Community – Being Human 71theft or war with them to the grave. Daily clips on newspapers, media
channels for television and radio in all nations report more about war
than about peace. The largest item in many national budgets is war-
related. Force and violence preoccupy social consciousness, the former
protecting the status quo, the latter threatening it, but both using the
same instruments of coercion and compulsion. Exemplary leadership is
rare if identifiable, while threats of intimidation and sanctions are ram-
pant on the part of the rich-and-powerful against the poor-and-weak.
How can (and should) relatives- human beings- live together as
community on this Planet Earth, while their greatest preoccupation is
conflict and war? In two major wars (World War I and World War II)
millions of people died in all continents during the twentieth century.
Factually, these were European wars, both of them sparked by confron-
tation between nations closely related both ethnically and culturally.
Africans were conscripted into these wars, whose cause they did not
know, and for which they were not interested parties. Battles were
fought on African soil even though Africans, like pawns in a chess
game, were peripheral to the conflict. The main loser in African battle-
fields was Germany, whose colonies were shared between France and
Britain. Africans did not enjoy peace after these two world wars. Ideo-
logical confrontation between Capitalist and Socialist powers pulled
African nationalist leaders toward one or other of the two rival ideolo-
gies during the struggles for national sovereignty. Those who identified
with neither ideology joined the Non-Aligned Movement. Africa did not
enjoy peace at the end of the Cold War in 1989. Instead, internal con-
flicts flared, apparently fuelled by external strategic interests dating
from the colonial era. Africa continues to suffer as if under a curse.
The 2015 UN Human Development Index lists African nations as the
most impoverished, the most fragmented, the most exploited, and the
least developed. Despite abundant natural resources and the resourceful-
ness of African peoples, no nation in Tropical Africa is ranked within