Conflict Resolution in Africa

Samuel Gyasi Obeng

>*Conflict Resolution in Africa: Language, Law, and Politeness in Ghanaian (Akan) Jurisprudence* provides significant insights into culturally congruent African communicational mores for resolving conflicts. The author discusses the African concepts of power, politeness, and persuasion, how they index and are indexed by language, their pervasiveness in African jurisprudence, and the consequences of not paying attention to them in the judicial discourse ecology. Important speech acts discussed are: concurrence, dissension, apology, pleading, request, cross-examination, persuasion, questioning, and challenging. The linguistic, discursive, and metacommunicative tools for managing the speech acts are elucidated, as are the structure and management of the courtrooms' turn taking, speech dominance, interruptive talk, and pre-sequences. The author stresses that understanding how a people...