Africa Up Close

High school students in Mankon, Bamenda, Cameroon, an Anglophone speaking region that has protested against the Francophone majority. Photo courtesy of Alberto Vaccaro via Flickr Commons. 

The immediate future of Cameroon is fraught with uncertainties. On October 1, 2017, during rallies marked by calls for a secession from French-speaking Cameroon, dozens of people were killed by security forces in the two Anglophone regions of Northwest and Southwest Cameroon. Besides Boko Haram in the North, the resurgence of the Anglophone Problem in the Western regions is the single biggest threat to the unity and stability of Cameroon today. This is especially concerning as the country braces for a challenging electoral year in 2018 amidst calls for President Paul Biya to step down after 35 years in power. The ongoing resurgence of the Anglophone crisis in Cameroon requires immediate international attention. The stability of Cameroon is of crucial importance not only for the sub-region of Central Africa, but also for the fight against terrorism in the entire region. The ruling regime’s poor management (repressive approach) of the ongoing crisis is largely responsible for the escalations in recent months. The way forward to a sustainable solution lies in an inclusive, mediated dialogue geared toward institutional reforms and the promotion of local governance, not only in Anglophone regions but also in the whole country.

Faure Gnassingbé, President of Togo, addresses the UN General Assembly in 2015. A commission was created to investigate the electoral violence surrounding the transfer of power to Faure Gnassingbé from his father, Gnassingbé Eyadéma. Photo by UN Photo/Cia Pak, via Flickr. Creative Commons.

As they transition from political regimes marked by violence, conflict, and human rights abuses, a number of West African countries attempted to follow South Africa’s path toward transitional justice.¹ One after another, they created reconciliation commissions in the hope of healing the wounds of the past. Togo set up the Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission was set up in Togo in 2009, Côte d’Ivoire established its Dialogue, Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2011, and in January 2015 Burkina Faso created the National Reconciliation and Reform Commission, with a subcommittee of truth, justice, and reconciliation. Do these major initiatives from countries that have suffered severe violence reflect genuine political will to reckon with the past, or are they just an exercise in politics?

From August 4-6, 2014, United States President Barack Obama will host the first ever US-Africa Leaders Summit in Washington, DC. The summit will be attended by more than forty African Heads of State, along with other business and social leaders, at a time when Africa is often described as one of the fastest growing regions of the world. The agenda of the event features key social, political, and economic issues pertaining to the partnership between the US and the African continent. The theme of the summit, “Investing in the Next Generation,” is more than relevant, given the fact that the youth of the African continent is today both its greatest potential and its most pressing challenge.

In the aftermath of September 11,  Scott Appleby, Director of the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame,  while underscoring the potential of religious traditions for peacebuilding, observed, “While religious extremists are often integrated into a well-organized movement, armed to the teeth, expertly trained, lavishly financed, ideologically disciplined, and involved in a kind of ‘ecumenical’ collaboration with other violence-prone organizations, the non-violent religious actor is relatively isolated, underfinanced, and unskilled in the techniques of conflict transformation.” In recent years a lot has been said and written on the necessity and strategies of tapping the resources of religious traditions to promote peace in the world, especially in countries plagued by interreligious conflicts.

The thriving of religious terrorist groups such as The Lord’s Resistance Army, Boko Haram, Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), Movement for Unity and Jihad in West Africa (MUJAO),  Al-Shabaab, etc., which are largely responsible for the spread of religious violence in Sub-Saharan Africa, is boosted by the illicit international arms trade that the international community has failed to take seriously enough in its quest for global security and peace. Torn between protocols and treaties couched in ideal terms and strategic or economic interests, the international community has failed to be consistent. This inconsistency is not only costing hundreds of thousands of lives, but also slowing down the so-called “global war on terror” across the African continent.

In the past two months, thousands of Muslims have fled or been displaced from the southern region of the Central African Republic, fearing for their lives in what some voices have warned might turned into a genocide.  One of the episodes of this dramatic and unfortunate situation took place on April 27, 2014, as The Guardian reports, “Heavily armed African and French peacekeepers escorted some of the last remaining Muslims out of Central African Republic‘s volatile capital…bringing out more than 1,300 people who for months had been trapped in their neighbourhood by violent Christian militants.”  The ongoing violence between Seleka[1] and the Anti-Balaka[2] factions in Central African Republic has been extensively and persistently described as interreligious. The first has been associated with Islam and the second with Christianity, leading to the portrayal of the conflict as opposing Muslims to Christians. This sweeping characterization has to be taken with some caution.  Indeed, Furseth and Repstad posit, “In debates over the role of religion in religious conflicts, there is often a tendency to either underestimate religion and reduce all religious conflicts to societal conflicts or overestimate religion and treat it as the dominant cause of the conflict.”  For the case of Central African Republic, I argue that the role of religion should not be overestimated in a conflict that is essentially political.

As we enter a new year in just a week, I would like to take this last post of 2013 and reflect on what has been a year of growth for our program blog, Africa Up Close. Now just over a year old, Africa Up Close, has become a major source of information for the policy community, academia, and those who follow Africa here in the U.S.  Here are some of our statistics. From a start up in September 2012, this blog now has a major following, with a total of 9,300 visitors from July 1-December 1 alone, of which 40% are returning visitors and 60% are new visitors.  The average visitor looks at a minimum of two pages per visit. We have therefore had almost 20,000 page views in that time frame.   As would be expected, our viewers are overwhelmingly from the U.S. mainly Washington, DC and New York, followed by the UK, Kenya and South Africa.

Below is the original French version of this week’s Southern Voices blog post, written by Ludovic Lado.

Du 21 au 23 Septembre 2013 une soixantaine de personnes ont perdu la vie suite à l’attaque du centre commercial Westgate à Naïrobi (Kenya) par une bande terroriste à connotation religieuse connue sous le nom de Shebabs.  Ils n’en étaient pas à leur premier forfait car depuis quelques temps ils attaquent des églises et des bus dans ce pays en signe de représailles à l’intervention kényane en Somalie. Une semaine après, Boko Haram, un autre groupe djihadiste massacrait une quarantaine d’élèves dans un collège agricole d’une ville du Nord du Nigéria pour marquer leur opposition à l’école occidentale qu’ils considèrent comme un péché. Depuis 2009, les attaques de cette secte islamiste ont fait des milliers de morts. Le radicalisme religieux terroriste constitue aujourd’hui une réelle menace pour la durabilité de la paix en Afrique, surtout dans l’espace sahélo-saharien qui ces dernières décennies est devenu le repère principal de l’activisme des mouvements djihadistes désormais capables de faire des alliances. Le Mali a récemment vu sa souveraineté mise à mal par une coalition de groupuscules qui instrumentalisent le djihadisme à des fins économiques et politiques.  Le terrorisme à connotation religieuse gagne donc du terrain en Afrique subsaharienne et selon le politologue français Marc-Antoine Pérouse de Montclos, « les formes terroristes d’un islam radical peuvent être considérés comme un phénomène nouveau… Nous sommes temoins de la criminalisation d’une insurrection religieuse, au nom d’un islam radical. »  On assiste à « une porosité entre activisme religieux et criminalité ».

From September 21st to the 23rd, more than sixty people in Nairobi, Kenya lost their lives in an attack on the Westgate shopping mall by a religious terrorist group known as Al-Shabaab. This was not the group’s first crime, as they have been attacking churches and buses in the country for some time in retaliation for Kenyan intervention in Somalia. One week later, Boko Haram, another jihadist group, massacred about forty students in an agricultural college in northern Nigeria to emphasize their opposition to Western education, which they consider a sin. Since 2009, attacks by this Islamic sect have killed thousands. Radical religious terrorism now poses a real threat to durable peace in Africa, especially in the Sahel. In the last few decades, the region has become the main hideout of jihadist movements who are therefore able to make alliances. Mali recently saw its sovereignty jeopardized by a coalition of small groups who used jihadism to further their economic and political goals. Religious terrorism had therefore gained ground in Sub-Saharan Africa and, according to French political commentator Marc-Antoine Pérouse de Monclos, “the terrorist forms of radical Islam can be considered a new phenomenon… We are seeing a religious insurrection turn to criminality in the name of radical Islam” We are witnessing “porosity between religious activism and criminality.”