Silencing Africa’s guns remains an elusive dream

ANNUAL PEACE AND SECURITY DIALOGUE

- ZAMIKHAYA MASETI

THE Thabo Mbeki Foundation (TMF) convened a Peace and Security Dialogue from September 3 to 6 in the serene surroundings of Magaliesberg.

For nearly half a week, hearts and minds from across the continent gathered in reflective intensity. The dialogue was not ceremonial, it was surgical, cutting into the deep tissue of Africa’s unfinished questions.

But it was the session on the Eastern region of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) that dislodged something in me. A visceral unseating.

My heart, long nestled in its biological comfort, seemed to shift, as if unwilling to stay still in the face of such testimony. Those voices did not read, they remembered. They remembered with clarity, with pain, with an honesty so searing it tore through the thin veil of diplomatic decorum.

They spoke of identity killings, not as theory, but as trauma. Of targeted erasures, where your surname could become your death sentence.

These were not stories, they were lived histories, told by those who carried them like scar tissue across borders and generations. In the DRC, identity is not merely a social marker; it is the axis around which the political universe spins. It is contested, racialised, manipulated and deeply etched into the fragile DNA of the body politic.

Yet even in the heat of that emotional reckoning, another session pressed harder against the intellect, the one dealing with the Sahel region. It demanded more than empathy, it required interpretation.

The Sahel is not simply a war zone. It is a region where ecological collapse, poverty, ideological radicalisation and foreign military entanglement converge like fault lines before an earthquake.

The crisis there is not episodic. It is structural. It asks us not just “what is happening?” but “what has failed?”