problems around building big walls.

Neighbours can drive you to distraction. Some are noisy, some are dirty, some are dangerous and some are just plain unreasonable.

Often if you can afford to, the only option really is to move from that particular neighbourhood and hope you don't end up in a worse one.

But more often than not, and if you are a country instead of a person, you can't move and so you try to find ways to keep out the unpleasantness.

And so we build walls. But then walls can cause more trouble than they solve.

I was witness once to a dramatic example of a domestic wall causing unbelievable tragedy.

Courtroom shoot-out

I had arrived in Addis Ababa on a reporting trip and met up with the soft-spoken journalist who was the stringer for the BBC African Service.

He had managed to report from Ethiopia for us and one other western news agency throughout the difficult years of Marxist ruler Mengistu Haile Mariam.

Our reporter lived next door to a general in the Ethiopian army.

I forget now which of the two of them built the wall; but the other claimed the wall was blocking the sunlight into his kitchen.

Twice the wall was demolished by the person who found it offensive and twice it was rebuilt.

The matter was taken to the Kebele, the neighbourhood court, to be settled and during the hearing, one thing led to another and our reporter shot the general dead.

The general's bodyguards then turned on the reporter and shot him.

Elizabeth Ohene:

image copyright Elizabeth Ohene

"There is nothing in history that would lead us to believe that the highest walls can keep out unwanted people or keep in people who want to get out"

Luckily for him he did not die and I found him critically wounded in hospital under the guard of armed soldiers. With the overthrow of Mengistu, he ended up being freed from jail and disappeared in the ensuing chaos.

Apart from the shock of having to come to terms with the reality of this most erudite and calm reporter shooting somebody, never mind an army general who was his neighbour, I couldn't work out how a fence wall could generate so much passion.

But in truth, it would seem walls have always been contentious structures.

We build walls to divide and keep out and therein lies the problem.

image copyright Getty Images image caption Kenyan security forces have struggled to guard their porous border with Somalia

Recently Tunisia announced it was going to build a wall along its borders with Libya to counter the threat from jihadist militants.

The wall would stretch 160km (100 miles) inland from the coast, and be completed by the end of 2015.

This is the Tunisian response to the crisis it is facing in the light of the massacre of tourists on its beaches.

Great divides: Past and present

image copyright AFP image caption A section of the Berlin Wall in 1962

Israel began building barrier in and around the occupied West Bank in 2002: 720km planned by completion

India has fenced much of the 740km Line of Control (LoC) that divides Indian and Pakistani-administered Kashmir

Demilitarised Zone (DMZ) between North and South Korea created in 1953 heavily guarded on both sides: 250km long and about 4km wide

Saudi Arabia is building a fence along its border with Yemen: 1,800km

The Berlin Wall (20th Century), divided East Germany and West Germany from 1961 to 1989: 155km

Hadrian's Wall (2nd Century), divided the Romans in England from Scotland: 117.5km

The Great Wall of China (began in 5th Century BC), a series of walls protecting China's northern border: 21,196km, built up over several centuries

Earlier in the year, Kenya had announced similar plans to build a wall along its borders with Somalia to keep out al-Shabab militants crossing over to its territory.

The 708km wall would be a series of concrete barriers, fences, ditches and observation posts overlooked by CCTV stations that is expected to stretch from the Indian Ocean to the city of Mandera, where Somalia and Kenya converge with Ethiopia.

I don't hold out much hope for the success of these mega projects.

The remnants of the Great Wall of China has been useful more as a tourist attraction than it ever was for the original purpose for which it was built, which was to keep out the Mongols, and the same can be said for the Hadrian's Wall in England - though both were symbols of their builder's military might.

image copyright AFP image caption Berlin Wall has now become a tourist attraction centre since its fall in 1989

For as long as you have unpleasant neighbours, you cannot be safe.

There is nothing in history that would lead us to believe that the highest walls can keep out unwanted people or keep in people who want to get out.

The Berlin Wall is the most recent dramatic example of the futility of such walls.

Phone walls

Sometimes there might not be any physical wall but the barrier can be quite as dramatic.

I went to a funeral in a small town in my constituency the other day.

As we drove in, my telephone company sent an SMS message to my phone, which said:

"Welcome to TOGO. The following rates apply: $1.5 per minute to make a call & $0.5 to receive a call, SMS $0.4 and mobile data is $0.02/1KB. The rates are tax exclusive."

I was furious. I hate the extortionate roaming charges the phone companies impose, and if I can help it, I no longer willingly use my phone when I go outside Ghana.

From bitter, earlier experience, I knew better than to try and argue with the phone company that I hadn't been in Togo when their signal tower had located me in Togo even though I was in Ghana.

The truth is the neighbouring country of Togo lies just across the road from the church in this town I was visiting.

It is one of the absurd consequences of the partition of Africa between the European powers.

More than 100 years after the infamous Berlin Conference, the borders exist on paper and are royally ignored by the people on the ground.

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