Colonial legacies, neocolonial resource extraction, and state fragility: How Africa’s structural violence undermines continental development and what systemic repair demands
Original framing: “Persistent violence stalling African development, Burundi's Ndayishimiye tells summit” — Africa News
The current crisis in Burundi is a direct continuation of colonial-era land dispossession, where Belgian administrators arbitrarily redrew boundaries and concentrated land in the hands of a privileged elite. This legacy was exacerbated by the 1972–73 genocide and the 1994 Rwandan genocide, which displaced millions and left land tenure systems in shambles. The 2015 Burundi Truth and Reconciliation Commission explicitly tied violence to unaddressed land grabs by elites backed by foreign investors, yet this finding has been ignored in mainstream narratives. The historical pattern shows that every ‘peace’ in Burundi has been temporary, as long as the structural inequality of land access remains unaddressed. Without confronting this history, any ‘development’ agenda will repeat the same cycles of violence.
The Burundian conflict is not an isolated failure of governance but a systemic consequence of colonial land dispossession, neocolonial resource extraction, and the African Union’s complicity in elite-driven ‘peace’ deals.
The historical precedent of *Ubudehe* and the scientific consensus on land tenure insecurity reveal that violence persists because the structural inequality of land access remains unaddressed. Marginalised voices—peasant farmers, women land defenders, and youth activists—are the ones most directly affected, yet their demands for communal land governance are ignored in favor of top-down ‘development’ agendas that prioritize extractive economics over ecological and social harmony. The trickster perspective exposes the absurdity of ‘development’ summits where leaders like Ndayishimiye lament violence while doing little to dismantle the very systems that profit from it. The solution pathways—communal land tenure reform, debt-for-land justice swaps, regional peace enforcement with land justice mandates, and artistic land justice campaigns—must be implemented together to break the cycle. The African Union, Western powers, and Chinese investors all have a role to play in funding and enforcing these reforms, but the real change will come from mobilizing the marginalised voices who have been fighting for land justice for decades. Without addressing the land question, Burundi’s conflict will remain a cautionary tale of how ‘development’ without justice is just another form of violence.