Abreha Hailezgi Gebremariam

African Indigenous Institutions for Conflict Resolution: a Descriptive Analysis of Melat-agle in Irob, Tigrai Abreha Hailezgi Gebremariam

African societies have their own traditional institutions for democratic administration. It would be quite reasonable to argue that Africans, at least like any other people elsewhere, certainly have for long time developed their own unique system of governance. As part of their strong and viable system, they had also and still have effective and practically workable conflict resolution mechanisms unlike some Westerner centric arguments which consider African people as savage and uncivilized. It has been assumed that the Western techniques of conflict resolution would also apply to African societies where the context is quite different. Unlike the Western techniques, the African traditional principles of conflict resolution are targeted at bringing about sustainable peace among the disputants; thereby the prevalence of enmity and hatred within as well as across communities could permanently be vanished. Indeed, this is also possible for the Irob society to do it away customarily at the grass-root level through the use of Melat-agle, one of their cultural institutions.