Epistemologies of African Conflicts—Violence, Evolutionism, and the War in Sierra Leone

Epistemologies of African Conflicts is a bold and ground-breaking epistemological critique of the dominant discourses on contemporary African conflicts. Using the Sierra Leone civil war as its empirical case, and through a detailed and painstaking examination of the dominant ways in which that conflict has been interpreted, theorised and understood, this provocative study considers how Africa is constructed as a reality for knowledge and the power political implications that this construction has for the continent and its people. This study goes beyond the immediate concerns about how the empirical aspect of Africanist discourses attest to their theoretical formulations, to focus on questions about the formal character of Africanist knowledge, their conditions of possibility, the ways in which they produce African subjectivities, define African realities and shape Western attitudes towards the continent as a result of these conflicts. This study situates the current discourses on contemporary African conflicts within the centuries-long Eurocentric conceptions of Africa conveyed through the 'colonial library' and investigates the historical linkages between 'Africanism' as the body of knowledge on and about Africa and a Western will to power which since the fifteenth century has also perfectly espoused and necessitated an Africanist will to truth. Identifying evolutionism as a major condition of Africanist knowledge linked to these power knowledge systems, it argues that the scripts of these conflicts are always already written long before the first shots are fired. Thus, the predicament of Africanist discourses emanates not only from their conceptual and epistemological dependence on the conceptualities of the colonial library, as well as their fidelity to an evolutionist epistemology, but also their devotion to the power/knowledge regimes of the Western will to power which makes them possible.

Zubairu Wai is an assistant professor of Political Science at Lakehead University.