No Peace Until We Decolonize and Return to Our Roots: Culture and Peacebuilding in Sub-Saharan Africa

For thousands of years, Afrocentric cultures have sustained and shaped communities. However, African communities have become fractured by centuries of slave trade, colonialism, and neocolonialism. These global dynamics of exploitation and dehumanization also obscured and decentered Afrocentric knowledge systems. The argument of this chapter is that peace and security interventions (and interventions in all other issues that concern the continent) remain flawed until Africans rediscover and incorporate Afrocentric cultural elements. Toward this end, the nature of Afrocentric culture is described, the contemporary context is discussed, and the implications for peace and security are examined.