ABSTRACT
Africa is a place that seems to elude us. It has had a long history, one that predates the European hegemonic presence in the region. The brutality inherent in the arrogant epistemology of the expansionist European psyche and Europeans’ conquest of the region that characterize the period of human enslavement, the slave trade, and colonialism demarcates a traumatic chapter in the continent’s history. It is one that embodies layers of mass criminality and exploitation, and a perversion of any rational concept of justice. The postcolonial period has likewise seen many incarnations of oppression, but these incarnations are not merely neocolonial elements and arrogant apartheid policies; sadly, they underscore political greed and spite by many Africans themselves, who in their zeal for power and control have imperilled the social landscape with moral hazards such as heavy-handed inequitable rule, rampant corruption, ethnocentrism and warfare, and misappropriation of resources. A 2005 United Nations report states that from 1956 to 2001 the region experienced 186 coups d’état, of which half are said to have taken place between the 1980s and 1990s (UN Office on Drugs and Crime [UNODC], 2005, p. 20). Thus significant trauma lingers on, impacting adversely on security, education, and development in the region in a way that deprivation of education and underdevelopment, in turn, recreates security issues. Yet no significant attention has been given to this nexus in the literature, save for Elisabeth King’s (2014) analysis on Rwanda.
