Overview

The book investigates the use of bottom-up, community based healing and peacebuilding approaches, focusing on their strengths and suggesting how they can be enhanced. The main contribution of the book is an ethnographic investigation of how post-conflict communities in parts of Southern Africa use their local resources to forge a future after mass violence. The way in which Namibia’s Herero and Zimbabwe’s Ndebele dealt with their respective genocides is a major contribution of the book. The focus of the book is on two Southern African countries that never experienced institutionalized transitional justice as dispensed in post-apartheid South Africa via the famed Truth and Reconciliation Commission. We answer the question: how have communities healed and reconciled after the end of protracted violence and gross human rights abuses in Zimbabwe and Namibia? We depart from statetist, top-down, one-size fits all approaches to transitional justice and investigate bottom-up approaches.

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9781498592840

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Reviews

"Everisto Benyera is indeed carving a fine niche in the field of transitional justice in Africa and that his ideas frame this important volume of essays is inevitable. Bringing together insights from colonial genocide in Namibia and postcolonial violence in Zimbabwe, this volume enriches us conceptually, theoretically and empirically. -- Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, author of ""The Decolonial Mandela: Peace, Justice and the Politics of Life"" (2016) and ""Epistemic Freedom in Africa: Deprovincialization and Decolonization"" (2018) This edited volume, written by a new generation of prominent scholars on African political transitions, deserves to be read by students, policymakers and everyone generally interested in contemporary processes of transitional justice in Southern Africa. Given some of the entanglements in the histories of violence in Zimbabwe and Namibia, this collection of essays offers fresh knowledge regarding non-state practices deployed to address the legacies of political violence in both countries. -- Victor Igreja, University of Southern Queensland, Toowoomba"

Everisto Benyera is indeed carving a fine niche in the field of transitional justice in Africa and that his ideas frame this important volume of essays is inevitable. Bringing together insights from colonial genocide in Namibia and postcolonial violence in Zimbabwe, this volume enriches us conceptually, theoretically and empirically. -- Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, author of The Decolonial Mandela: Peace, Justice and the Politics of Life (2016) and Epistemic Freedom in Africa: Deprovincialization and Decolonization (2018) This edited volume, written by a new generation of prominent scholars on African political transitions, deserves to be read by students, policymakers and everyone generally interested in contemporary processes of transitional justice in Southern Africa. Given some of the entanglements in the histories of violence in Zimbabwe and Namibia, this collection of essays offers fresh knowledge regarding non-state practices deployed to address the legacies of political violence in both countries. -- Victor Igreja, University of Southern Queensland, Toowoomba

Author Information

Everisto Benyera is associate professor of African politics at the University of South Africa in Pretoria.

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