Guerrilla warfare would continue in many independent African States so long as governments are not responsive to the peoples needs
Kwame Nkrumah in Hand Book of Guerrilla Warfare, Panaf, 1970

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In a people’s rise from oppression to grace, a turning point comes when thinkers determined to stop the downward slide get together to study the causes of common problems, think out solutions and organize ways to apply them.

Ayi Kwei Armah, Osiris Rising, 1994

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Africa will indeed survive, unless the world does not survive. So perhaps the point is not survival, but survival in what shape?

Akwasi Aidoo, 1999

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Introduction 

The system empties our memory or fills it with garbage, and so it teaches us to repeat history instead of making it. Tragedy repeats itself as farce, the prophecy announced. But with us it’s worse: tragedy is repeated as tragedy. 

Galeano, E. 1991 The Book of Embraces 

This paper attempts to sketch an overview of the conflict situation in Africa and the various attempts under way in negotiating and mediating an end to the vicious conflicts that have reduced much of Africa to a wasteland. It suggests the ‘dos and do nots’ for negotiators, many, who simply do not know and understand the conflicts that they are negotiating. For example, it is rare to come across the profiles of the various leaders in conflict during mediation, arbitration and negotiation. Yet, this is important if we are to understand the psychology of the leaders who send their countries or parties including child soldiers to war. The lack of a deeper understanding of the root causes of Africa’s conflicts allows negotiators and mediators to leave out the critical element of ‘education’ in post conflict reconstruction. Better education, according to the Economist1, is the key, “…... without that, the African future will be bleak indeed”. 

This paper concludes by suggesting that without the total involvement of Africa’s cultural workers, youth and women and the radical transformation of our institutions and the perusal of aggressive ‘economic nationalism’ policies, the root causes of conflicts in Africa would remain with us for a long time to come. 

Conflict in a holistic sense is the single biggest growth business within the last decade of the 20^th century in Africa. Judging by the number of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), Community Based Organizations (CBOs), religious groups and Intergovernmental Organizations (IGOs) engaged in conflict resolution work, one may come to the sad conclusion that there is nothing positive coming out of Africa2. And yet, this is not so. In his 1998 report on the causes of conflict in Africa, the UN Secretary - General states that: 

Africa as a whole has begun to make significant economic and political progress in recent years, but in many parts of the continent progress remains threatened or impeded by conflict.3 

Conflict is the constant subject of discussion among African intellectuals including cultural workers, activists, women, youth and politicians. It is also the single most important issue under discussion within the Organization of African Unity (OAU) and also within subregional organizations such as the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), the Inter-Governmental Authority on Development (IGAD) and the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and gradually within the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA). 

Is Conflict Natural to Africa? 

Conflict is a universal experience. It is not natural to Africa. Rather, it is natural to human development. According to Zartman, it “is an inevitable aspect of human interaction…”4 There is negative and positive conflict. It is the mismanagement of African conflicts that leads to disasters, death and destruction of properties. According to Rok Ajulu, there are 22 African countries currently undergoing high and low intensity conflicts5. Conflict Resolution as a science is relatively a new subject. From the 1950s to the early 1980s, it was studied under ‘Peace studies’. This was influenced by the Cold War. Within the past decade, conflict studies have become an independent, important discipline that no serious higher institute or organization can ignore today. Although, conflict as part of the human environment is itself as old as mankind, conflict resolution as a new subject, is dedicated to a scientific method of finding out and resolving conflict between different identities. 

Conflict and Transformation 

Conflict in our opinion is collisions between ideas and projects.  In his ‘Mastering African Conflicts’ General Amadou Toumani Toure6 (1998), one of the few democratic minded officers Africa has produced remarks that: 

Conflicts arise [sic] from human relations in two principal ways: first, individuals or groups of individuals have different values, needs and interests; and, second, most resources are not available in unlimited quantities and so access to them must be controlled and fought for. These two factors intrinsically cause conflicts. 

Every conflict has a beginning and an end. Every conflict has parties or groups that have interest and needs that are negotiable and non-negotiable. Violent conflicts are defined as expression of violence. The groups involved are parties in conflict and those involved in transforming conflict are known as ‘Third Parties’. These parties come in various shades, namely, NGOs, IGOs, states and individuals. Conflict transformation is activities of popular democratic or undemocratic forces that do change to the balance of power in conflict situations. Popular forces in the form of mass action normally bring about ‘positive or progressive’ transformation. Transformation normally takes the form of an uprising or creating the necessary conditions for change. 

The most beautiful example in recent years in Africa is the mass uprising by Malian women in the city of Bamako in March 1991. Their action was in opposition to the one party dictatorship of General Moussa Traore. He seized power from the civilian government of President Modibo Keita in 1968 and ruled with an iron hand. The transformation of the Malian conflict led to a pro-people military-cum civilian transition government. The transformation of the Malian conflict finally led to the civilian government of president Alpha Konare.  In A Peace of Timbuktu (1998) Poulton and Youssouf described how power was shared: 

The military arrested Moussa Traore in the early hours of Tuesday, 26 March 1991, and they were welcomed as heroes by a crowd of 20,000 outside the trade union building, Bourse du Travail. There, the officers proposed to handover power to the democratic movement led by unions, political associations and lawyers, together with student and youth leaders. One of the key factors in the Malian transition was the refusal of the civilians to accept power: ‘The power is not yours to give: it belongs to the people. We propose that civilians and officers of all the uniformed forces should jointly accept responsibility for the transition to democracy.’

Another much written example is the internal struggles by the mass democratic movements in South Africa before political apartheid was removed in 1994. Conflict transformation, if it is to be durable, must involve real structural changes7. Conflict is not natural to Africa. It is universal. 

Small Arms and Conflict 

The availability of millions of small arms and light weapons increases the ferocity of mass killings. Small arms aid human rights violations, thus making this continent the most serious conflict zone in the world. From Algeria, where since 1992 more than 60,000 persons have been killed to the rainbow nation, South Africa, where thousands die every year from gun shot wounds and rape. From Mauritania, in the west, to Eritrea and Ethiopia, where according to ‘Africa Confidential’ more than 100,000 soldiers were killed in the various battles along their common border in 1999 and across the fertile lands of the Great Lakes region, conflict over resources and political despotism is the breakfast, lunch and supper. Light weapons and small arms manufacture and export and re-distribution in Africa need more attention as Annan (1998) puts the case for restraint: 

All states have the right and responsibility to provide for their own defence. Africa’s compelling development interests nonetheless require that a minimum of resources be diverted for military purposes…Identifying the sources of arms flow into Africa is critical to any effort to monitor or regulate this trade. Arms exporting countries have a responsibility to exercise restraint, especially with respect to the export of weapons into zones of conflict or tension in Africa. 

The attempt by West African States to restrict the manufacture, importation and distribution of small arms since November 1998 is a shinning example of what Africa can do if she has the political will. 

Some Root Causes of Conflict 

Much has been written about the causes of conflicts in Africa. Africa is not one huge country. It is a vast and diversified continent. Hence, the sources of conflict in different African countries vary. In our opinion, the following contribute to the deepening of wars and violence in Africa: 

1.   Impunity: When Idi Amin, the semi-literate army officer took power in 1971 and systematically murdered thousands and perhaps up to a million people, nobody was held responsible for this crime. So came the Milton Obote II government. It carried out its share of mass killings. Next came the 1993 massacres in Burundi, then genocide in Rwanda. Impunity must and should not be tolerated in Africa. The state of Israel teaches Africa a lesson here. Without some form of justice, reconciliation can not be taken seriously.

2.   Despotism and bad governance: No military coup of the ‘left’, ‘right’ or ‘centre’ can bring about popular democracy. The acceptance of coups against civilian regimes by the international community contributed in no small way to the current instability in Africa. When the CIA financed the coup of 24 February 1966 the democratically elected government of Kwame Nkrumah was removed from power, the OAU meeting accepted the impostors' foreign minister instead of the representatives of the elected government of Ghana. This set the precedence for instability in Africa and for that matter the bloody coups and popular uprisings in Ghana and Africa. Military governments, no matter their origins, are undemocratic by essence. 

Table 1

Military Coups against Civilian Governments in Africa

Coups militarized politics, hence instability and impunity in all countries where coups have taken place.

3.       Poverty: The abject poverty seen in the cities and rural areas of Africa makes recruitment of rebels an easy task. Governments spend millions on the military and security forces, leaving virtually nothing for education, health and the economy. The uneven distribution of national resources has created ‘poverty’ regions across Africa. Northern Ghana, Northern Uganda, the Niger Delta areas are some examples. In conflict countries, human dignity or deprivation is brought forth sharply. The 1997 UNDP Report writes: 

It is in the deprivation of the lives that people can lead that poverty manifests itself. Poverty can involve not only the lack of the necessities of material well - being, but the denial of opportunities for living a tolerable life. Life can be prematurely shortened. It can be made difficult, painful or hazardous. It can be deprived of knowledge and communication. And it can be robbed of dignity, confidence and self-respect as well as the respect of others. All are aspects of poverty that limit and blight the lives of many millions in the world today. 

Table 2
Indicators of human poverty 

Source ADB, African Development Report 1997, Part Three, tables 1 and 8.3  

4.   Citizenship: This is a serious problem related to bad governance. In Humanitarian and Political Challenges in Africa: Genocide and its implication (1999) the unsigned research paper takes up this important issue: 

The concept of citizenship, with its corollary converse concepts of expulsion of ‘aliens’, statelessness, etc, demands close attention in contemporary Africa. The principle of equality of citizenship has the honored mostly in the breach. 

Two strands to the concept of citizenship, (as misapplied), warrant attention. 

(a)           The idea of an ethnically homogenous state: This has a variant in the form of a religiously homogeneous state. In the case of multi-ethnic states, that is, almost every state in Africa - the main concern here is not which is the ‘core’ or dominant ethnicity, but which marginal ethnicity is denied the right to citizenship, and in extremist, the right to life;

(b)          The idea is that citizenship is a privilege not a right, and its corollary that state sovereignty encompasses the state’s right to award or withdraw citizenship. 

5.       The unresolved citizenship crises in Rwanda, Burundi, DRC and Uganda are some of the fundamental causes of the current wars in the region. Thus the 1999 Lusaka Agreement for a Cease-fire states: 

The parties re-affirm that all ethnic groups and nationalities whose people and territory constituted what became Congo (now DRC) at independence must enjoy equal rights and protection under the law as citizens (Page 16, section 16). 

Although, “Congo’s Lusaka accord means little until President Laurent-Desire Kabila’s government talks to and negotiates seriously with the three main rebel groups.” 

6.       Racism and ethnicity-politics

The blatant racist politics of the Rhodesian, and South African governments and their racist polices in Namibia (South West Africa), coupled with their training, financing and overt and covert activities in Mozambique and Angola are still the source of the low intensity conflict in southern Africa. The open violence in South Africa cannot be devoid of the effects of apartheid –era policies. Part of the source of the current instability in Zimbabwe comes from the fact that some 4,000 whites own one-third of the arable farmland9. 

7.       Conflict and Parties - The Case of the Great Lakes region

Normally, conflict resolution is supposed to be a non-partisan business. It assumes that conflict is endemic and the ‘solution’ is made possible through the scientific exploration of the interest of all parties to a dispute. This is done by creating the necessary space for facilitating communication between the parties in conflict. The attempt in the 1999 Lusaka accord on the regional war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) to:

(a)           Identify all parties,  be they state or non-state actors;

(b)          Identify the interest of all states involved in the war;

(c)           Identify the interest of all non-state actors involved in the war;

(d)          Identify the most important issue, that is, the interest of the Congolese people;

(e)           Accept that the conflict located within a conflict system environment

is a good example of the exploration of interest and parties in a recent African conflict. Although, the accord left out Sudan, she shares a border with Congo. The Sudanese civil war, which restarted in 1982, has led to the death of about two million southern Sudanese.

8.       Conflict: Up and Down

Conflict is not static. Conflict in our opinion is a dynamic process consisting of a series of sequences of phases. It is not straight like the Accra-Tema motorway in Ghana. It goes up and down. It has a beginning and an end. It may take 30 years or so as the Eritrea self-determination war or 25 years like the Indonesian occupation of East Timor has demonstrated. The August 1999 clashes between the numerically superior Rwandan forces and the Ugandan Peoples Defense Force (UPDF) in the northwest Congolese City of Kisangani is an example of a phase in a conflict. In this particular case, the conflict in the Great Lakes region. The relationship or balance between them determines whether the conflict increases in violence or not. The recent (1999) siege of elite Zimbabwean government forces numbering about 3,000 in Ikela in the DRC by forces of the RCD-Goma, despite the Lusaka Protocol of 1999 is another example of the dynamic process of conflict transformation. Ikela lies some 480km to the north-east of Kinshasa. 

Typology of Conflict: Stages of Conflict Development 4 

Conflict anticipation                               Early Warning
Conflict escalation                                 Crisis intervention
Conflict endurance                                 Empowerment, mediation, arbitration
Conflict improvement                             Negotiation, conciliation
Conflict transformation                           Structural changes/Democratic institutions 

According to the Development Assistance Committee guidelines (1998) all conflicts undergo the following: