LAUSR

In discourses of violence, Africa—whether as a geography, a concept, or a racialized entity—is a familiar context. The long histories and legacies of slaveries and colonialisms have ensured that the subject of violence and conflict readily suggests itself whenever the idea of Africa is invoked. The continent’s familiarity with the subject of violence is also the result of a legacy of Western misrepresentations of realities on the continent and a result of manufactured conditions of violence discussed subsequently in this essay. To ask about violent conflicts in Africa has become a kind of anachronism for describing what philosopher Achille Mbembe describes in his book, On the Postcolony, as “a never-ending process of brutalization” constituting a singular force of history on the continent. The subjects and realities of violence in Africa are, so to speak, not new. To speak of “new” conflicts or patterns of contemporaneous violence taking place across the continent cannot amount to theorizing the “new” in African conflicts. What is at stake in such a query is the question of the changing epistemologies of (or how) we perceive violence, rather than questions of an emergence of a never-before-seen violence.