This week, The CIHA Blog will be posting a series of articles about nonviolence movements across Africa. The below post by CIHA Blog co-editor Cecelia Lynch gives an overview of such movements and a preview of the articles to follow. Stay tuned throughout the week for more (Nigeria’s Nonviolent Protest Movements, Peace Education in the DRC, Violence and Nonviolence in South Africa).
Educating the West about Nonviolence across Africa
by Cecelia Lynch
Recently, I heard a panelist speaking on South Sudan say that the current violence was not the “fault” of either President Salva Kiir or opposition leader Riek Machar, but was instead a result of the “fact” that neither had any experience of a “culture of peace,” which needed to be taught, presumably by outsiders. There are, of course, a number of problems with this statement, but the one I wish to focus on is the way it feeds into the trope of an entire continent filled with violence (as well as poverty and disease). This year, the Central African Republic and South Sudan take precedence in reinforcing the trope; last year it was the DRC and Mali; before it was Darfur in Sudan, Chad, Somalia, Kenya and Zimbabwe, and before that Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Uganda.
Tropes are self-reinforcing, especially on the part of lazy journalists, pundits, and academics who do not reflect upon or even see the things that do not fit into them. Yet this trope leaves out the numerous articulations and experiences of nonviolence from the continent that provide models for those inside and also outside of it. This symposium features three such articulations, but there are many, many more, which a brief overview like this one can only begin to plumb.
Nonviolent practices, campaigns, and theorizations in different parts of Africa have taken many forms, emerging from numerous dialectics and contradictions embedded in gendered, religious, customary and transnational histories and relationships. Without essentializing “culture” on the continent, one can still point to communal forms of conflict resolution and resistance to colonialism that have emerged in different ways through waves of precolonial, colonial and post-colonial power struggles. Historical examples include the early debates in South Africa, where nonviolence was developed as a guiding philosophy and method in the struggle against British and Dutch colonization, not only by Gandhi, but also by black South Africans such as J.L. Dube and Albert Luthuli of the African National Congress. While the ANC and other resistance organizations moved away from nonviolence after 1953, it never disappeared from ethical debate, and nonviolent tools remained part of the range of techniques used to bring down the system of apartheid. Other examples come from the independence struggles of the 1950s and after. As Mary Elizabeth King states, “The real-life experience of African nonviolent struggles was important for Martin Luther King, Jr., who drew knowledge and encouragement from the civil resistance of Africans in Ghana, Kenya, Zambia and elsewhere in their quests for independence from colonial rule” (King, December 18, 2012, in http://wagingnonviolence.org/feature/teaching-and-learning-civil-resistance-in-west-africa/).
The example of Martin Luther King, Jr. is one that demonstrates the translatability (always within limits) of nonviolence philosophies and techniques across continents, not in an absolute sense but in both inspiring practitioners and providing ideas about adapting resistance techniques to different situations. These twin aspects of nonviolence – thinking through its conceptual and often religious underpinnings and adapting techniques to situations “on-the-ground” – have been critical for at least three more recent, well-known campaigns: that of women in forcing negotiations in West African conflicts, that of Kenyan religious and NGO figures in stemming post-election violence in 2007, and that of young Egyptians in bringing an end to the Hosni Mubarak regime. In Liberia, the Women’s Peacebuilding Network, composed of Christian and Muslim women, worked together through war to compel the government and rebels to engage in peace talks, while not exempting outsiders from responsibility. In Kenya, groups working at numerous levels, from the grassroots to “eminent persons” in Africa, created a system of intersecting networks to address concerns about land and governance during the winter of 2008. In Egypt, young professionals in the diaspora worked with in-country labor groups to study and adapt techniques used in Bosnia in the 1990s (another place where the use of nonviolence is unseen).
None of this is to claim that nonviolence is the only legitimate strategy or philosophy to use in situations of extreme violence and colonial or post-colonial oppression. The MauMau in Kenya (a derogatory term given to armed resisters by the British and eventually taken up by the resistance movement itself, as the play, “The Trial of Dedan Kimathi” by Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Micere Mugo demonstrates), the African National Congress in South Africa, anticolonial movements in Algeria, Cameroon, Angola and Mozambique, and, for that matter, armed rebel movements in Central America, each demonstrates the need to look closely at a range of historical examples of resistance. It is unlikely that advocates of nonviolence alone will ever completely agree with proponents of movements such as these on the measures necessary to achieve liberation.
But it is well worth noting the range of religious, nationalist and gender-based philosophies and strategies of nonviolence developed in numerous contexts across Africa, because they demonstrate the problematic nature of the trope of a “naturally” violent continent. Nonviolence trainings and teachings take place through numerous institutes, sponsored by religious and secular entities, including the (Jesuit) Hekima Institute and the Nairobi Peace Initiative (both in Nairobi), the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation (Cape Town), Pro-Femmes Twese Hamwe (across Rwanda), the Mano River Women’s Peace Network (MARWOPNET (Sierra Leone, Guinea, Liberia and Côte d’Ivoire) and the West Africa Network for Peacebuilding (WANEP, Accra), among others. Women of faith organized the Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians in 1989 to “be agents of justice” (www.thecirclecawt.org); faith leaders have organized under national sections of World Religions for Peace in numerous African countries, and Inter-faith Action for Peace in Africa (IFAPA) focuses specifically on issues that connect peace across Africa’s major faith traditions (including African religions). Rwanda has become well-known for its locally-based “transitional justice” work, and Sierra Leone’s Fambul Tok and its TRC are also based on alternative visions of restoring communities destroyed by violence. These initiatives can be read as emanating from cultures of nonviolence, unlike criminal justice systems which prescribe punitive forms of violence.
The primary problem with tropes that reinforce the idea of Africa as inherently violent is that they ignore the structural issues and historical relationships that have created conditions that make conflict difficult to avoid. As of this writing, the continent continues to be militarized with and through the U.S. in ways that appear to be leftover from the Cold War: the East African Regional Security Initiative (EARSI) was created after the failed military intervention in Somalia, and now Kenya and Uganda, among others, are fighting the (U.S.) war on terror in Somalia. Today, Boko Haram’s activities are providing a useful rationale for militarizing North and West Africa, drawing Cameroon and Nigerian into the fold just as Niger and Mali were two years ago. This militarization will breed more, not less, violence: as Nadine Mulembusa points out, teachers in DRC and Rwanda “were unanimous in agreeing that the dynamics of colonialism, dictatorship, and the ensuing militarization of the state … created and maintained a culture of violence in their societies.” Tropes also ignore the ongoing systems of land appropriation and displacement which accompany practices of ethnic reification, which colonial administrations employed as tools to control populations and resources across the continent, and which have been reproduced in numerous ways by many postcolonial African governments and their ex-colonial supporters in Europe and the U.S. (and now, China as well). The intractability of some of these practices and structures breeds conditions for the violence that does occur, as Simangaliso Kumalo laments in his piece on South Africa. Violence, therefore, needs to be understood in its historical and ongoing global militarized and economic contexts, and Kumalo’s piece cries out in despondence over the situation in South Africa today, especially given its international reputation as a critical site for the philosophical and pragmatic development of nonviolence.
The ahistorical nature of many of the lamentations regarding violence on the continent remains a serious problem. This is why Kajsa Hallberg Adu’s piece on the new nonviolent movements in Nigeria is so welcome and probably surprising for many. Not only are its proponents acting in a country usually seen as producing only extremists of all kinds, but they are doing so in ways that reject assistance from the usual crowd of Western benefactors, compelling the audience to understand them as Nigerian and African. As a result, instead of viewing the continent as a hotbed of intractable violence, perhaps it should be seen as a series of sites in which people actively work to stem and overturn systemic injustices. Sometimes these injustices breed continued conflict, but often they result in imaginative theoretical and practical developments of nonviolence which are insufficiently recognized.
Cecelia Lynch is a Professor of Political Science and Director of International Studies at the University of California, Irvine.