Introduction: 'Unsettling violence'

Africa is tendentiously associated with violence in the historical, political and anthropological imagination, as well as in contemporary media representations. At the same time, forms of non-violent practice, significantly under-represented in theoretical and historical discussions, are integral to African social and historical experience and constitute an important dimension of African personhood. The present volume seeks both to historicize and to deconstruct the pervasive, almost ritualistic, association of Africa with forms of everyday as well as extreme violence, the latter bordering on and including genocide. But it also holds up to scrutiny occluded histories of non-violence that must be restored to our scholarly narratives of the African past and present. The contributions to this volume are accordingly directed at political, social and cultural processes in Africa which incite violence or which facilitate its negation through non-violent social action, whether or not explicitly formulated as such.