(no subject)
Pambazuka has a review up of this really interesting sounding book:
Extreme incidents of violence in post-Colonial Africa have frequently been explained through the discourses of tribalism and ethnic hatred. A variant of this narrative is the obsession with Africa’s ‘failed’ and ‘collapsed’ states that are said to be paralysed by kinship and ethnicity-based patronage politics. However, systemic violence has far more entrenched structural causes and the scholarly eye searches for these underlying conditions.
Feminist academic Patricia Daley’s major new theoretical work on Burundi argues that presenting genocide in Africa as irrational violence that is internal in origin obfuscates crimes against humanity and Western complicity in abetting them. Affixing blame on innate dysfunctions within African societies helps reduce genocide to the continent’s allegedly ‘barbaric’ and ‘savage’ traditional culture. It diverts attention from colonialism, neo-colonialism and foreign aid that have a causal relationship with atrocities in Africa.
Extreme incidents of violence in post-Colonial Africa have frequently been explained through the discourses of tribalism and ethnic hatred. A variant of this narrative is the obsession with Africa’s ‘failed’ and ‘collapsed’ states that are said to be paralysed by kinship and ethnicity-based patronage politics. However, systemic violence has far more entrenched structural causes and the scholarly eye searches for these underlying conditions.
Feminist academic Patricia Daley’s major new theoretical work on Burundi argues that presenting genocide in Africa as irrational violence that is internal in origin obfuscates crimes against humanity and Western complicity in abetting them. Affixing blame on innate dysfunctions within African societies helps reduce genocide to the continent’s allegedly ‘barbaric’ and ‘savage’ traditional culture. It diverts attention from colonialism, neo-colonialism and foreign aid that have a causal relationship with atrocities in Africa.