Scholars are developing a better appreciation for the deeper histories of vulnerability and of the force of European conquest in Africa's modern history. Students of Kenya's past, for example, have offered detailed reconstructions of early colonial conflict. Contemporary crises such as Africa's “World War” in the eastern Congo, where more than a million people have perished, have called attention to the importance of understanding violence, its impact, and its history. Scholars recognize African history as, in part, a history of violence, displacement, and insecurity. Africa today has the largest number of displaced people anywhere, presenting difficult problems for international aid agencies, raising national and international political tensions, and severely complicating efforts at political reconstruction. Seen in the long term, however, the present seems rather more continuous, and the prolific discourse on and around “failed states” surprisingly innocent of an engagement with Africa's past.

Violence in colonial southern Africa is unmistakable. In the early 1900s, German genocidal violence culminated in the near extinction of the Herero and Nama peoples of Namibia, where roughly 75,000 people died; in the case of the Herero, nearly 80 percent of the total population died. The people of Zimbabwe saw high levels of violence a decade earlier in the Chimurenga of 1896–1897, the rebellion growing out of more than a decade of colonial predations that continued with “pacification”– a colonial euphemism usually denoting additional bloodletting. Many tens of thousands of people died or fled as a result of colonial violence in areas ranging from Mozambique to southern Angola.