By Gerry Tuoti

Thursday marked the first day of a three-day international educational workshop at Northeastern about U.S. policy and peacemaking in Africa.

The workshop, titled “Conflict and Peace-Making in Africa in the 21st Century,” featured guest speakers discussing a myriad of issues relating to the U.S. and Africa.

Solomon Gomes, the special assistant to the special representative of U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, joined other government officials and academicians Thursday to open the workshop co-hosted by Northeastern’s Department of African-American Studies and the U.S. Institute of Peace, an independent government agency. Gomes addressed many of the political problems in Africa and shared his vision for the continent’s future.

“To know where you are going, you must know where you came from,” said Gomes, who proceeded to discuss postcolonial African history.

Gomes said that the colonial legacy has left Africans many problems to deal with. Africa has experienced more than 30 wars since 1970. Many modern African nations have inherited their borders, languages and some of their customs from their former colonizers.

Omo Omoruyi, a faculty member of Northeastern’s African American Studies Department, agreed.

“Africans are now slaves to the colonial heritage of their countries,” Omoruyi said.

Omoruyi stressed that Africa needs to find its own solutions to its problems. Many African audience members agreed.

“I don’t have any faith in the West,” said Dibinga Wa, a national of the Democratic Republic of Congo. “We need African inspired unity. It is not in the nature of the West to do anything for us.”

African American Studies Department Chair Kwamina Panford echoed the need for African self-reliance.

“It is now obvious, and there is general agreement, that the UN failed miserably in saving the lives of the Rwandese,” he said of the U.N.’s lack of involvement in the civil war in Rwanda in the early 1990s.

Gomes spoke of the inadequacies of the African Union (AU) and its predecessor, the Organization for African Unity (OAU). He said that the AU suffers from a severe lack of material and logistical resources.

“The means for anticipating and preventing conflict does not exist,” Gomes said. “The AU Conflict Resolution Center is like a car that looks nice from the outside, but has no engine. We have all these pious declarations, but we don’t have the means to do anything.”

Gomes believes that the AU should open its doors to allow rebel groups to participate in the discussion of certain issues. The OAU, and now the AU, would only talk to recognized liberation groups, Gomes said. This practice limited the number of viewpoints that were able to be presented to the AU.

Despite Africa’s troubled history, Gomes is optimistic about the future. The prospects for future peace look good, he said.

“The AU is in better position to be more proactive and effective than the old OAU,” Gomes said.

In 1997, a joint U.N.-OAU representative for Africa’s Great Lakes Region was created. More recently, the AU issued its first ever preventative troop deployment, which was in the Central African Republic. Also, the U.N. has now established an office at AU headquarters in Addis-Ababa, Ethiopia.

Gomes said that the AU must follow the legacy of the Mandela presidency in South Africa to have a peaceful future. Gomes said that Mandela’s legacy includes political reconciliation, an inclusive government of national unity, term limits for politicians, and the adoption of an inclusive multiracial and multiethnic political party.

Louis Luisa, a former director of the NAACP’s Boston branch and current Boston City Council member, read a resolution from the city council that congratulated Northeastern and the U.S. Institute of Peace for hosting the event and declared Feb. 13-15 “Conflict and Peace Making in Africa Days” in the city of Boston.

“Boston is made up of people from all over the world,” said College of Arts and Sciences Dean James Stellar. “It is important to reach out to other countries because, in fact, people from those countries live in our city.

“There is not a more auspicious moment for us in recent American history to address making peace than now,” Stellar said.