Page 39 - Msingi Afrika Magazine Issue 9

MY AFRIKA

874. That represents a 36% increase. group emerged as an offshoot of distortions that mar discussions and
the Islamic Courts Union which depictions of African conflicts are
In the recent past, the Democrat- controlled Mogadishu in 2006, while rooted in the long-standing tenden-
ic Republic of the Congo (DRC), a transitional federal government cy to treat African social phenomena
Somalia, South Sudan, Nigeria, the was in exile in Kenya. Despite gains as peculiar and pathological, beyond
Central African Republic (CAR) and against the group, Al-Shabaab insur- the pale of humanity, let alone ratio-
Libya, have seen tens of thousands gents continue to launch sporadic nal explanation. Yet, from a histor-
of people killed and millions more attacks against civilians and the ical and global perspective, Africa
displaced. The war in the DRC government. has been no more prone to violent
alone is one of Africa’s deadliest conflicts than other regions.
having claimed the lives of more In Libya, conflict has persisted by
than five million people since 1998 armed groups since the ouster of Zeleza, who is at present the Vice
when it began. In the first half Colonel Gadafi in 2011. In spite of Chancellor of United States Interna-
of 2019, about 732,000 new dis- a UN arms embargo, parties to the tional University - Africa (USIU-A)
placements were recorded, 718,000 conflict continue to draw on inter- in Nairobi, further explains that
associated with conflict and 14,000 national support for weapons. Africa’s share of the more than 180
associated with disasters, posing ad- million people who died from con-
ditional challenges for the new DRC The ongoing Covid-19 pandemic flicts and atrocities during the twen-
government. aside, conflicts continue to pose a tieth century is relatively modest: in
serious challenge to Africa’s growth the sheer scale of casualties, there
In South Sudan, since civil war and development agenda. Violent is no equivalent in African history
broke out in 2013, about 380,000 conflicts in Africa continue to exert to Europe’s First and Second World
people are reported to have been a heavy toll on the continent’s com- Wars, or even the civil wars and
killed and more than two million munities, polities and economies, atrocities in revolutionary Russia
have been forced to flee their robbing them of their developmen- and China.
homes. A 2015 peace deal fell apart tal potential and democratic possi-
after clashes between government bilities. The worst bloodletting in twenti-
forces and rebels. eth-century Africa occurred during
As Malawian historian Paul Zeleza the colonial period in King Leop-
In Central African Republic (CAR), meticulously argues, the causes of old’s Congo Free State.
the conflict situation has persisted the conflicts are as complex as the
for more than seven years, insecurity challenges of resolving them are This is not to diminish the role that
and attacks against civilians, humani- difficult. African Union has played in curl-
tarians, and UN peacekeeping forces ing violent conflicts on Africa. It is
has led to thousands of deaths and But their costs cannot be in doubt, merely to emphasize the need for
has internally displaced more than nor the need, indeed the urgency, more balanced debate and commen-
600,000 people. to resolve them if the continent is tary, to put African conflicts in both
to navigate the twenty-first century global and historical perspectives.
In Nigeria, more than 30,000 people more successfully than it did the For a start, not only are African con-
have been killed by Boko Haram twentieth, a century that was marked flicts inseparable from the conflicts
insurgency that began in 2009 with by the depredations of colonialism of the twentieth century – the most
the aim of confronting what it and its debilitating legacies and de- violent century in world history;
perceived as the westernization of structive post-colonial disruptions. many post-colonial conflicts are
Nigerian culture. About two million rooted in colonial conflicts. There
people have fled their homes and The magnitude and impact of these is hardly any zone of conflict in
another 22,000 are missing, believed conflicts are often lost between contemporary Africa that cannot
to have been conscripted to the hysteria and apathy – the panic trace its sordid violence to colonial
group. The group’s influence is expressed among Africa’s friends history.
said to have extended to neighbor- and the indifference exhibited by its
ing countries, including Cameroon, foes – for a continent mired in, and Nearly 60 years after independence
Chad and Niger. supposedly dying from, an endless from colonial rule, sub-national
In Somalia which has had a civil war spiral of self-destruction. More im- territorial demarcations, political
since 1991, the Al-Shabaab militant portantly, Zeleza points out that the identities and the locus of authority

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