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152 CHAPTER TEN Growing seeds of peace in an African war-torn world PHILIP MUTAKA & LILIAN M. ATTIA Introduction Most probably, the people who truly value the importance of peace are those who have experimented the atrocities of war or other conflicts within their families. They realize that peace is a most precious commodity for several obvious reasons: economic prosperity, cultural richness, family stability, possibility of their offspring achieving their full potential. Unfortunately, as is observed nowadays, peace has become a rare commodity in our African countries. Greg Trihus of SIL/Yaounde branch was absolutely correct when he told us that, one of the best contributions linguistics could do to a country is to help revitalize a culture of peace among its people (personal communication). Yet, most of us tend to think that maintaining peace in a country is the business of the government people. But is it really, especially that, from the grim situations we witness all over the continent, the strategies devised by various governments have not been successful? What we daily hear in the news are stories of wars, rapes as a war tool, family displacements, the number of refugees increasing at an alarming rate in various African countries, etc. In this paper, we would like to propose a solution that basically appeals to our leaders’ emotional feelings of sincerely wanting to promote peace because, soon or later, everyone will have to account for their actions before a divine judge. To make this obvious in the minds of these leaders, first, we will sketch the grim situations created by war and other conflicts, secondly, we will discuss the deep reasons that underlie these grim situations, thirdly, we will lay out our proposals for solutions to grow the seeds of a peace culture in such a war-torn world and we will conclude the paper by showing the advantages of such a solution as compared with the solutions often devised by our current governments. Life may present a grim picture for some of us As you are reading these lines, do you know that millions of people in several parts of the world are undergoing ineffable suffering? You are probably happy with your family, sipping a glass of champagne with your friends, expecting your decent salary, making plans to earn more money. It might be useful for us to think about the fate of people who are not as lucky as you. And they are numerous. Often times, it is not their fault. They are merely victims of warlords waging wars among themselves. You have certainly heard about the genocide in Rwanda. This is a situation where black people like you and I, with families that they cherish, saw their loved ones being ruthlessly killed. Most of these people are Christians and they are God-fearing individuals. Not everybody was a killer. But the killers were certainly sons and daughters of Rwandan people, and they killed simply because one happened to be tall whereas the other was short, or because of such 153 differences in the shape of the nose or of the lips. Most of these people died because their parents had told them that, when you are a Tutsi you are superior to a Hutu, that you are entitled to most favors that your government can offer and that the other people have to act as beggars towards you. Some of these people became killers because they had heard such stories and they just wanted to get rid of the enemy. Did they know their real enemy? They have been made to believe that the enemy is their neighbor who does not have a nose that looks like theirs. This sounds stupid, and yet, that is what happened. Imagine living in such a world! If you were there, you would probably have been targeted, either because you happened to have a long nose, or because you happened to sympathize with one specific ethnic group. People have heard about the Rwandan genocide because the media made a great fuss about it. What we should bear in mind is that, other people from other countries like the DRC, Sudan, Cote d’Ivoire, have suffered the same fate. During our recent short visit to DRC, we were informed about the kinds of atrocities that Katangese troops that belonged to Kabila’s army inflicted on the Nande people in Butembo. A group of Katangese would enter a house, ask the members of the family to gather in a given spot...

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