<em>Peacemaking in West Africa:</em> Historical Methods and Modern Applications

Abstract

Peacemaking in West Africa: Historical Methods and Modern Applications I. William Zartman (bio) Peace is a steady state that conflict, like weeds, arises continually to perturb. Conflict may be explained by snakes in the Garden of Eden, but it is more likely to arise, not because of conflict-prone human nature, but because humans, being free-willed individuals, have desires and tastes that quite naturally collide with the desires and tastes of others. Collectively, humans have handled these weeds, in Western thinking, through regimes termed social contracts mythically established among individuals, in either the Hobbesian or the Lockean version. In West Africa, as in many other parts of the world outside the Atlantic community, the problem has been handled by raising the collective community above the individual and then establishing collective mechanisms to bring deviant individuals to order when they act in antisocial ways (Zartman 2002). These regimes and mechanisms have worked imperfectly, since they have been established by humans tainted by the snake and free will, but they have worked in a usually positive-sum way, particularly within groups of people close enough together to establish a community. This relatively stable situation has been disrupted by contact with the outside world, and particularly by contact with the Western (or, to Africa, northern) world, which brought many changes that disrupted the sense and reality of community. It pushed aside the regimes and mechanisms long used to handle conflict and it introduced new sources of conflict to a population left with only weakened means of [End Page 1] handling them. Through colonial regimes, then adapted and adopted by independent successor states, new mechanisms and regimes were introduced, built on a different notion of conflict management. Instead of seeking to bring deviant individuals to order within a restored social tissue, they sought to separate deviants from the social tissue through factual inquiry, blame, judgment, and punishment within state-run legal systems and a zero-sum view of conflict. These regimes and mechanisms have worked imperfectly, but they have worked, at the cost of conflict with the traditional systems. Can it be otherwise? Could the two opposite and opposed systems be combined productively to provide mechanisms and regimes that would overcome the imperfections in the workings of each one working alone? Can the social illnesses that break out in contemporary society find cures or at least treatments through practices culled from both traditional and contemporary systems? And how did the previous systems work and how do their remnants work today? These questions gave the direction to an innovative conference organized by the West African Research Association at the West African Research Center in Dakar on 12–15 December 2009, made possible by a grant from the US Department of State. Papers by 28 participants from eight different countries were presented. Nine of the 18 papers in English are included in this issue of the African Conflict and Peacebuilding Review; ten of the papers were in French and are being published by L’Harmattan under the editorship of Professor Edmond Kwam Kouassi, Academic Co-coordinator of the Conference. Eight of the articles in this issue are authored by scholars based in Africa. “The best way to promote traditional medicine is to show that both types of medicine can work together to resolve a public health problem. This is what we are doing with malaria,” stated Dr. Ogobara Doumbo (2011), director of the Malaria Research and Training Center in Bamako (Mali). Six articles in this issue look forward, examining traditional mechanisms for resolving a public conflict problem and the possibilities—current or proposed—for their contemporary use in conjunction with the state legal system. Four of these articles, by Ken Ahorsu and Robert Ame, Tanto Richard Ndi, Henry Kam Kah, Moses Aluaigba, and David Udofia, describe the workings of senior councils among the Ewe in Ghana, the Bagam and Bamenyam in Cameroon, the Cross River peoples in Nigeria and Cameroon, and the Tiv and Ibibio regions of Nigeria, and indicate how these practices and regulatory societies can or could be combined with modern state [End Page 2] methods to handle various sorts of conflicts, including land issues, political participation, citizenship issues, and personal disputes. The...