What Colonialism Ignored: 'African Potentials' for Resolving Conflicts in Southern Africa

390 Pages·2016·2.215 MB·English

by  Sam Moyo, Yoichi Mine

“Reading this book invites one to put to centeR-stage contextualized hitheRto undeRRated values of
afRican potentials in consideRation of conflict Resolutions and co-existence. a veRy good naRRative foR
those seeking a non-Romanticized cRitique of afRican potentials in addRessing the challenge of Releasing
potentials of people’s agency foR solving afRica’s pRoblems.”
Edward K. Kirumira, College of Humanities and Social Sciences, Makerere University, Uganda
“based on histoRical analysis and ethnogRaphic accounts fRom southeRn afRica, this book sheds light on the
abilities of the afRican people to devise effective solutions to theiR pRoblems such as conflicts.”
Yntiso Gebre, Associate Professor, Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia
“the book epitomizes a coopeRative and constRuctive appRoach to contemplating afRica’s conflicts and
tensions. it exudes the mutuality of exchange of ideas, offeRed fRom equal gRounding, which is impoRtant foR
tRue scholaRship, and which is woRth emulating.”
Kennedy Mkutu, Associate Professor, United States International University, Kenya
As Julius Nyerere once noted, Africa has largely been the continent of peace, though this fact has not been widely
publicised. In reality, Africa possesses dynamic potentials for resolving contradictions and violent ruptures that
colonial authorities, post-colonial states and global actors have failed to capture and capitalise upon. Drawing on the
everyday experience of rural and urban people in Zimbabwe, South Africa, Namibia and Zambia, this book brings into
conversation leading Japanese scholars of Southern Africa with their African colleagues. The result is an exploration
in comparative perspective of the fascinating richness of bottom-up ‘African potentials’ for conflict resolution in
Southern Africa, a region burdened with the legacy of settler capitalism and contemporary neoliberalism. The book is a
pacesetter on how to think and research Africa in fruitful collaboration and with an ear to the nuances and complexities
of the dynamic and lived realities of Africans.
SAM MOYO, the widely respected scholar of African political economy and land issues, was Director of the African
Institute of Agrarian Studies, Zimbabwe.
YOICHI MINE is Professor of African Studies at the Graduate School of Global Studies, Doshisha University, Japan.
What Colonialism Ignored:
‘African Potentials’
for Resolving Conflicts in
Southern Africa
Edited by

Sam Moyo
&
Yoichi Mine

In collaboration

Langaa RPCIG CAAS
Mankon Bamenda Kyoto University
Publisher:
Langaa RPCIG
Langaa Research & Publishing Common Initiative Group
P.O. Box 902 Mankon
Bamenda
North West Region
Cameroon
[email protected]
www.langaa-rpcig.net

In Collaboration with
The Center for African Area Studies, Kyoto University, Japan

Distributed in and outside N. America by African Books Collective
[email protected]
www.africanbookscollective.com

ISBN: 9956-763-39-X

© Sam Moyo & Yoichi Mine 2016

All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any
means, mechanical or electronic, including photocopying and recording, or be
stored in any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission
from the publisher
This book is dedicated to the fond memory of
Professor Sam Moyo (1954–2015).

Yoichi Mine and all contributors

About the Contributors

Sam Moyo (Chapters 1 and 2) was Executive Director of the
African Institute for Agrarian Studies (AIAS), Harare, and former
President of the Council for the Development of Social Research in
Africa (CODESRIA, 2009–11). He was Editor-in-Chief of Agrarian
South: Journal of Political Economy (Sage India) and the author and
editor of books including: Reclaiming the Land (Zed Books, 2005);
African Land Questions, Agrarian Transitions and the State (Codesria
2008); Land and Sustainable Development in Africa (Zed Books, 2008);
Reclaiming the Nation (Pluto Press, 2011); and Land and Agrarian
Reform in Zimbabwe: Beyond White-Settler Capitalism (Codesria, 2013).
The present volume has turned out to be one of his major
posthumous works due to his untimely death in Delhi, India, in
November 2015.

Yoichi Mine (Chapters 1 and 7) is Professor at the Graduate
School of Global Studies, Doshisha University, Japan. His major
research fields are human security, human development,
transnational migration, comparative history and African area study.
He has published several award-winning Japanese books on
development and conflict resolution in Africa, and his works in
English include a co-edited volume: Preventing Violent Conflicts in
Africa: Inequalities, Perceptions and Institutions (Palgrave, 2013). He is
Secretary General of the Japan Association of Human Security
Studies and Visiting Fellow at JICA (Japan International
Cooperation Agency) Research Institute.

Grasian Mkodzongi (Chapter 3) is a post-doctoral research fellow
at the University of Cape Town. He obtained his Ph.D. from the
University of Edinburgh (United Kingdom). His doctoral thesis
entitled ‘Fast Tracking Land Reform and Rural Livelihoods in
Mashonaland West Province of Zimbabwe’ was about the dynamics
of rural livelihoods after Zimbabwe’s FTLR Programme. His
current research focuses on the interfaces of agrarian change,
mineral resource extraction and rural livelihoods in Zimbabwe and
the Southern African region.
Shuichi Oyama (Chapter 4) is Associate Professor at Center for
African Area Studies, Kyoto University, Japan. His major research
fields are geography and anthropology concerning land issues and
people’s livelihoods in northern Zambia and in the Niger of the
Sahel region. His main works include ‘Land Degradation and
Ecological Knowledge-based Land Rehabilitation: Hausa Farmers
and Fulbe Herders in the Sahel Region, West Africa’, in T. Reuter
ed. Averting a Global Environmental Collapse: The Role of Anthropology and
Local Knowledge (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015).

Yoko Nagahara (Chapter 5) is Professor at the Graduate School
of Letters, Kyoto University, Japan. Her major research fields are
the history of Southern Africa and comparative colonial history.
Her edited works include: Toward New Perspectives of African History:
Women, Gender, and Feminisms (Ochanomizu Shobo, 2006, in
Japanese) and Colonial Responsibilities: A Comparative History of
Decolonization (Aoki Shoten, 2009, in Japanese). She is former
Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of African Studies (Japan Association
for African Studies).

Toshihiro Abe (Chapter 6) is Associate Professor at the Faculty of
Letters, Otani University, Japan. His research interests principally
relate to social reconciliation, transitional justice, migration and
social movements in the South African and Cambodian contexts. In
the late 1990s he started a career in sociology, researching
reconciliation processes in South Africa. Recently, his interest has
expanded to the field of transitional justice more generally.

Zvakanyorwa Wilbert Sadomba (Chapter 8) is a researcher with
Centre for Applied Social Sciences (CASS) at the University of
Zimbabwe. He won consecutively (2013 and 2014) the First Prize
of the Vice Chancellor’s award for research excellence. He is a
sculptor and an inventor with four patents under his belt. He has
published several journal articles and War Veterans in Zimbabwe’s
Revolution: Challenging Neo-colonialism and Settler and International Capital
(James Currey, 2011) and completed a manuscript, The Stubborn
Ghost of Alvord (forthcoming). His research interests are to
interrogate the effect of African liberation movements on
postcolonial societies using philosophical and anthropological
approaches.

Mayu Hayakawa (Chapter 9) is a part-time lecturer at Kumeda
Nursing School in Osaka, Japan. She received her Ph.D. from
Osaka University in 2013. Her major research interest lies in the
anthropological study of popular economy in Africa. She is the
author of An Anthropology of Hyperinflation: Multiple Monies and the
People in Zimbabwe (Jimbun Shoin, 2015, in Japanese).

Michael Neocosmos (Chapter 10) is Professor and Director of
the Unit for the Humanities at Rhodes University (UHURU). His
main fields of research have included political economy, migrant
labour, ethnicity, citizenship, state and civil society, political
transition, all in Southern Africa, as well as issues of social theory
concerning rural development, democracy, human rights and
political subjectivities. His main publications include: The Agrarian
Question in Southern Africa (Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 1993); From
Foreign Natives to Native Foreigners: Explaining Xenophobia in South
Africa (Codesria, 2006 and 2010); and Thinking Freedom in Africa:
Toward a Theory of Emancipatory Politics (Wits University Press,
forthcoming).

Table of Contents

Contributors…………………………...………..…...……. v
List of Abbreviations…………………………..…………. xiii
Preface……………………………………………………. xvii

Chapter 1: Introduction: African Potentials
for Conflict Resolution and Transformation…………... 1
1.1. Introduction………………………………………….. 1
1.2. Violence and Social Disarticulation in Africa…………. 3
1.3. Three Predominant Approaches……………………… 8
1.4. African Potentials: An Alternative Approach?.................. 11
1.5. Structural Violence and Accumulation Trajectories
in Africa……………………………………………… 14
1.6. African Potentials in History………………………….. 18
1.7. The Structure of this Book…………………………… 23

Part I: Structure and Agency…………………………… 35

Chapter 2: Southern African Potentials to
Address Land-based Conflict…………………………... 37
2.1. Introduction: Conflict Management Perspectives……... 37
2.2. Understanding the Southern African Conflict
Regime………………………………………………. 40
2.3. Compromised Decolonisation and the Narrow
Peace-making Frameworks…………………………… 45
2.4. Zimbabwe’s Radicalisation and its Potentials
for Conflict Management…………………………….. 50
2.5. Structural Reform: Accumulation
from Below and Above?……………………………… 56
2.6. Managing External Dimensions of the Conflict……… 62
2.7. Concluding Remarks………………………………….. 66

Chapter 3: Utilising ‘African Potentials’ to
Resolve Conflicts in a Changing Agrarian
Situation in Central Zimbabwe…………………………. 75
ix