Preface

The central role of warfare in human history can hardly be in doubt. Yet the fact remains that the key centres of research into the history of war have in recent decades been clustered, with few exceptions, in Europe and North America, societies in which direct experience of conflict – no matter how fresh in the memory it might be for a dwindling few – is largely lacking. It means that war is something that either happened some time ago, its significance hardly questioned but the interpretation of it necessarily abstract, or is happening somewhere else, usually in parts of Africa and (perhaps rather better known, and certainly better reported) central and western Asia. For the peoples of those regions, war is emphatically not abstract: It is something very much here and now, constantly evolving, part and parcel of daily existence, reaching some way into the past and, it would seem, for some distance into the future. This most fundamental global division is no coincidence, for it may well be that the ability to reflect historically on organised violence is a luxury – a dividend of peace, perhaps – but it also reflects the broad distinction between those who have largely ‘done with’ war, and those who have not. Whereas generations of Europeans have recently grown up only with the celebration or commemoration of conflict, and with a considered narrative of the role of war in their histories close to hand, millions of Africans – the subject of this book – have no such cultural and intellectual equipment at their disposal, yet. The story of war is still unfolding around them, often in the most horrific of ways.