As the 20th century comes to a close, Africa consists of some 54 countries. Since independence, about a third of them have experienced large scale political violence or war. This does not include those countries which had relatively bloodless military coups or occasional assassinations. After all, even the United States has had presidential assassinations.

Countries differ in violence even when they are next-door neighbours. I come from Kenya. Kenya shares borders with five other countries. Four of those other countries have experienced civil wars - Ethiopia, Somalia, Sudan and Uganda. The fifth is Tanzania which was partly born out of a revolution - the Zanzibar revolution of 1964.

By comparison with its neighbours, Kenya has been spared large-scale civil conflict - so far!

In the second half of the 20th century, more people have died as a result of conflict between Black and Black than because of conflict between Black and White. While anti-colonial wars did cost a lot of lives (especially in places like Algeria where more than a million perished at the hands of the French), post-colonial wars have been even more ruthless.

And yet the seeds of the post-colonial wars themselves lie in the mess colonialism created in Africa by destroying old methods of conflict-resolution.

While most African conflicts are partly caused by borders, those conflicts are not themselves about borders. They conflicts are partly caused by borders created by colonial powers to enclose groups with no traditions of shared authority or shared systems of settling disputes.

On the other hand, African governments have tended to be possessive about colonial borders and have discouraged challenging them. The borders generate conflicts within them, but have not been encouraged to generate conflict across them. The dispute between Ethiopia and Eritrea is more an exceptional inter-state conflict than a rule.

While the worst conflicts in Arab Africa are religious, the worst conflicts in Black Africa are ethnic (so called atribal). Algeria currently has the worst conflict in Arab Africa proper, and the conflict is between Islamists and military secularists. It is one of the ugliest wars in the world. Egypt in Arab Africa also has a religious conflict. The worst conflict in Black Africa in the 1990s has been between the Hutu and Tutsi, especially with the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. This has been ethnic.

Sudan is caught in-between. Is the conflict between North-South primarily ethnic or primarily religious? You may take your pick. In Somalia the conflict was sub-ethnic - i.e., between clans rather than between tribes.

While Black against White in Africa is a clash over resources, Black against Black is a clash of identities. The thesis here is that racial conflicts in Africa are ultimately economic, whereas tribal wars are ultimately cultural. White folks and Black folks fight each other about who owns what. Black folks and Black folks fight each other about who is who. Apartheid was ultimately an economic war. But Hutu against Tutsi is a culture-conflict.

While African wars are fought with modern weapons, African armies are not yet modern armies. One of the destabilising forces which colonialism bequeathed to independent Africa was a standing army with Western weapons. One of the few African countries to consider whether to do without a standing army was Tanzania. In 1964 Nyerere even had the opportunity to disband his entire army and not build an alternative one. He did disband the old one, but he did not follow Costa Rica's example and do without.

At independence the weapons were less modern but the armies more disciplined and professional. Now the weapons are more modern and the armies less disciplined and less professional.

While there are many more plural societies than dual societies in Africa, dual socieities may be more dangerous per capita. This distinction which the paper makes is between a plural society and a dual society. A plural society is one which has multiple groups defined ethnically, racially, religiously, culturally, or by other parameters.

A dual society is one in which two groups account for over 80 per cent of the population. The United States is a plural society, but Belgium is a dual society of Flemish and Francophone-identities.

While Africa should indeed celebrate that it has relatively few conflicts between states today, should Africa also lament that it did not have more such interstate wars in the past? In Africa, has the balance between external conflict and internal conflict tilted too far on the side of internal?

And as human history has repeated time and time again, civil wars often leave deeper scars, are often more indiscriminate and more ruthless than are inter-state conflicts short of either a World war or a nuclear war. The United States, for example, lost more people in its own civil war in the 1860s than in any other single war in its 200-year history, including Vietnam and the two world wars.

War has become too dangerous to be a reliable instrument of nation-building and state formation in the future. If pluralism is to be diverted away from divisiveness towards more creative formations, certain positive values would need to be more clearly identified, cultivated and institutionally consolidated.

This is what brings constructive pluralism into relevance. On what values and principles does it need to rest? How can a constructive plural order be built?

Tolerance is measured by the moral and attitudinal yardstick of acceptance of difference. But we need to learn that victims of intolerance do not necessarily become paragons of toleration. Christianity which suffered the tortures of Roman gladiators became a religion of the Roman Inquisition. The Jews who suffered under the Nazis became an occupying power with thousands of political prisoners.

The Muslims whose entire Calendar is a celebration of the Hijrah as asylum are bombing each other’s mosques across the sectarian divide. The Tutsi as victims of yesterday become the oppressors of today; and the Hutu as victims of today are destined to become oppressors of tomorrow. The price of toleration is eternal vigilance - cultivated and institutionally enforced.

Conflict prevention requires greater and greater sophistication in diagnosing conflict-prone situations. Unfortunately Africa is full of contradictions - conflict generated by too much government versus conflict generated by too little; conflict generated by too many ethnic groups, as distinct from conflict ignited by too few ethnic groups. It is dark outside. Africa is waiting for her real dawn. It is to be hoped that the wait is not too long.

What is the solution in situations of acute state-failure or political collapse? The state before total collapse may be the equivalent of a political refugee - desperate, bewildered, sometimes destructive, but fundamentally moaning to be rescued from a nightmare which may in part be of its own making.

One option is unilateral intervention by a single neighbouring power in order to restore order. There is the precedent of Tanzania's invasion of Uganda in 1979, with troops marching all the way to Kampala. Tanzania then put Uganda virtually under military occupation for a couple of years.

The Ugandan state was temporarily a refugee camp. Tanzania's intervention was very similar to Vietnam's intervention in Cambodia to overthrow Pol Pot - except that the Vietnamese stayed on in Cambodia much longer. The question arises whether Yoweri Museveni's Uganda should have intervened in Rwanda in April 1994 the way Julius Nyerere's Tanzania intervened in Uganda fifteen years earlier. Have Uganda and Rwanda also intervened in Zaire/Congo?

Union with Tanzania for Rwanda and Burundi would, in the short run, be safer than union with the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire, and hereafter DR Congo) in spite of the shared Belgian connection with DR Congo and the link with the French language. Tanzania is a less vulnerable society than DR Congo, and a safer haven for Hutus and Tutsis.

It is indeed significant that Hutus and Tutsis on the run are more likely to flee to Tanzania than to DR Congo in spite of ethnic ties across the border with DR Congo. Moreover, Hutus and Tutsis are getting partially Swahilised and should be able to get on well with "fellow" Tanzanian citizens. As citizens they would be assimilated in due course; their former refugee state would be integrated.

But behind all the scenarios and all the search for solutions, behind the pain and the anguish, is the paramount question Ð are we facing birth-pangs or death-pangs in the present crisis? Are we witnessing the real bloody forces of decolonisation - as the colonial structures are decaying or collapsing? Is the colonial slate being washed clean with the blood of victims, villains and martyrs? Are the refugees victims of a dying order, or are they traumatised witnesses to an epoch- making rebirth?

Is this blood from the womb of history - giving painful birth to a new order?

Moral reform is often a coy mistress in the old style. It is difficult to persuade the reform mistress to come out and be consummated.

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