Beyond the Equator There Are No Sins

Abstract

The phenomenon of violence has pervaded African people’s lives across precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial historical epochs. While it is easy to codify manifestations of violence such as precolonial raiding, colonial wars of conquest, and nationalist resistance wars, there are many other forms whose logic is harder to understand, such as terrorism, xenophobia, racist-inspired violence, criminality, rape, torture, and maiming. This study deploys the concept of coloniality of being, as advanced by Nelson Maldonado-Torres, in combination with Frantz Fanon’s notion of the “damnes” and Slavoj Zizek’s ideas of subjective, objective, and symbolic violence, as important conceptual tools to explore the logic of violence in African history from the time of colonial encounters to the present. The study locates the logic of violence in coloniality and its reproduction of African subjectivities where race was used not only to “inferiorize” black people into “damnes” but also to deny their very humanity so as to justify such forms of violence as slavery, colonial conquest, dispossession, imprisonment, rape, shooting, and killing. African nationalism as a deeply interpellated phenomenon reproduced colonial violence and authoritarianism, bequeathing it on postcolonial Africa as a mode of governance. While the key concern of this study is to explain the logic of violence, its central arguments are empirically proven through the case studies of Congo under King Leopold II, where violence was used as a mode of governance; the Herero people who became victims of German colonial genocide; and South Africa where “neo-apartheid social fascism” recreated black townships as crouching villages of violence and civil tension.