The legacy of arbitrarily drawn borders and limited political centralization meant that in many SSA countries remnants of the colonial experience continue to play a big role in defining the institutional landscape, such as the civil service and public administration, educational system, and economic infrastructure. To be sure, many countries adopted English, French, or Portuguese as their official languages, and European missionaries, who often followed in the colonizers’ footsteps, had success in transmitting their religious practices to local populations.