Africa as a continent has suffered from the belittling effect of Western imaginative and ideological configuration of violence, political instability, famine, civil war, and barbarism. These imaginative and racial characterizations of Africa emanate to retain consistency from two contrasting image or metaphor.
The first image stemmed from the scholars that typifies Africa as “dangerous and mysterious” continent and the second depiction embedded in the film industry which portrays Africa as “wildlife safari”, as researchers noted. Such dominant representation of Africa in the Western media and academic institutions usually ignores the actualities and specificities of social, political, cultural, and economic processes that occur in the continent, rather, legitimatized the dominant worldview.
These containerizing of Africa as a single country, however, suppresses the diverse nature of Africa in terms of culture, philosophy, historical experience, and sociopolitical advancement of its constituency. In dealing with these intricated problems, African and African affiliated scholars challenged the discourse that undermines Africa as a single geographical concept and racial entity. Dehomogenizing those reductionist and anachronistic understanding of Africa is imperative to critically recognize the diverse and highly complex historical entity.
In other words, in tracing the idea of Africa, therefore, one has to think about several trajectories that produced or contributed to the invention of Africa as an intellectual construct riddled with artificial divides and paradoxical misrepresentations. Though one of the issues that need to be rethought or rethink in Africa is “Peace”. It needs particularities or “historical specificity” due to its subjective nature.
Whenever we talk about peace in Africa, examining its ontology and the cosmological order of the society is imperative, because, the African concept of peace embedded in the culture and moral tradition of the people. Whilst the point of departure between the Western and African concept of peace is, “morality” as the center of episteme, as, peace in Africa has a “spiritual and moral value” located in the religious belief systems of the people as handed down from one generation to another.
Since it is a lived experience, people often try to explain the circumstances around them from the context of traditional religions; it is because the spiritual is part and parcel of this holistic understanding of reality and patterns of thought as an African indigenous cosmology. Thus, African cultural worldview should be seen as a set of more or less systematized beliefs and values in terms of which the group evaluates and attaches meaning to the reality that surrounds it (Mulaudzi, 2014:97).
One should further also be aware of Mudimbe’s criticism that the gnosis (the seeking to know and the systems of knowing) of the people of Africa should not be determined by the non-African locus of Western epistemology (Mudimbe, 1988:x), rather by its indigenous people knowledge and wisdom. Indigenous knowledge or African knowledge has its own worldview that embraces wholeness, community and harmony which are deeply embedded in cultural values.
Furthermore, the method for acquisition has a practical, collective and social or interpersonal slant. Among the people, it is common to mention are the Oromo community. The Oromo epistemology of “peace” aimed at maintaining peace, as an essential key to all cosmic and human order, possessing the highest and most central value for humanity to pursue (Tena, 2013:159). The Oromo concept of peace surpasses (Galtung 1969) definition of peace that discussed the absence of violence as negative peace, and absence of direct and structural violence as positive peace.
Rather, the Oromo concept of peace advocates the presence of solidarity, harmony, brotherhood, and sharing. This philosophy of life most importantly, not limited to human relations but also give due emphasis for the cosmic order and spiritual power that is interconnected in every dimension. From an Oromo point of view or epistemology, according to Asmerom “the theme of peace is everywhere” (Legesse, 2000:77).
Due to such understanding of peace, every member of the society is expected to behave and act towards one another and towards others according to commitment to the value of peace. This comprehensive concept of peace which is deep-rooted in and among the Oromo culture required its people to establish brotherhood, cooperation, and harmonious relation with non-Oromo underlying that all human sprung from a single source that is Waaqa or God.
Such humanistic notion of peace according to Tena emanate from politicomilitary system of Gadaa not only as a political philosophy and a theology perspective but also a moral philosophy that rationally explains the moral quality that human acts and behaviors should have in the intricate nature of human relationships. If conflict occurred, the resolution is not merely focus on reconciliation between the parties, but also easing cooperation.
Furthermore, it can be noted that the principle of peace found in the Oromo community is not limited to human relationship rather the combination of or the integration of three distinguishable aspects, namely environment, society, and the spiritual. This implies that, African cultures are repositories of a substantial body of knowledge on how to promote peace and maintain harmonious community.
Apart from the Oromo concept of peace, one can take Ubuntu as another paradigm for peace corresponds to the loyalty of peoples in their relationship or the essence of being human. The term comes from an ethical rule expressed in Zulu and Xhosa languages, that disseminates the idea of “a person is a person through other people” (Ramose, 2003).
This concept of humanism according to Murithi shades light on the importance of building peaceful through the principles of reciprocity, inclusivity, and a sense of shared destiny between different peoples. Unlike the Cartesian world view that represents the western thought of individualism, the notion of Ubuntu expressed the humanity of a person to be determined by the alterity with others, through his/her humanity towards other human beings.
Since there is no real personal existence independent of society and its environment, the ethical and epistemological foundation of Ubuntu reflects how a member of a community are important as a part of the whole, not simply as individuals. Unlike the Western philosophical thought of individualism ‘I think, therefore, I am’ the African existential analytics confirmed, an individual can only say, ‘I am because we are’; and since ‘we are’, therefore, ‘I am’ (Chuwa 2014: 17). Thus, Ubuntu as an important concept of peace promote a culture of peace, tolerance, forgiveness, peaceful co-existence and mutual development. It is worth noting that “Ubuntu” facilitated to South Africa to transcend the bitterness, hatred and suspicion of the past (Murithi, 2009:223-224).
The resolution was successful because the guiding principle of ubuntu was based on the notion that both parties to a dispute need to be reconciled in order to re-build and maintain social trust and social cohesion, with a view to preventing the emergence and escalation of a culture of retribution among individuals, families and the society as a whole. Despite the abundance of African philosophical, theological, and ethical concepts of peace, many post-independent African states, however, preferred alienated and inapt model of peace.
Here, the argument does not emanate from guilty of romanticizing the African past, but Western solution since independence does not bring a viable or durable solution to African states. Africans are still in continuous conflict, ethnic tension, poverty, political instability, and humanitarian crisis. While conflicts are a characteristic of a certain socio-cultural process, at the same time the solution need to be dependent upon the strategy of satisfactory alternative that based on socio cultural process and design of that society.
However, the African peace process that favors external actors has faced “conceptual cramps”. Therefore, the Western and Eurocentric peace discourses require a serious interrogation in order to place the African worldview at the center and to arrive at a more authentic reflection on African peace. In order to understand this, examining post-independent African countries that have attracted a body of knowledge and foreign interference in to the continent is critical.
Elusive as it may be, decolonization produced moments of inspiration and promise in Africa. However, the inherited colonial institution after independence (Mamdani 1996) and the perennial mental colonization (Ngugi, 1994) crippled the state and facilitated the colonialist to protect their vested multilayer interests in the continent thereof.
As a result, the level and magnitude of violence escalated have never been seen before in Africa history. At the wake of these intricated problems, Cold war according to Schmidt, brought a new surge of foreign intervention to the continent (2013:7). In this period of mounting tension between East and West, African governments sometimes had a serious choice to make between the two blocs.
Despite their choice either of the two blocs, most African leaders including their giant institution (OAU) failed to Africanize the inherited institutions, politics, and economy with colonial structure. When the East or pro-socialist failed to support many African state, some African countries had remained beyond the scope of tensions between superpowers. In other words, the tension transformed into economic crisis, ethnic conflict and the struggle for state power.
At this juncture, foreign aid came with strings attached (its own luggage). In other words, since the end of cold war, many African countries attested a peacebuilding process that make compulsory of intervention. The underlying assumption of aid or intervention was, peace is the outcome of liberal democracy, market-based economic reforms, and the formation of liberal institutions. To legitimatize their concepts of peace, “fragility of state and state failure” works of literature came to the fore as a platform. This scholarship considered liberal peace and institution of the state as a mere solution to mal-state building in Africa. As Schmidt projection, some of these interventions resembled past imperial practices, with more powerful nations attempting to exploit Africa and its riches for their own ends (2013:8).
That is why the Westphalian state model that provides the paradigm for African state-building has encountered epistemological failures to find a model that fuses diverse nationalities into unified framework of the nation. Apart from these problems, the institutional legacy of colonialism in Africa has haunted African countries in their attempt to build a viable state (Mamdani, 1996).
In this precarious situation, the structural adjustment programs (SAP), military intervention in the name of “war on terror”, economic conditionality is either neo-liberal or liberal state-building memos that thoroughly implemented in Africa over the last four decades. These external global demands, however, failed to bring the desired outcome.
The Somali intervention, South Sudan civil war, Libya crisis, and Cameroon ethnic tension shade light on how the colonial institutional legacy of statecraft and Western one-size-fits-all policy (Brown, 2018) obstructed the development of Africa. Generally, the problem emanates from; first, while the teething troubles are internal, the solutions are external that disowned the objective reality of the African society.
Second, inflating international intervention (top-down) approach over local intervention (bottom-up). In other words, despite the need for contextspecific or a model that takes the local into account, many African states organized in a western imported model that sets priorities individualism over collective humanism.
The third is, paradoxical involvement of Western in war making and peace building in Africa. Any peace process that intended to bring durable peace needs to consider the cosmologies and theologies of the people in their specificity. Thus, understanding the social structure, institutions, and the guiding principles of the people is critical. Giving due emphasis on local arrangement (traditional conflict management process) and identifying the role expected from each member of the society is important to clearly delineate who should do what in the peace process.
The Ethiopian Herald April 05/2019
BY FISEHA MOREDA
