Chapter 6 The Paradigm of Peace: South ’s Peace Diplomacy in Burundi and

Siphamandla Zondi

Necessarily, therefore we are engaged and will continue to be engaged in Africa’s efforts to guarantee peace for her children, to feed and clothe them, to educate them and to bring them up as human beings as human as any other in the , their dignity restored and their equal worth recognized and valued throughout our universe. mbeki 1998 ∵

1 Introduction

“ cannot escape its African destiny,” said in a 1993 speech mapping out the strategic orientation of the of the post- apartheid state before a world audience in the usa (Mandela 1993). “If we do not devote our energies to this continent,” he warned, “we too could fall victim to the forces that have brought ruin to its various parts.” He had already argued strongly that there could not be one system and one reality for the world and another for Africa, thus placing a demand upon the new country to champion the cause of peace, democracy, justice, human dignity and development for Africa (Mandela 1993). The end of the Cold War had provided the air of optimism that caused Man- dela to declare that a new Africa was going to emerge. For his successor, (1998), this new period was about African renaissance or renewal, an age of hope that at last the continent would shake free of the chains of colonial heritage, neocolonial present, a global marginalisation that engendered condi- tions of poverty, underdevelopment, violence and conflict, governance deficit and other ills on the continent. One of the central promises of this renaissance that South Africa was to play a critical role in was to create conditions, institu- tions and procedures to ensure peace, stability and democracy in Africa. In- deed, South Africa would go to play an energetic role in strengthening the con- tinental peace architecture including regional peace structures, a key part of © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, AND CODESRIA, , , ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004417816_007

136 Zondi which were efforts to end conflict through mediation and political dialogue leading to governments of national unity and post-conflict reconstruction. The pursuit of peace is an essentially decolonizing project in the case of Africa where colonial domination required new and deep forms of violence that are so deep-rooted that they now haunt former colonies with orgies of blood (Ndlovu–Gatsheni 2015: 22–50). We have known for a time now that coloniality as a model of power that emerges in the late 15th century as the post-enlightenment European man ex- panded his new found audacity of self-belief, as Kwarteng (2012) calls it, was marked by politics of domination, structures of hierarchy and inequality and paradigm of violence all interconnected in processes that became known as colonization and . We also know that the forces of resistance against this had another dream, a dream underpinned by peace, equality, fairness and justice, a wish to see peaceful co-existence and collective prosperity for all in the world for all. Prix- ley ka Seme spoke in 1906 in Colombia, the usa, on the ground haunted by the ghost of empire in Colombus, a message that contradicted Columbus. He said, “The brighter day is rising upon Africa.” “Her Congo and her Gambia,” he con- tinued, “whitened with commerce, her crowded cities sending forth the hum of business, and all her sons employed in advancing the victories of peace- greater and more abiding than the spoils of war” (Seme 1906). The ideal on which the anti-colonial struggle, anti-imperialism efforts and postcolonial re- building of Africa were premised on was the victories of peace that were great- er and more abiding than the spoils of war that the colonial project and its neo-colonial residue were based on. The pursuit of peace was therefore a pur- suit of a paradigm that decolonises Africa’s geopolitics. This is important to note so that we can distinguish the pursuit of peace by colonial forces and those by anti-colonial ones as fundamentally different. Peace within the para- digm of war is negative peace, mere silence of guns, but in a decolonial setting it is to open space for people to live again, to believe again, to dream again and to thrive again. This chapter critically reflects on South Africa’s role in Burundi and Mada- gascar. Both are cases about how to deal with lingering problem of tendencies in the and conduct of the independent state, the paradigm of politics and inter-communal relations all framed in significant ways by colonial past and neocolonial present. Therefore, peace processes must be placed in an ana- lytical framework of neocolonial continuities and the continued dream for de- colonization. We therefore employ a decolonial methodological frame of anal- ysis in this chapter (Smith 2012; Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2015; Anibal 2000: 533–580).