Introduction

The third World Conference against Racism (WCAR) in 2001 agreed that the Atlantic slave trade constituted a crime against humanity. This declaration represented a major victory for the anti-racist forces globally. It outlined the basic requirements of anti-racism as a critical aspect of the new partnership in the global economy. It followed from the acknowledgement of crimes against humanity that there had to be redress for these crimes. The most important form of redress is in the form of reparations. Indeed, without this redress, even arguments for debt forgiveness in Africa may not make sense, nor would the pursuit of peace as a necessary condition for development be based on a sound settlement of historical injustices inherent in many conflicts.

The thrust of this paper is to seek to grasp the tensions and opportunities that are inscribed in the search for peace in Africa. It will be one of the main arguments of this intervention that peace in the biotech century requires a fundamental break with the concept of a commercial eugenic civilization¹. The struggle to establish new rules for the patenting of life forms and the move to treat life as an invention threatens to unleash on human beings the crudest concepts of racism since Adolph Hitler. African women at home and abroad who feel the impact of the privatisation and commodification of the genetic commons have been the most forthright in rejecting capitalist ideas of the market that sanctions the Killing of the black body². Facing the brunt of the horrors of modern capitalism African women comprise the social forces that have the most to gain in the transformation of the current continental and international relations.

The concrete lessons of the search for peace away from warfare will be used as one window to expose the limitations of the linear conceptions of war and peace. Cheik Anta Diop had recommended a bicameral parliament for Africa in the Federation of Africa. Diop had proposed women’s participation in running public affairs within the framework of a feminine assembly, sitting separately but having the same prerogatives as the general assembly. This proposition of the free flowering of the ideas of African women in the framework of building policies for peace and justice will form a core element of this paper. African women have already defined reparations in a more profound and moral way beyond simple compensation for crimes against humanity.

One major limitation of the moral imperatives of healing and transcending the old paradigms will be the current lack of attention paid to the issues of information warfare and biological warfare. Our previous study of the US partnership with Africa under the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) clarified the implications of information and biological warfare in the era of the information revolution³. Our conclusion will seek to analyse the centrality of the youth in the refinement of intergenerational concepts of peace. Our conclusion seeks to reinforce the idea that peace is a process and not an imported event. In the process new institutions and new social forces will have to be mobilised.

The context of the present push for peace

The new direction of the numerous grassroots movements in Africa has had an impact on the political process and pushed the current political leaders in Africa towards peace. This conjuncture represented a dramatic step away from the celebration of war criminals and the entertainment and support for military entrepreneurs in Africa. Yet, there is the critical awareness of how the process of globalisation strengthens militarists and maintains Africa at the bottom of the international division of labour. This gave rise to the concept of the globalisation of apartheid⁴.

Apartheid in the new economic form, biopiracy, militarism and the extension of capital accumulation has a long history in Africa and the interconnections between imperialism, militarism, masculinity and the warrior traditions have been the subject of numerous texts on African politics⁵. One of the most important breakthroughs in the conceptualising of peace has been the realisation that it is not possible to bring about the end of war without a sustained rejection of the ideas of masculinity and patriarchy. The ideology of patriarchy reduces women to accept their domination by mobilising mothers to produce soldiers.

It is at the level of the discussion of the place of women in African society where the whole issue of peace comes up against the patriarchal concepts of state and society that had been internalised by educated African males. In the words of one feminist, J. Ann Tickner, “the psychic sapping of women in patriarchy functions continually to recreate its warriors. The state of patriarchy is a state of war, in which periods of recuperation from and preparation for battle were euphemistically called ‘peace.’ As long as the state of patriarchy continues to exist, women will go on recreating warriors. In a patriarchal society, men have placed themselves at the top of the hierarchy with women and children at the bottom . . . Women are exploited, victimized and oppressed”⁶.

The concepts of peace that have been reproduced ad nauseum from patriarchs and rational thinkers have been concepts that relate to suspension of hostilities and not a real peace. Immanuel Kant has been one of the more well known rational philosophers that wrote of peace treaties as merely breaks for more war⁷. Kant, as one of the foremost philosophers of the European Enlightenment, could not recognise the crime of slavery and the fundamental challenge posed to human dignity by enslavement of other human beings. This was because then and now Enlightenment thinking reduced the world to enlightened rational Europeans who could civilise and pacify savages and non-rational beings. It is this hierarchy of humans that is still at the core of the divisions of the world, and hence the potential cause of conflicts. Under current globalisation of capital, the entire world is made the object of exploitation. The polarisation between wealth and poverty, health and disease, war and peace intensify with the military forces of the capitalist countries organised to maintain the current unequal division of wealth. In the current context of war without borders, the USA arrogates to itself the right to intervene in all parts of the world. In this international environment, Africa continues to be a scene of plunder so that criminal elements are supported and cultivated. These criminal elements are involved in the international trade in natural resources (e.g. diamond, timber and genetic resources), illicit drugs, weapons and other forms of wealth creation that are associated with the international climate of liberalisation and the free movement of capital⁸.

It has been the people’s enthusiasm for peace that has created the new stage of the formation of the African Union and the articulation of the ideas of a new move away from poverty. The global movement for justice was a powerful political force that launched a fundamental critique of capitalism, racism, homophobia, sexism and long held beliefs that Europeans were superior to Africans. It was also in the context of this same movement where the critique of globalisation and the opposition to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and institutions of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and multilateral imperialism became refined. Leaders such as Julius Nyerere opposed the IMF and the conditionalities of the imperial countries that were grouped into the G-7 (Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and USA).

In an earlier analysis of ‘The Peace Narrative and Education For Peace in Africa’, we drew attention to the fact that the entire history of European engagement with Africa has been premised on the role of force in production and the absence of democratic relations⁹. It needs to be restated here that force and violence from Europe was represented as peace, peacekeeping and peace enforcement. The most glaring example of this experience of peace was the conference of Berlin of 1884–1885 that was called in the name of bringing peace. The Berlin conference was the first experience of conflict management and resolution, in this case resolving the conflict between European states. The representatives from these states roamed the continent seeking to pacify Africans who were rebelling against the expropriation of their lands. This represents the first conceptual break that must be made in Africa. This break must involve the clarification that the pacification programmes of Cecil Rhodes, King Leopold and numerous others represented warfare and violence.

The second conceptual break involves the clarity of the wrong-headedness of the concept of dominion over nature. African society did not embrace this dominion. Force in production, dominion over nature and inferior peoples formed the core beliefs of Western European capitalists. These concepts set in motion modes of economic organisation that was celebrated as working under the hidden hand of the market. Economic relations based on the production of primary commodities, the plunder of humans and nature, racial segregation and militarism on a day-to-day basis formed the basis of colonialism. There had been no democracy under colonialism and the anti-democratic, racial and patriarchal political context provided the conditions for militarism and perpetual conflicts. Militarism as the mode of politics became entrenched in so far as the peoples of Africa were reduced to being subjects in the hierarchy of the international division of labour. In every country of Africa it can be demonstrated how the structural relationships between economics, western concepts of peace and politics in the society provided conditions conducive to perpetual forms of warfare.

In the aftermath of the biting criticisms of how the World Bank and the IMF brought about new slavery and the importance of development as freedom,¹⁰, there has been numerous discussions in the World Bank on the relationship between primary commodity production and warfare. In the period of this new international awareness of the relationship between minerals and militarism, the intellectuals of the World Bank joined in the discourse with reports on the Economic causes of civil conflict and their implications for policy. After decades of foreign aid, foreign investment and economic reforms, the Development Research Group of the World Bank noted in their publication Economic Causes of civil conflict and their implications for policy that:

the most powerful risk factor is that countries which have a substantial share of their income (GDP) coming from the export of primary commodities are radically more at risk of conflict. The most dangerous level of primary commodity dependence is 26% of GDP. At this level the otherwise ordinary country has a risk of conflict of 23%. By contrast, if it has no primary commodity exports (but was otherwise the same) its risk would fall to one half of one per cent. Thus, without primary commodity exports, ordinary countries are pretty safe from internal conflict, while when such exports are substantial the society is highly dangerous. Primary commodities are thus a major part of the conflict story¹¹.

This World Bank language on civil conflict and the subsequent unleashing of resources for the establishment of conflict resolution centres provided the conditions for mobilising the intellectual energies of young Africans to study and resolve conflicts without confronting the fundamental issue of the militarism and violence that emanate from the economics of war and militarism. What is most revealing from the analysis of the World Bank on the relationship between primary commodity extraction and warfare is the extent to which questions of democratic participation and the global armaments culture are excluded from the policy alternatives offered for economic adjustment, poverty alleviation and peace.

In short, it must be said that the three main conceptual issues of militarism as a mode of politics (pacification programmes), patriarchy and dependence on primary commodity production are not separate questions but linked to the realist concepts of security and national interests. African women who feel the full brunt of the economics of warfare have deepened the analysis of war to implicate masculinity and violence so that African males must take full responsibility for the prevalence of warfare and violation. It is for this reason that in the struggles for peace African women have been at the forefront of defining peace and democracy in a way that can break the conceptual logjam on peace and conflict resolution.

African men and women of the grassroots, who are struggling at the bottom of the international system of exploitation, continue to subsidise the armaments industry of the industrialised North. The linkages between the purchase of armaments and the debt crisis have been exposed in studies of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. These studies of the financial flows in the 1990s underline the linkages between primary commodity production, the movement of small arms and the integration into the global markets. Yet, in the transition period where there are major democratic struggles to break the role of force in production, the elected governments continue to service the debts that had been incurred to purchase weapons. There are the interminable discussions on debt relief when what is necessary is the collective mobilisation of the poor to argue that the debt of the poor countries should be cancelled. Simultaneously there are discussions on small arms with the same mobilisation to stop the illegal looting of resources via liberalised trading channels.

The oppressed are demanding institutions and organisations dedicated to a decisive break with the liberalised institutions of global capitalism. It has been the experience of wars in Liberia, Sierra Leone, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Burundi, Rwanda, Sudan and Angola that liberalisation supports military entrepreneurs and those who commit genocide. This demand for structural transformation recognises the need for democracy, African political union and economic union. This structural transformation that is based on democratic politics opens an avenue for dealing with one of the most important sources of conflict, the use of weapons for the manipulation of differences among the people. This is the politicisation of ethnicity, regionalism and religion.

War situations and the manipulations of border disputes, religious disputes and ethnic questions degenerate into continuous conflict in the absence of democratic institutions, democratic states and peoples organised to defend peace. It has been argued since the end of the Cold War and the upsurge of democratic movements that only a democratic state can provide the basis for peace. It is not possible for peace to develop in conditions where peoples from all walks of life and from different religious and ethnic backgrounds do not feel that their lives are valued. One prominent African scholar noted correctly that:

A genuine state depends on the multiplicity and diversity of its people: the old, the young, peasants, workers, diverse national/ethnic origins, merchants or businessmen, intellectuals, cadres, women, men, believers, non believers etc., differences among the people are infinite.

. . . a democratic state cannot be based on a single difference, such as religious or ethnic entities. Multiplicity per se is necessary as a base for a genuine state; but rather than composing or expressing this multiplicity, the state must transcend it with the help of new categories, such as ‘citizen’ or ‘ndugu’, both referring to particular entities. It is on this basis that differences do not change into discriminations. In themselves, differences do not produce conflicts. The democratic state has an obligation to propose one or several abstract concepts, abstract in the sense that they are not derived from social being which may be cultural, linguistic, religious, professional etc¹³.

African women and the struggles for peace in the African Union

African women are at the forefront of challenging the present system and are taking the demand for peace further with clarity on the need for demilitarisation, democratisation, debt cancellation and an assault on gender violence. At the 1999 meeting of Pan-African Women in Zanzibar, the women reinforced the point that they should be in the leadership in the struggle for peace and reconstruction. With the war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo engulfing all the sub-regions of Central, Eastern and Southern Africa, the women made a call for a culture of peace. The resolution of the meeting declared that,

We, women of Africa,

Gathered at the Pan-African Women’s Conference on a Culture of Peace in Zanzibar, United Republic of Tanzania, 17–20 May 1999, on the eve of the new millennium and the International Year for the Culture of Peace, consider this Conference as an irreversible climax for African women. We resolve to launch a Pan-African women’s peace movement to stop violent conflicts and war, and appeal to women and men, also on other continents to join us in our efforts . . .

After the social, economic and cultural devastation caused by colonialism, Africa has witnessed in the post-independence years economic and social deprivation, uneven distribution of wealth and opportunities among people, violent conflicts, military coups, political instability, dictatorship and corruption. Abject poverty, gender inequality, policies of exclusion, illiteracy, the lack of social, economic, religious and political security and the limited participation of women in the democratisation processes have marginalised us and denied Africa the use of women’s talents, experience and skills as agents for peace and development. We are determined to use our visions and capacities to redress these imbalances and help ensure sustainable development and durable peace.

Africa continues to lose resources through unfavourable economic systems, which have been causing a widening gap between Africa and other regions. As a result, despite the substantial contribution that Africa has made to global development, the continent is in danger of losing direction and being marginalized in the current trend towards globalisation and open market economies. In that regard, we call for debt cancellation by the international community.

Having suffered massive violations of fundamental human rights and having had to shoulder the burden of sustaining our societies while at the same time handling traumas, miseries, violence, social injustices and poverty, we commit ourselves to promote non-violent means of conflict resolution and African values for a culture of peace.

In the process of committing themselves to the promotion of non-violent means of conflict resolution and developing African values for a culture of peace, these women were repudiating the peace making plans of the United States, the European Union (EU) and their African allies. These women formed international alliances and pressured organisations such as the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) to support the mandate of the UN to work for peace.

Throughout the Cold War, when peace was being represented as the balance of nuclear terror, UNESCO had taken the lead from the General Assembly of the UN declaring: ‘‘every nation and every human being, regardless of race, conscience, language or sex has the inherent right to life in peace.” In 1982, UNESCO adopted the following posture with respect to peace,

There can be no genuine peace when the most elementary human rights are violated or while situations of injustice continue to exist; conversely, human rights for all cannot take root and achieve full growth while latent or open conflicts are rife . . . Peace is incompatible with malnutrition, extreme poverty and the refusal of the rights of self-determination. Disregard for the rights of individuals, the persistence of inequitable international economic structures, interference in the internal affairs of other states . . . The only lasting peace calls for the establishment of an equitable international order which will preserve future generations from the scourge of war.

It was significant that in Mozambique, during the period of South African destabilisation, the National Song and Dance Company sought to develop dances for peace so that other means of education could be developed in communities battered by warfare and dispersal. Through song, through dance, the body and music, it was possible to reach larger sections of the society than normal institutions of learning would have reached.

The position of African women in Mozambique on the definition of peace arose out of the concrete reality of the escalation of gendered violence in Africa. There is widespread violation of women and wholesale rape has been largely excluded from the discourse on peace. African military entrepreneurs sought to make women unwilling allies in warfare by invoking ethnic ties and coercing women into military roles. The use of the term ‘dodaism’ by the sociologist Owen Sichone to capture the linkages between masculinity and ethnic consciousness represented a major step forward in deconstructing the linkages between masculinity, violence and ethnicity¹⁴.

The World Bank and the external exploiters have recognised the vibrant place of African women in the struggles for peace so there is a conscious effort to mobilise the energies of African women for ideas of petty ventures (e.g. microcredit schemes) that do not fundamentally challenge the integration of women’s labour into the global system of injustice. African feminists are extending the discussions on peace from the victim paradigms of the women in development discourse¹⁵. In focusing on the agency of women who struggle in their day to day lives, the construction of social relations at all levels are explored: the homestead, the village community, urban communities, the school, institutions of spiritual reflection, in cultural activities such as dance, in the bureaucracy and in the coercive forces and in economic relations. It is from this orientation that there is now the focus on how bloodletting can be sanctioned and supported by military and civilian authorities. Joanna Bourne’s work on the Intimate history of killing: Face to Face with killing in the 20th century opens a new window into how wanton killings can be carried out by seemingly normal males¹⁶.

Gender violence can be traced to the ideas of male valour and the warrior traditions which, when translated in the minds of young males, equate physical power with masculinity. Young males are socialised to fight at an early age and the use of physical force and intimidation are presented as problem solving while negotiation is left to the girls who are less physically disposed to use force. The experiences of youths who are mobilised as fighters as far apart as the Congo, Liberia and Sierra Leone bring back the concrete reality of the interconnections between war and gender.

The new insights on War and gender and the Intimate history of killing connect actual warfare to rape, sexual violence, child prostitution, murder and incest. On the ground there has been new networks at the community, national and global levels dedicated to opposing gender violence. These transnational networks linked to the global women’s movement are shaping an alternative of global co-operation that is very different from the globalisation of capital. New communication techniques are shared as the grassroots learn from the best practices of women in other parts of the world. Women’s groups are growing in numbers and are demanding that the centrality of women in the formal and informal organs for peace be recognised. This includes the right of women’s groups to be represented at peace conferences. The most recent concrete examples of this demand have been in the cases of Burundi and the Sudan where African women demanded to be central to the peace processes. Throughout Africa the grassroots women are making it clear that violence against women a central political issue.

Every day, women are slapped, kicked, beaten, humiliated, threatened, sexually abused, and even murdered by their partners. Often we do not hear about this violence, because the women who are abused may feel ashamed, alone and afraid to speak out. In many urban communities health workers, doctors and leaders do not recognize violence against women as a health problem. Because of this silence on violence against women, African women have sought to mobilize internationally to bring the issues of women and peace to the forefront of the international agenda. It was the pedantioc work of African feminists along with peace activists from all parts of the world that ensured the passage of the United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325.

On October 31, 2000, UN Security Council members unanimously passed Resolution 1325, which calls for: the participation of women in decision-making and peace processes; gender perspectives and training in peacekeeping; the protection of women; and gender mainstreaming in United Nations reporting systems and programmatic implementation mechanisms.

In Africa, in November 2004, some of the most powerful women from more than 40 African countries agreed to immediately press their respective governments to ratify and implement the Protocol to the African Charter on the Rights of Women in Africa to further protect women from violence or discrimination. The ministers and lawmakers also recommended that resources be generated to train legal officials and law enforcement agents to combat gender violence and uphold women’s rights. This has been part of a major campaign in Africa to mobilize women to ensure that African governments ratify The Protocol To The African Charter On Human and Peoples' Rights On The Rights of Women in Africa. The provisions of this Charter on Human and peoples’ Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa will have to be included in country-level legislation once the requisite number of countries ratify this charter.

Through national forums, regional groupings, pan-African organisations and international organisations, African women are developing new avenues for expressing concepts of peace that demystifies the link between the personal and the political. Women in Africa are at the forefront of a more robust definition of peace as freedom from all sources of oppression. This thrust by progressive women has forced African governments to pay more attention to issues of domestic violence, misogyny and sexual terrorism. Even before the formal crafting of the African Union there had been many efforts by the militarists to capture the energies of women to support militarists.

The fact that the Organization of African Unity (OAU) established an African Women Committee on Peace and Development at the 1997 summit should be seen in the context of the conservative attempts to co-opt the women’s movement in Africa. The challenge in the period of the New Africa Initiative is to ensure that there is not the same effort to co-opt the struggles for economic change by the NEPAD (New Partnership for Africa’s Development) crafters. The same leaders who are seeking to create the conditions necessary for private enterprise oversee economies where there is massive structural violence as well as direct violence against women in the form of battering, rape, and other forms of abuse. It is this concrete history of the OAU Committee on Conflict Management and Prevention and the concrete reality of the ineffective organs such as the African Women Committee For Peace that influence the new direction of the New Africa Initiative.

A rigorous understanding of peace deals with the concept of peace being related to economics, environment, gender and democracy. The ideas on peace and the opposition to genocide were honed by the anti-militarist forces in the world, especially women. African women are in the forefront of this challenge to partnering with the EU as the basis for development. There is now enough material to demonstrate that present partnerships such as the Lomé agreement with the EU and the African Growth and Opportunity Act of the USA has not fostered economic development in Africa. These failed partnerships ensure that grassroots women are opposed to the conception of prioritising foreign investment by raising fundamental questions with respect to a gender-based approach to economics, democracy and environmental planning. At all levels of decision making women are ending the silence and are exposing the fact that there is the need for the institutionalisation of structures which will promote women’s participation in the decision making process around access to water, sanitation, health and environmental issues.

Organised women are demanding clean water as a basic democratic right in the same ways as they are campaigning against privatisation and user fees for social services. The fight against liberalisation is one part of the fight against domestic violence, and fighting for reproductive rights, the basic living standards for all and the whole organisation of gender relations. It is out of this engagement that scholars are writing on education for peace. More than ten years ago Yash Tandon wrote the book, Militarism and peace education in Africa.

The writings of Yash Tandon and Birgit Brock-Utne expose the role of the USA in Africa and should bring home the lessons of US military involvement on the continent. This clarifies the reality that the Africa Crisis Response Initiative (ACRI) and the Strategic Studies Centers being established by the US are not geared toward partnership for peace. In my own work on the US Security Doctrine and the Africa Crisis Response Initiative, I have analysed the ACRI posturing as the need to develop African allies for forward planning and war.¹⁷. The fact that the US dominates the international organisations such as the United Nations and the multilateral agencies such as the IMF means that Africans have to be self-conscious in the kind of partnerships that are developed in the context of the African Union. It is this self-consciousness that mobilises the energies of African women and their allies who define peace as follows:

By peace we mean the absence of violence in any given society, both internal and external, direct and indirect. We further mean the non-violent results of the equality of rights, by which every member of the society, through non-violent means, participates equally in decisional power, which regulates it, and the distribution of resources, which sustain it¹⁸.