Thinking an African Politics of Peace in an Era of Increasing Violence

Michael Neocosmos

It should be apparent to all that violent approaches to resolving popular contradictions are today (again) seemingly all-pervasive on the African continent. The patent inability of the (new democratic) African state to resolve popular contradictions has led to more or less vocal calls for ‘foreign help’, with consequences which are often too ghastly to contemplate. It is not simply here a question of state deployed violence but also of popular violence (e.g. of an ethnic or xenophobic kind). In South Africa at least a ‘culture of violence’ has been systemically produced by specific forms of political thought and practice and not simply inherited from a colonial/apartheid past. In Nigeria the state’s insistence on addressing the Boko Haram phenomenon militarily has (predictably) completely backfired leading to the kidnapping of teenage children à la (originally Ugandan) Lords’ Resistance Army. The only popular response on offer seems to be a moral one: ‘free our girls’. The absence of alternative politics should be evident. This paper attempts to think a political alternative to violence founded upon concepts and categories inherent in African traditions; i.e. in in actually existing (although often subterranean) popular practices. These cannot be understood as mere survivals but have been imaginatively altered and reconstructed to different extents and in different ways because of the necessity of people to cope with ongoing crises in their lives from the slave trade onwards. The paper then is fundamentally conceptual and methodological in order to redirect analyses and to begin to make alternatives thinkable.

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Thinking an African Politics of Peace in an Era of Increasing Violence