Introduction: Narrating War and Peace in Africa

Summary

This volume examines war and peace in Africa—mainly in the twentieth century and up to the present time—with an emphasis on the manner of their representation. Such an approach is justified and called for, as too many Western representations tend to reduce Africa and its inhabitants to negative generalized stereotypes. These stereotypes are found everywhere: from philosophy to historiography and popular culture. According to Hegel (1770–1831), Africa “is no historical part of the World,” while Hugh Trevor-Roper in 1963 did not hesitate to write about the African past as the “unrewarding gyrations of barbarous tribes in picturesque but irrelevant corners of the globe.” These days, postcolonial imagery of the Third World is presented as a spectacle: “Next to Bacardi-rum beaches, images of suffering, starvation and bloodshed circulate through the media networks of the world's electronic Colosseum.” If, therefore, general representations of Africa are problematic, representations of wars and conflicts in Africa are even more so.

Although wars and conflicts appear to typify the African continent in the second half of the twentieth century, we have to remember that “the whole of human history includes wars, massacres, and every kind of torture and cruelty.” However, in postindependence Africa, there have been, and still are, numerous wars and violent conflicts, for example, in Nigeria, Rwanda, Burundi, Zaire/the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Somalia, Sierra Leone, Uganda, Mozambique, South Africa, and Chad, and more recently in Sudan, Zimbabwe, and Kenya. Many of these conflicts culminate(d) in civil wars, and so it is that, with a few exceptions, “the history of the gains of independence now appears distant.” These gains appear to be distant because “the nation-state has proved a burden, capitalism a failure, and liberal democracy elusive.” As there are no credible alternatives to these Western legacies, the question is,

How can the various ethnic groups accept the notion of the nation-state? If an ethnic group operates like a mini-nation within a modern country, how can the clashes between mini-states be prevented? A mini-nation continues to use its collective history, identity, language, and other aspects of culture to strengthen ethnicity and compete with other groups within the new country.