THERE CAN BE NO PEACE WITHOUT JUSTICE: AN AFRICAN APPROACH

Author

David J. Ndegwah

Jaramogi Oginga Odinga University of Science and Technology, School of Education and Social Sciences, P. O. Box 210, Bondo, Kenya

Book: War and Peace in Africa: Philosophy, Theology and the Politics of Confrontation. (Editors: David W. Lutz et al).

Pages: 131-152

Publication year: 2012

Publishers: Academica Press

Abstract

Today, the question of peace and reconciliation is on everyone’s lips the world over. The mass media is replete with accounts of protracted and recurrent warfare, which has changed tactics from “war between nations” to “war within nations.” We can mention a number of “hot spots,” including the unrelenting Israeli-Palestinian issue that always threatens to spill over into neighboring countries, putting the entire Middle East on edge; the Northern Ireland debacle, and the constant resurgence of armed conflict in Macedonia, Sierra Leone, Angola, Somalia, and Sudan. The genocide that shocked the world in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Rwanda is still fresh in our minds. Indeed, the history of human civilization is so marked by the alteration of peace and war that one wonders whether war is an interval between peaceful periods or peace is a mere break (or regrouping or cease-fire) in a prolonged warfare that is our existence. It is no longer easy to tell whether we—humans—are a peace-loving species or in fact war-mongering, deadly monsters to one another. Theories exist among thinkers and policy-makers that are divided on the nature of human beings with regard to this issue, and they can all be broken down into two opposing camps. The first camp, led by philosophers like John Locke, concede that humans are essentially good creatures who live together in a state of perfect freedom, loving and caring for one another, while the second camp, led by people like Thomas Hobbes, think that human beings live in a state of war—all against all—and that man is wolf to his fellow man (homo homini lupus). Whichever of these two camps may come out as the winner or loser, we are agreed on one thing: that there is a dire need for peace and reconciliation now more than at any other time in the history of humankind. But three questions are pertinent: what do we mean by the word “peace”? What is the prerequisite for peace? What is the most effective way to achieve an everlasting peace, at least in Africa? This paper, therefore, looks at the meaning of peace, particularly in the African context, the three theories of peace, the dimensions of reconciliation, and reconciliation in the African context, as practiced among the Pökot people of Kenya. Then it concludes that justice, particularly distributive justice, is a necessary component (indeed a conditio sine qua non) in the realization of true peace on the African continent.

About the Book

This work is a major investigation of the questions of war and peace in Black Africa by Africans with an emphasis on the philosophical, theological and political underpinnings of contemporary African thought and practice. The voices are overwhelming African and the locus of contributors includes Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda and Malawi. Some of the contributors, as well as the editors, have experienced war first hand and have played honorable roles in rebuilding or re-energizing intellectual communities in Africa that have been affected by atrocities, destruction and inter-tribal hatreds. Contained in this work are force arguments and discussions regarding what has happened since de-colonization and what are the possibilities for waging peace not war or violent confrontation.