Recurrent Genocidal Nightmares

Genocide has been called the ‘crime of crimes’
and an ‘odious scourge.’ With millions of victims in the last century
alone, it is one of the great moral and political challenges of our age.
Despite the challenges, such human cruelty has not stopped. The 21st
century is recording its first genocide in Cameroon with only a scanty
few raising a finger. The significance of the ‘odious scourge’ has
compelled Tatah Mentan to research on the trajectory of the ‘scourge’ in
Africa over the past centuries. The targeted ongoing mass killings in
Cameroon, like those of Rwanda before, have driven the scholar to expand
his focus beyond the Holocaust, which had long been the primary case
study.

In this book, Tatah Mentan explains that these cases were
not merely a human catastrophe, nor an atavistic reversion to the
barbarism of a past epoch, but rather an event produced by the unfolding
of the logic of capitalism itself. This book therefore critically
explores the essence of capitalism as genocide in Africa and its
consequences on Africans during their colonisation and incorporation
into the European-dominated racialised capitalist world system in the
late 18th century. It uses multidimensional, comparative methods, and
critical approaches to explain the dynamic interplay among social
structures, human agency, and terror to explain the connection between
structural capitalist terrorism and the emergence of the capitalist
world system. Tatah Mentan proposes a genuine participatory democratic
alternative to the unending genocide nightmares. Nurturing participatory
attitudes, would facilitate and reinforce self-management, and educate
and empower individuals and dispossessed and under-represented
communities to seek self-determination and democratic participation in
the political arena. Tatah Mentan concludes that the same fundamental
commitments that urge humanity to promote participatory political
democracy should compel them to promote truly inclusive economic
democracy as well.

Political economists, historians, students,
corporate managers and policy makers at national and international
levels are invited to share the insights of this book.