60 years after the UN Convention - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

ehind most mass violence lurk economic interests 277
people like Nkrumah, Kaunda and Nyerere, invested a lot in the bid
to create a ‘one nation with a common destiny’ mentality, crucial
for turning groups of disparate peoples into a nation. A ‘One Ghana,
One Nation’ and a ‘One Africa, One Nation’ doesn’t remove completely
the identity politics, but it creates a diff erent form of identity
to strive towards. One of the things structural adjustment did was to
destroy the need to build a civic body of law. And Mahmood Mamdani
has been making this point quite strongly, that you must remember
it was only with the liberation from colonialism that the concept
of civil law began to be applied to Africans. At the moment many of
us, deep in our consciousness, are still natives, subject to the rules of
native law that allowed the colonisers to divide and rule and in the
process excuse and accommodate barbarity. To overcome the mentality
imposed by this second-order law, we have to invest in civic consciousness.
This is the central challenge for elevating the rule of law
over the infl ammations of narrow identities.