On Systemic and Epistemic Violence in Africa

This a broad and thematic/conceptual study which dissects violence in its various manifestations. The chapter delves deep into the phenomenon of violence in Africa and reveals its multifaceted character. Focusing on the systemic and epistemic violence that is always hidden, the chapter posits that overt violence has systemic and epistemic underpinnings. The chapter highlights how Africa was dragged into colonial modernity through such violent systems as mercantilism, enslavement, colonialism, racial capitalism, and heteronormative patriarchal sexism. Behind these inimical processes lurked the cognitive empire and its colonial library which operated through invasion of the mental universes of its targets in the process committing such epistemic violences such as theft of history, epistemicides, linguicides, and culturecides.