African Continent: Birthplace of Satyagraha
Africa is home today to the extremes of appalling violence and a nonviolence based partly on its indigenous traditions.
Published in Nonviolence Magazine
July 12, 2016
“Africa is one of the biggest continents in the world.” Such is the modest beginning of Chapter One of Gandhi’s great work, Satyagraha in South Africa. I have always thought, though, that Gandhi was aware that he had launched the most significant experiment in social change the world had ever seen on an appropriately large stage. Satyagraha, launched on a date now associated with the opposite force, September 11, 1906, Tolstoy agreed, was the first time in history that Satyagraha was carried out on a large scale; and it would only get bigger when Gandhi carried it to India and the heart of colonialism, Martin Luther King picked up the baton in racist America, and on from there. In 1906 the word Satyagraha did not even exist (nor, in English, “nonviolence,” for that matter): today it is a regular feature of the political landscape. One nonviolence scholar, who is not given to romantic exaggeration, has recently estimated that at any given time there is hardly a society today not experiencing some kind of nonviolent demonstration or movement.
Yet how much of a mark did Satyagraha, nonviolence, leave on the continent of its birth? This would be hard to say. As the articles in this issue will illustrate, Africa is home today to the extremes of appalling violence and a nonviolence based partly on its indigenous traditions — think of the concept of Ubuntu, “I am because you are,” popularized by Archbishop Tutu during the famed Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings that made possible South Africa’s remarkable transition from apartheid state to democracy. Some of the more remarkable experiments in what we call Restorative Justice are also African, most well known perhaps the Gacaca courts that similarly saved Rwanda from endless cycles of retributive violence. The most restorative, and effective, practice I have heard of arose among the Babemba in South Africa (and other sub-saharan regions), where an offender sits in the middle of a circle with the entire village around him and every person in the village in turn says something positive about him. Africa is also a venue for a large number of conflict-resolving interventions, like the Quaker Great Lakes Initiative and the highly imaginative projects done by Search for Common Ground.
Not to mention that one of the most dramatic nonviolent uprisings of modern times unfolded in Liberia — scene of one of the most violent wars and despotic regimes. I had the pleasure of meeting Leemah Gbowee, who got a well-deserved Nobel Prize for her role in leading that mostly women’s rebellion, as I did Jenni Williams, who is embroiled in similar struggles right now in Zimbabwe.
Whatever may be the explanation for this paradox, let us all hope that the power of women like Leemah Gbowee and Jenni Williams come increasingly to characterize the social texture of Africa and the world.
