ADEKEYE ADEBAJO: Kenyan political thinker envisioned continent at peace

This month marks the third anniversary of the death of Kenyan political scientist Ali Mazrui. Equally significantly, this year also commemorates the golden jubilee of Mazrui’s concept of Pax Africana, developed in a classic 1967 study Towards a Pax Africana.

Pax Africana argued that Africans needed to create peace on their own continent. Africa was encouraged to act as its own policeman, as well as contribute to policing other parts of the world. The related idea of "continental jurisdiction" was a sort of Monroe Doctrine urging outsiders to stay out of Africa and let Africans resolve their own conflicts. The Mazruian concept of "racial sovereignty" argued that intervention by African states in each other’s disputes was more legitimate than those of outsiders.

The Kenyan noted that Pax Britannica was the very antithesis of Pax Africana, as it championed the pacification of "savage natives" and the idea that white races had to disarm darker races to rule over them. He thus regarded laws to disarm Africans as a negation of their "warrior tradition" and the reduction of Africans to children, emasculating them by suppressing values such as physical courage.

Mazrui would later call — in his 1979 BBC Reith lectures — for Africans to renounce the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, arguing that a nuclear-armed continent was perhaps the shock needed for nuclear states to disarm. He noted that the "nuclearisation of the warrior tradition" would restore the Third World’s adulthood, which imperialism had stripped away.

In the three Cold War decades between 1960 and 1990, Africans failed to attain Pax Africana due to the fact that Pax Americana, Pax Sovietica and Pax Gallica flooded Africa with weapons, waging proxy wars and supporting despots, resulting in 10-million African deaths.

With the reduction of interest in Africa by external actors in the postapartheid era, however, some of the countries that Mazrui had argued would act as future African hegemons were able to promote Pax Africana. Pax Nigeriana intervened in Liberia and Sierra Leone in the 1990s (and later in Guinea-Bissau and Sudan’s Darfur region).

Pax South Africana also deployed in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Burundi in the 2000s, helping to rout M-23 rebels in the eastern Congo more recently in 2013. Pax Ethiopiana has seen the country deploy the largest peacekeeping forces to UN missions and Pax Uganda leads AU peacekeeping efforts in Somalia. However, Pax Africana has also more recently been defiled by the continuing neo-imperial actions of Pax Americana and Pax Gallica in Africa. About 2,000 US soldiers remain deployed in Djibouti, while Washington has bases and outposts in Kenya, Uganda, Chad, Central African Republic (CAR), South Sudan, the Congo, Ethiopia, Burkina Faso, Ghana and Senegal.

France has 4,000 troops deployed in Mali, Chad, Niger, Burkina Faso, and Ivory Coast.

Africa’s recent response to these violations of Pax Africana has been feeble: an African stand-by force promised to have become operational seven years ago is still in perpetual gestation. After the Cold War, Mazrui pushed the idea of UN "trusteeship" as a way of Africa avoiding the control of neo-imperial powers. He was often ahead of his time, as 85% of UN peacekeepers are today deployed to eight African peacekeeping theatres. Though some of these missions are subject to neo-imperial machinations – with Paris, London, and Washington drafting all the resolutions in African cases on the UN Security Council – it is mostly African and Asian peacekeepers that populate these missions. Thirteen of the 20 top contributors to UN peacekeeping are also African.

However, as the continent’s elusive quest for Pax Africana continues, the question Mazrui posed half-a-century ago remains unanswered: "Now that the imperial order is coming to an end, who is to keep the peace in Africa?"

• Adebajo is director of the Institute for Pan-African Thought and Conversation at the University of Johannesburg.