The European Legacy in Africa (The African Legacy in Europe)

The contribution focuses on selected elements of the European legacy in Africa that frame the twentieth century in a crucial way. They contributed to the perpetration of major atrocities on the African continent on a scale that invites comparison with the Holocaust – that is, the genocide of Namibian Hereros at the beginning of the twentieth century and the genocide of the Rwandan Tutsis at its end. The paper also discusses elements of the African legacy in Europe – particularly the emergence and transfer of a new form of power that depends on the experience of imperialism as central to the ‘Western’ worldview. The Rwandan genocide in 1994 represents a new nature of the atrocity, in which the victims become the killers. A better understanding of it could therefore also shed light on some related, but different, events, such as “humanitarian interventions” and the “war against terror”. The article focuses on the organization of the colonial and postcolonial bureaucratic apparatus of rule, its special form of non-state power, and its connection with “race”, “tribe”, and “tradition” as crucial elements of post-totalitarian forms of government and new forms of identitarian collective violence. It stresses the crucial connectedness of the “African” and “European” structure of this new form of power, which indeed usurped the role of the modern nation-state. The processes that create the conditions for the new forms of domination and for the local and global undermining of politics and (political) responsibility can also be understood in the same way.