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Decolonising Peace Education in Africa

Decolonising Education for Peace in Africa

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Burundi, DRC & Belgium

Capturing fluid borders and pluriversal visions of peace on the Tanganyika Lake Coast
 

Project Introduction

Fluid Borders is a project undertaken by a team of academic researchers, artists, feminist activists, and people severely affected by flooding around Tanganyika Lake and its riverbeds. Building upon border thinking and drawing as a research methodology, we jointly explore the literal and metaphoric fluid borders within the Burundian-Congolese borderlands and their implication for peace education from decolonial feminist perspectives. 

Rather than seeking to maximize participant numbers, we reflected with three groups of about ten people in Uvira and Gatumba over the whole length of the project. This includes artists, feminist activists, small-scale cross-border women traders, and people severely affected/displaced by floodings living within such fluid borderlands. The Uvira group led by the Caucus des Femmes also includes civil society and authorities’ representatives; to articulate activist and policy implications of the project with them.

A person standing in front of a group of people sitting outside
 

Project Methodology

Over the past year, we used arts-based methods and created a joint reflexive space to question preconceived peacebuilding ideas through metaphors, namely the meaning of fluidity in terms of identity, nation-states, border crossings, raising levels of Lake Tanganyika and severe flooding, as well as the entanglements of such fluidity with insecurity and armed conflicts within this very borderland. We aimed to engage with the multitude of ways of “living and understanding the world,” including the multiple ways of making sense of the entanglements between bodies, nature, conflict, and peace in the Borderlands. From January 2023 to January 2024, we run 20 workshops across the Uvira-Gatumba border around the following themes: borders crossing, the pluriverse, Gatumba as a delta, identity within the frontier, border agents, gendered stereotypes in Kirundi proverbs, etc. The content of the first round of drawings and texts are available on Flickr. We run a series of activities with university students in Bujumbura and Northern Burundi about the preliminary findings in connection with wider debates about the coloniality of peace. We launched an exhibition with arts material produced within the workshops and had a public debate with all participants present.

We are about to launch our sensorial e-book -https://www.pluriversaldreams.org/capturingfluidborders/ ok seeks to deepen ongoing reflection around notions of fluid borders within the Great Lakes Region, featuring five young artists who hail from this region. During a week-long residency, we (Kioka’s team, two academics, three poets, and one stand-up comedian), engaged with scholars and literally texts (mostly Gloria Anzaldua’s work on borderlands, as well as that of Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, and James Baldwin, amongst others) and artistic material. We immersed ourselves, reworked, rethought, and continued to analyse the project themes, interrogating borders, identities, belonging, and exclusion, whilst mobilising personal stories to create texts. This multi-disciplinary tool forms a literary and graphic collection that lets you listen to recordings of poetry, slam, spoken word, combined with paintings, graphics, and photography. We also produced a pedagogic tool to guide teachers and animators to run activities using the sensorial e-book https://www.pluriversaldreams.org/plus-dinfo/

 

 

Project Highlights

Many students live and study across (or within) these borderlands in this cross-border context. For example, Burundian universities and schools welcome many Congolese students; displaced children often receive education in the neighbouring country. The fluidity of these lived experiences is often absent from these education programmes. While secondary and university classes are very diverse, school curricula are still structured along national lines and at the national level. Peace issues are also dealt with in community dialogue initiatives and often revolve around mediating interpersonal and inter-group conflicts with groups of young people. These activities take place regularly at the community level. Many are delivered and influenced by approaches provided by international NGOs, marked by Eurocentrism. While identity, perceptions of identity, and experiences of multiple and fluid identities are crucial aspects of conflict, they are rarely explored in existing initiatives. Our artistic work and accompanying scholarly reflection put forward crucial and innovative ways to rethink peace education in the region and on the continent. How can we help young people to read this collection of poems in the light of the artificial construction of borders, an act of violence in itself? How can they develop their own reflections on questions of identity that are so personal, so global and so structural? Our pedagogic work offers a wide option of activities to help students and curious adults explore these questions.

 

Educational Resources

Educational resources that have been produced through our project include:
 

Research “outputs”

In addition to the material already listed, other outputs include: 

 

Publications: 

“Navigating Fluid Borders: Shaking up & Unlearning the Coloniality of Peace Research within Congolese-Burundian Borderlands”, Special Issue “Depopulating places: in search of challenging but possible futures,” Parvati Raghuram (Ed.)  Authors: Astrid Jamar, Christelle Balegamire, Pat Stys, and Jean-Paul Nizigiyimana.

“Drawing on/about Proverbial Art to Rethink the Coloniality of Gender across Burundian-Congolese Borderlands,” with J.-L. Nsengiyumva, and J.-P. Nizigiyimana, Chapter for Edited book Arts and Heritage in Education for Peace: Insights from Africa, “Melis Cin, Craig Walker, and Faith Mkwananzi (Eds), Open Access book, A paraître en 2025.

Reports:​

  • Activity Report 1: KIOKA on arts-based workshops and border crossing
  • Activity Report 2: August Dissemination workshop
  • Feedback sessions with participants: insights from these can be found in the blog content

 

Two exhibitions

  • Activities with the University of Ngozi (Northern Burundi) for International Peace Day.
  • Dream Pocket movie competition  
     

A group of people looking at papers on a wall

Impact

Despite all the challenges encountered, we built a strong and stimulating space to debate the coloniality of peace among ourselves, with participants, as well as our respective professional academic, artistic, and activist networks in Belgium, Burundi, and South Kivu – DRC. It’s a project that got us to rethink how we work and approach peace activism and peace education. We are all encouraging our respectives to appreciate the eurocentrism, power asymmetries, and extractivism of peacebuilding. We also set an example of how to work at a slower pace to mitigate the too often dismissed effects of the coloniality of peace and co-produce locally relevant arts and pedagogic material.