Ascent into the Ages: Mikelle Antoine, In Memoriam

On Sunday 22^nd November, Facebook reminded me of a picture I had posted six years ago, in 2009. In the picture is Mikelle Antoine, her husband, Nii, their two young children, and myself. The picture was taken on 21^st November 2009, on the campus of the University of Ghana at Legon, in Accra. In the background is the Kwame Nkrumah Institute of African Studies. I had just arrived in Accra, to attend a Third World Studies annual conference in Elmina, on the shores of the Atlantic Ocean.

It was a nice memory. I shared it, and wrote in the comment: “Do you remember this day?” I tagged Mikelle, and hoped she would see the tag and be reminded of the memory. A thought ran through my mind. I hadn’t seen updates from Mikelle in a long time. I went to her page to see what she had been up to lately. 

Somebody wished her a happy birthday, on 7th November. Beneath that comment somebody wrote: “Rest In Peace Mikelle. You were an inspiration to many and sorely missed.” That was very strange, I thought. Just because somebody hadn’t been active on their Facebook page lately, and you write on their page "rest in peace"? Below that was another birthday message; all of them posted on the 7th of November.

Another earlier message also said “Rest in Peace.” And another one. Several more. By this time my heart was pounding, and I was beginning to sweat. I started inboxing the people who had written the condolence messages, asking them what they were talking about. I got one reply within a few minutes. “Unfortunately, Mikelle died in July. She had breast cancer.” I was shattered.

I got to know Mikelle Antoine around 2003, in East Lansing, Michigan. I was a PhD student in the Department of Teacher Education, in the College of Education at Michigan State University. She was a PhD student in the History Department. One semester I took a history course in alternative modernities in African history, and that was when I got to know her. She was in the same class. Around the same time, I got to know about the Blueprints Book Club (BBC), which Leketi Makalela, then a PhD student in Linguistics also at Michigan State, and Walter Sistrunk, another PhD student, had initiated. It brought together ten or so of us, PhD students from Africa, the Caribbean and the United States, studying various aspects of Africa. Mikelle was a key member of the book club.

It was an exciting period of my life as a student. The idea behind the BBC was that there was a history of Africa that was not being taught in mainstream academia. This history, we believed, presented a form of knowledge about the Pan-African world that would have a liberating effect on African peoples. So we hungered for this knowledge. We drew up a list of books and read one book every two or so weeks. We read the work of Ivan Van Sertima, Molefe Asante, Jacob Carruthers, Cheikh Anta Diop, Marimba Ani, and others.

The recommendation to read Marimba Ani came from Mikelle, who got her first degree from Hunter College in New York where Marimba Ani was a professor of African Studies. Professor Ani taught Mikelle at Hunter. We read Marimba Ani’s 1994 book Yurugu: An Afrikan-Centered Critique of European Cultural Thought and Behaviour.

Other topics we read and discussed were Afrocentrism, ancient African science, ancient African philosophy, Pan-Africanism, among others. One weekend a replica of the slave ship The Amistad was brought to Detroit and was docked on the shore of the Detroit River. We drove to Detroit to see it, and read and discussed its history. We also saw the movie The Amistad.

Back in the classroom, the history course I took in the History Department proved to be a turning point in my intellectual itinerary. Throughout my graduate school career, starting with the University of Iowa where I had studied English Education, there was a nagging question at the back of my mind. What was there in Africa before the coming of the Europeans? Although both my programmes at Iowa and at Michigan State were in teacher education, for the questions about Africa, I looked to other disciplines in pursuit of the nagging question.

For the term paper in the history class, I decided to give the nagging question a go. One evening I entered the MSU library around 6pm, and went to the stacks. By the time I decided to take a break, it was 6am the following day, and I had a huge pile of history books on Africa. The most fascinating discoveries were Cheikh Anta Diop's The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality, Ivan Van Sertima's They Came Before Columbus: The African Presence in Ancient America, and Martin Bernal's three-volume Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization. They opened my eyes to what was there in Africa beyond the colonial experience.

There was a lot to learn and to unlearn. Exploring this new terrain with minds like Mikelle and others was a fascinating experience. We attended African Studies conferences. We presented papers. We talked and debated for hours. For me this meant bringing these new perspectives to the African school curriculum and the education of African teachers, which I looked forward to engaging in full time after my studies.

Mikelle was born and grew up in Haiti, and later came to the United States. As an undergraduate student at Hunter College she studied abroad, and it happened to be at the University of Ghana at Legon. There she met Nii, who was studying Theatre. They fell in love, and later got married. Nii joined Mikelle in Michigan, and I drove Mikelle to the airport in Detroit to welcome him.

When Nii finished his masters’ degree at Michigan State, they moved back to Accra and started raising a family. Enroute to Accra, Mikelle donated a huge chunk of her library to a South African university, where she stayed briefly for part of her research.

When I landed at Kotoka International Airport in Accra on 21^st November 2009, Mikelle and Nii, and their two young children, were there to welcome me. I had told them, as I prepared for the trip, that for me this would be a pilgrimage to the capital of Pan-Africanism. Thus during my visit they took me to Kwame Nkrumah’s Memorial Park, where the great Pan-Africanist leader and philosopher rests. They also took me to the W.E.B. DuBois Memorial Centre for Pan-African Culture where the great Pan-Africanist scholar and pioneer is reposed.

Mikelle finished her PhD dissertation in 2010. She defended it on 4^th June at Michigan State University, and it was titled The Rise of Asante Women within the Ahmadiyya Muslim Mission, 1960-1983. It was a study of how Asante women pursued liberation by becoming Muslim between the 1960s and the 1980s.

Mikelle was very involved intellectually, socially and communally. She was a history professor at Ashesi University, where she also taught gender, Islam, media and film, and museum education. She was director of fundraising at College for Ama, a non-profit that supported girls’ education in Accra.

She was an independent-minded and original thinker, not easily satisfied with received knowledge and accepted beliefs. I remember her one day disputing the claim that capitalism was a Western phenomenon, foreign to Africa. Disillusioned with the quality of education both in public and private schools on the continent, she strongly advocated for home-schooling. She even wrote an e-book on the topic, titled 30 Steps to Homeschooling Successfully in Africa. She was an active blogger and wrote numerous articles on homeschooling, parenting, education and other topics on her blog, Mikelle on Education. 

In 2014 Mikelle and her family moved to South Carolina in the United States. In an email, she told me it was going to be for a year. On her blog she wrote about her visit to the US, and the historical research she was pursuing. She said South Carolina and North Carolina were “an extension of the West African coast… a continuation of El Mina, Cape Coast and part of the slave dungeon history.”

Ever the historian, she said the two Atlantic states answered the question “what happened to those Africans? What did they become? Did they thrive? The coasts tell one part of the story and SC/NC tell the other half.”

She shared a fascinating piece of living history she had stumbled upon in South Carolina: “While here, we learned what became of some of our ancestors. We recently learned about a 100 year old former share cropper woman with a second grade education. She is still living and grew up with knowledge of an African language.”

It was to be her last blog post, posted together with another one on cancerous tumours. In hindsight, that was the closest hint she ever let on that she was terminally ill. Mikelle died on 30^th July this year, in South Carolina, where she was buried. She was a Pan-Africanist who lived and breathed mother Africa. She was a loving wife to Nii, a caring mother to their three children, a sweet-hearted friend and a gifted intellectual. A beautiful soul through and through. She would have turned 40 today, November 24^th. She has joined the ancestors, and now belongs, to borrow an Obama phrase, to the ages. 

Malawi on International Day of Peace: uMunthu, Education and a Global Paradox

On the surface, it would seem paradoxical that while the rest of the world is today celebrating the United Nations’ International Day of Peace, the air in Malawi is thick with fear, anxiety and a premonition for violence. Last evening in Lilongwe, the capital, hundreds of people were out shopping into the night, creating long check-out lines in shops that normally close early, and are usually never crowded. There was absolutely no parking space left at People’s in downtown Old Town. Bread had sold out in most shops, and bakeries had no fresh stocks. People were stocking up, afraid this might be the last shopping for several days. For that was the experience on July 20^th, when major cities and towns were taken over by protests and riots that resulted in massive looting and the killing of 20 unarmed citizens. When civil society leaders organized another protest for August 17^th, cities and towns were again paralyzed, even though no protests took place after a last minute decision to postpone the marches and give a chance to dialogue between civil society and government, mediated by the United Nations.

Despite the appearance of a paradox when a day set aside to celebrate peace is marked by tension and fears of deathly violence, it is in such moments of conflict that peace is better appreciated, and social justice affirmed. The feeling by many people in Malawi is that of a needless crisis being fomented by a leadership that seems more concerned with engineering electoral succession than worrying about the future of the country. There has been a debate about who has caused the crisis, and the culpability of all Malawians in prolonging it. There are aspects of the crisis that are clearly being perpetuated by the conduct of the leadership, but there are also aspects that are a result of complex, asymmetrical and exploitative global structures of governance and lopsided economic interdependence.

It has become cliché in Malawian lore to repeat the maxim about how peace is not only the absence of conflict, but the presence of social justice, or words to that effect. An idea first propagated by the world’s leading peace studies scholar, Johan Galtung, it is taken as common sense, even as the idea of “structural violence”, Galtung’s notion of how injustice resides in social structures, is not as widely understood. Global changes in information consumption and the idealization of government systems have created expectations and aspirations, while exposing structural inequalities not only between nations in the Global North and the Global Southth, but also within nations and their societies. In Malawi, the emergence of a category of a super-rich class is sharply juxtaposed with a majority class whose hopes have remained stagnant for decades, creating what in a recent New York Times op-ed, the Kenyan anti-corruption campaigner John Githongo aptly described as a resentment-induced rage that has fuelled revolt starting with North Africa, and spreading south of the Sahara. There have been riots in London, protests in Wisconsin and against Wallstreet in New York City, evidence that this resentment is not just a reaction to growing inequality in Africa alone. According to Richard G. Wilkinson and Kate Pickett in their book The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger, inequality is a corrosive factor in the social well-being of people, and the United States, the world’s wealthiest and most powerful country, is also one of the most unequal.

What is perhaps more paradoxical is what is going on around the world on this day when the world observes the International Day of Peace. In the United States, the southern state of Georgia is today scheduled to execute Troy Davis, who was convicted of murdering a police officer in 1989. There has been an international outcry and a growing movement to try and stop the execution, after the real killer confessed to the crime, and several witnesses recanted their testimony. Those protesting the execution have included former US president Jimmy Carter, and former FBI Director William Sessions, according to a New York Times editorial. 

Elsewhere in the world, it has been a week of untold carnage in Yemen where scores of citizens have been brutally murdered by their own government. Fighting is still going on in Libya, weeks after Colonel Ghadafi was ousted in a NATO-led military campaign. At the United Nations in New York, the Palestinians are seeking statehood in the face of threats by the United States to veto the Palestinians’ aspirations for sovereignty and peace. In Afghanistan’s ongoing NATO war against the Taliban, a prominent peace negotiator was assassinated yesterday Tuesday.

The presence of such conflict and violence, death and misery make for a world that is clearly hurting. But it also highlights the efforts of individuals and groups working to find lasting solutions to problems of war and violence, and advocate for a more just and peaceful world order. States define peace as an absence of physical violence and war, but for ordinary people, peace still lacks in other ways that are more structural than physical, more subtle than obvious. Peace scholars refer to the absence of war and physical conflict as “negative peace”, and the presence of social justice as “positive peace.” In thinking about these concepts and how they apply to Malawian and African contexts, I have found the term “uMunthu-peace” to be another concept that adds to the notion that peace is much more than an absence, it is also the presence of other efforts to make the world a better place. The term “uMunthu-peace” derived out of a study in which I followed Malawian school teachers and read Malawian philosophers in an attempt to find an endogenous theory of peace in Malawian and African education systems.

That was in 2004, when two teachers in two rural districts of Malawi told me about how most educational systems are ill-prepared to teach citizens to go beyond classroom knowledge. In the informed views of these two teachers, it was not enough to teach primary school pupils and university students how to calculate complicated mathematical problems and memorize sophisticated formulae. Students needed to also learn what it means to be a good human being concerned with the well-being of others and the upliftment of their community. To date, very few educational systems in any part of the world offer that kind of education. The emphasis, argues Joel Spring (2007) of Queens College, City University of New York, is on “economic growth and the preparation of workers for the world’s labor market.” In his book A New Paradigm for Global School Systems: Education for a Long and Happy Life, Spring proposes a new educational paradigm in which “educational policy is focused on longevity and subjective well-being rather than economic success.”

Kindness, a virtue that adds to a moral code for humanity’s collective wellbeing is considered “subversive of neo-liberal assumptions that place value on utility and cost above other human values,” according to Sue Clegg and Stephen Rowland (2010) of Leeds Metropolitan University and the University of London, respectively. Writing in the British Journal of Sociology of Education, Clegg and Rowland observe that despite being an aspect easily recognized by students in a teacher, kindness is never considered in descriptions of “teaching excellence”, “student satisfaction”, nor “professional values.” This is true of Malawian education and education in most parts of the world. The result is the violent and unjust world we live in, which makes the case for continued efforts by peace activists to raise global consciousness about the possibility of sustainable peace and social justice.

When I first heard that the date for the Malawi protests, in the form of vigils, had been shifted from 17^th September to 21^st, I initially thought it was to do with the 21^st September being International Day of Peace. But the reason was because the 17^th was not ideal for most of the civil society leaders who had other commitments; 21^st September was. The Twitter hashtag that has been used for the campaign since July 20th, #redarmy, reveals no intention of an appeal for peace. Apart from an announced press conference by the UNDP Malawi office, Malawi is not observing the International Day of Peace. Instead, we are observing what was going to be another day of street protests, in the form of vigils, turned into a mass stay-away at the last minute.

Security, and fears of a repeat of July 20^th seem to have been the overriding concern in the decision to move from street protests to what civil society called “Plan B.” While civil society leaders have been imagining the protests as peaceful demonstrations aimed at sending a message of concern to the Malawi leadership about the direction the country is taking, the reaction to the call for protests has betrayed a different understanding of what is being envisioned. A court injunction obtained by “concerned citizens” after the aborted August 17^th protests put a ban on any form of anti-government protests. Shop owners were barricading doors and windows, and people were out en masse shopping late on Tuesday. Most offices announced to employees not to show up for work on Wednesday September 21^st, and to ensure their personal safety. Clearly, where civil society were envisioning peaceful protests, everyone else has been hearing violence, looting, property damage, and deaths.

That is quite an intrigue, something that comes out of events of July 20^th. And it raises some troubling questions. Are Malawians hopelessly incapable of maintaining law and order whenever they decide to exercise a constitutionally-granted right to peaceful demonstrations? What explains the easiness with which peaceful protests turn into violent riots and mass killings? How do we explain the resentment that is clearly simmering just underneath the surface and readily finds an outlet in destroying property and taking lives? Is it impossible to envision a Malawi in which leaders, both in political parties and in civil society, think of the greater good and work to bridge the gaping inequality that is fast characterizing Malawi and the rest of the world?

As an educationist, I always turn to how and what we teach in the schools, for answers to questions like this. Educationists who espouse belief in the singular significance of peace have developed a field of study, called “peace education” at the primary and secondary level, and “peace studies” at the university level. Peace educationists argue that all education ought to be peace education. In my study of prospects for peace education in Malawian schools, since 2004, I have learned, from watching teachers, that it is entirely possible to approach the school curriculum, and day-to-day classroom content, into peace education. I have also learned how peace education and peace studies have been in existence for some decades now, but they are yet to become the staple of educational systems. It is not much wonder to peace educationists that school systems have always produced leaders who resort to war to resolve problems, and who care more about personal power and wealth than about the greater good.

Coincidentally, today, September 21^st, is also Founder’s Day in Ghana, when they celebrate the birthday of Ghana’s founding president, the late Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah. Africa’s pursuits for peace and independence owe a lot to a vision first stipulated by Kwame Nkrumah, who argued that the independence of Ghana was meaningless unless it was tied to the independence of the rest of the continent. Dr Nkrumah argued more than fifty years ago that on their own, African countries were not economically viable and therefore needed to integrate their systems into a continental society. He also devoted his life to connecting continental Africa with the African Diaspora, and lived a life of testimony to that noble ideal. Subsequent generations of African leaders have been unable to appreciate Dr Nkrumah’s wisdom, and have colluded with forces of imperialism to impoverish ordinary Africans.

It is the disillusionment from that collusion between African leadership and forces of imperialism that lies at the heart of the protest movement in Malawi and elsewhere. As long as educational systems in Africa and around the world continue perpetuating educational policies that ignore larger ideals of uMunthu-peace, social well-being and the greater good, the world will continue the paradox of celebrating peace amidst war, violence and death. 

Peace Studies and ‘Africa’: International Day of Peace Reflections

When I stumbled upon peace studies as an academic discipline in 2003, I saw the myriad questions I had developed over a life time, some of which I was unaware of, begin to gel into an intelligible, coherent pursuit. I wondered why it had taken me five years into graduate school to learn of the existence of peace studies as a discipline. And had it not been for a dissertation research fellowship, I can not tell whether I would have become acquainted with the discipline, and gone ahead to adopt it as an intellectual and activist framework. What seemed even more peculiar was that it felt so natural and intuitive; I realized I had been using it all along, only I hadn’t called it peace studies. Five years later, I have come to regard it as indispensable for the way I understand the world and our attempts towards solutions to its intractable problems. The tell-tale moment came in 2004, during field work in Malawi, when it occurred to me that it was what uMunthu/uBuntu demanded of us as human beings. I had set out on a sojourn to the global North, in search of truth, and had returned home at the height of that search, only to find that the object of my searching had been lying in plain sight all along. On this day, September 21, International Day of Peace, I would like to reflect on how the discipline of peace and justice studies brings together a host of multidisciplinary approaches to understanding Africa, Pan-Africans, and their place in the work of promoting global peace.

It was whilst I was in the field that I learned how to appropriate peace studies to make sense of the uMunthu/uBuntu imperative which lay at the center of the pursuit for local and global peace. In order to achieve this, I began thinking, it was necessary for peace studies to take Africa and Africans seriously. As yet, this is not the case, an argument made by Marvin Berlowitz (2002), professor of Educational Foundations at the University of Cincinnati. Berlowitz wrote in an issue of the journal Peace Review that the discipline of peace studies was plagued by Eurocentric bias. He said several African American peace leaders and activists were ignored in the scholarship, and his list included one African peace leader, and one Caribbean scholar activist.

Berlowitz’s conclusion was that Eurocentric bias pervaded the field of peace studies, and he attributed the problem to an “ideological split” that represented differing historical experiences between Euro-Americans and African Americans. In explaining why Eurocentrism was a problem in peace studies, Berlowitz listed two main reasons: it distorted our view of peace studies and the peace movement, and it precluded any viable understanding or alliance between African Americans and Euro-Americans. For example, historical events such as the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and anti-colonization were active topics of research and activism in the African American community, while they were paid less attention to in mainstream peace studies.

While Berlowitz’s main concern was the place of African American peace leaders and activists in the peace studies canon, the same questions are relevant regarding the place of African peace leaders and activists. In this quest, a much more comprehensive persuasion for Africans and African contexts in peace studies has been made by Matt Meyer, a founding member of the Peace and Justice Studies Association and co-convener of the World Resisters League, and Bill Sutherland, a co-founder of the Congress for Racial Equality, and a leading thinker and activist of Pan-Africanism. Not only have Matt Meyer and Bill Sutherland asserted the place of African leaders such as Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere, Kenneth Kaunda and other African leaders and activists in the study of peace and justice, they have also argued for the place of Pan-Africanism and African independence and anti-colonial movements as legitimate subjects of peace studies.

Bill Sutherland and Matt Meyer’s 2000 book Guns and Gandhi in Africa: Pan African Insights on Nonviolence, Armed Struggle and Liberation in Africa, accomplishes what no other study that I know of does: merging together Pan-Africanism, African independence and anti-colonial struggles, and Gandhian nonviolence into a coherent exploration of African contexts in the study of peace and justice. The book chronicles detailed accounts and narratives of Africa’s experiments with violence and nonviolence. The narratives are developed through interviews with African leaders and political activists, and personal reflections from Bill Sutherland. Bill Sutherland’s experiences go back to the 1950s when Ghana was fighting for its independence with Kwame Nkrumah as its leader, to the 1990s when Sutherland and Matt Meyer traveled across the continent to personally meet and interview several African leaders and activists. The book thus offers deep insights into the confluence of violence and nonviolence in Africa’s struggles for independence from Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere, Jerry Rawlings, Kenneth Kaunda, Graca Machel, Sam Nujoma, Nathan Shamuyayira, Emma Mashinini, and Walter Sisulu, among many others.

In his preface to the book, former Archbishop of Cape Town, Desmond Tutu, states that Matt Meyer and Bill Sutherland’s work evokes uBuntu ideals. Tutu says Meyer and Sutherland begin to “develop a language that looks at the roots of our humanness beyond our many private contradictions” (p. xi). Tutu says Meyer and Sutherland challenge us to “better understand concepts often seen as opposed to one another—like nonviolence and armed struggle.” In so doing, they “help to focus our attention on the larger struggles we must still wage, united: for economic justice, for true freedom and equality, and for a world of lasting peace” (ibid.). Tutu goes on to inform us that Gandhi’s philosophy of soul force and nonviolence originated in a South African context, and “were based on some concepts he learned in South Africa,” during Gandhi’s stay there (xii).

In Ghana’s struggle for independence, we learn from Sutherland that Kwame Nkrumah, a leading Pan-Africanist and anti-colonial leader and activist of his time, was also a committed nonviolence advocate, and published a pamphlet in the early phase of his leadership of Ghana’s independence movement. The pamphlet was titled What I Mean By Positive Action. Positive Action was Nkrumah’s version of nonviolence, informed by the Ghanaian context of the colonialist and imperialist nature of the oppression Africans were under. Speaking decades later to Matt Meyer and Bill Sutherland, one person who had been one of Nkrumah’s close associates, Komla Agbelo Gbedema, confirmed that Gandhian nonviolence was indeed the model Ghana followed. Sutherland and Meyer quote Gbedema as saying “The Gandhian movement was a our model. Some considered Positive Action a strategy or tactic, others a principle.” But for Gbedema himself, he learned his nonviolence from a Quaker teacher who taught him that violence begot violence. The Ghanaians attributed the success of their struggle to Nkrumah’s brand of nonviolence. They even invited both WEB DuBois and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr to their independence celebrations in 1957. WEB DuBois was unable to go, but Martin Luther King Jr went, and heard Nkrumah shout the words “Free at last! Free at last!” Six years later MLK himself would use those very words to end his famed “I Have Dream” speech.

Another African anti-colonial leader and activist who also believed in nonviolence as an effective approach was the first president of Zambia, Kenneth Kaunda. Meyer and Sutherland write that Kaunda was an early advocate of nonviolent direct action, and pursued these ideals in the Africa Freedom Action and World Peace Brigade, a precursor to Peace Brigades International. Kaunda wrote a book titled The Riddle of Violence, in which he directly addressed the relevance of Gandhi to Zambia’s struggle for independence. In his life after the presidency, Kaunda told Meyer and Sutherland he had established the Kaunda Institute for Peace and Democracy, where there would be courses in peace studies and democracy.

In their discussions between Meyer and Sutherland and the now deceased first president of Tanzania, Mwalimu Julius Nyerere, the problem of achieving true independence still remains a legitimate peace and justice struggle both at the local as well as the global level. Nyerere’s role in this struggle took on a visible Pan-Africanist outlook, as had Nkrumah’s. Both African leaders invited people of African descent from outside Africa to participate in the intellectual life of Tanzanian society. Bill Sutherland was one of these figures. The late Guyanese scholar and activist Walter Rodney was another. Nyerere, like Kaunda, also hosted South African and Zimbabwean political leaders in their struggle against their respective white minority governments.

Amongst African countries, South Africa’s presence in peace studies is much better represented. There is widespread recognition that the anti-apartheid movement garnered support amongst peace activists outside Africa. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission has been researched and written about extensively in peace research, as has the story of Nelson Mandela and the debates inside the African National Congress about the efficacy and problems associated with nonviolence. What is perhaps not widely acknowledged to the extent that it deserves is the philosophy of uBuntu, of which Archbishop Desmond Tutu is a leading advocate. Whereas Pan-Africanism and the anti-colonial independence movements enter the peace studies discourse by what can be called an activist political project, the uBuntu connection to peace studies can be said to be much more organic and internal. uBuntu, which I like to refer to as uMunthu, in it’s Chichewa version, belongs to the peace and justice studies framework through its ontological definition of the collective bond of humanness, rendering responsibility for one’s neighbors on the planet an inherent core value.

If we accept Berlowitz’s claim that African American peace leaders and activists, with the exception of MLK, are absent from peace studies, African leaders and activists are even more so. If we accept Sutherland and Meyer’s argument that the African leaders they write about in their book provide an African perspective to the global peace and justice movement, then it is fair to use Berlowitz’s questions to ask why African leaders and activists are not given the attention they deserve in the peace studies scholarship. The same goes for the philosophy of uMunthu.

Amongst the texts that constitute the peace studies canon, very few of them treat Africa in a substantive, meaningful way. Matt Meyer and Bill Sutherland’s are the only exception. Meyer has a couple of books on Pan African peace studies forthcoming in the next months, which will add to Guns and Gandhi in a way that ought to begin to change the peace studies landscape. The recent achievements of Kofi Annan in resolving the Kenyan post-election crisis, the fledgling, much-criticized efforts of Thabo Mbeki in Zimbabwe, and the work of the environmentalist and scholar Wangari Maathai, amongst others, ought to add to the canon.

The absence of African contributions to the global peace and justice movement poses two kinds of problems. The first problem is that of language and definition. On the one hand, the language I am most familiar with, Chichewa, does not have definitive terms for peace, violence, or nonviolence. Even in English, the best we can do to offer a response to violence is nonviolence, itself a negative formulation. And when we look at the definitions used in the literature, some of my students have a difficult time understanding why the problem of peace is worthy of their attention in a college classroom. They point to the difficulty of finding universal agreement on what peace entails as evidence that peace can not be achieved, and that therefore the study of peace itself is a futile, empty endeavor.

The second problem, like the first one, also deals with teaching peace studies. On the few occasions that African contexts get mentioned in the texts we use, students see a confirmation of the stereotypes they inherit about Africa as a place of hopelessness, helplessness and despair. There can be no denying that Africa has peculiar problems that defy easy rationalization. Even the African leaders and peace activists that Meyer and Sutherland describe in their book acknowledge this. However the persistence of Eurocentrism in the curriculum, both in Africa and outside Africa, lead to a distortion of the underlying contexts that create the problems Africa and Africans face. Those distortions entail policy prescriptions that over the decades have done little to teach students about difference, interdependence and imperialist exploitation. Even with well-meaning and critically-minded preparation for American students going to do study abroad in African countries, it is still very difficult to orient students to abandon a missionary-savior outlook and adopt an attitude in which Western societies can also learn from Africa in an equal exchange of knowledge production.

It is a reasonable claim that peace and justice studies is well disposed to provide a comprehensive and meaningful understanding of Africa’s problems, but the discipline can not accomplish this when the knowledge of Africa’s contributions to global peace and justice remains as underdeveloped as it currently is. The current crop of university students who feel compelled to study marginalized societies will be much better served by a peace and justice studies approach that does not ignore injustices at home, and that offers an Africa that is an integral part of historical and contemporary efforts to promote global peace.