Violence and Belonging

The Quest for Identity in Post-Colonial Africa

Vigdis Broch-Due

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134437887
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Globalisierung

Modernization in Africa has created new problems as well as new freedoms. Multiparty democracy, resource privatization and changing wealth relationships, have not always created stable and prosperous communities, and violence continues to be endemic in many areas of African life - from civil war and political strife to violent clashes between genders, generations, classes and ethnic groups.
Violence and Belonging explores the crucial formative role of violence in shaping people's ideas of who they are in uncertain postcolonial contexts where, as resources dwindle and wealth is contested, identities and ideas of belonging become a focal area of conflict and negotiation. Focusing on fieldwork from across the continent, its case studies consider how routine everyday violence ties in with wider regional and political upheavals, and how individuals experience and legitimize violence in its different forms. The Zimbabwean and Sudanese civil wars, Kenyan Kikuyu domestic conflicts, Rwandan massacres and South African Truth and Reconciliation processes, are among the contexts explored.

Chapter 1

Violence and belonging

Analytical reflections

Vigdis Broch-Due

Violence enacted is but a small part of violence lived.

(Nordstrom and Martin 1992: 8)

This volume brings together a number of original chapters which collectively set out to chart the disturbing landscape of identity conflicts in contemporary Africa. It represents some of the latest empirical work on recent and ongoing conflicts in the area and takes a fresh look at theories of violence and boundary maintenance in anthropology and related social sciences (Marx 1976, Riches 1986, Barth 1969, 1994, Bloch 1992). It includes new work on identities and updated analytical positions relevant to post-colonial realities (Cohen 2000, Vermulen and Govers 1994). The picture which emerges challenges the popular image of an African or even ‘ethnic’ violence that is primordial, anarchic or ‘primitive’. Writing against the grain of generic interpretations of violence as the ‘anti-social’ par excellence – the absence of society, the residues of primordial impulses or genes, suppressed desires, the rupture of the social – all our authors insist that violence, even in its most terrifying form, is not only integral to the social but is intrinsically part of the modern, translocal arenas of state bureaucracies and business interests.

We now understand clearly that the effect of multi-party democracy, privatisation and structural adjustment has not been the creation of more stable and prosperous communities across the continent. All too often, it has been attempts at ‘development’ and ‘modernisation’ that have led to violence and upheaval. In fact, routinised violence has become an inevitable part of the modernising state. Analysing these forms of routinised violence in their contexts of production and interpretation, the volume raises important questions about the tensions between actors’ intentions and real choices, and how these relate to overarching frameworks of cultural values and understandings.

The dramatic reconfiguration of want and wealth, so characteristic of the post-colonial landscape, has produced extreme levels of uncertainty about the legitimacy of established identities, rights and claims. As this volume shows, violence is often deployed as part of a futile quest to produce certainty, a means to reinforce essentialised ideas about identity and belonging. It also shows something surprising and perhaps unsuspected: the effect of violence is usually the reverse, reinforcing diversity in identity rather than eliminating it. From the Sudan to South Africa, our case studies show how, as resources dwindle and relations of wealth are reconfigured in the wake of violence, identities and ideas of belonging – whether to a gender, generation, class or ethnic group – become the focal arenas of conflict and negotiation.

There is a novel contribution to social theory in this volume too and it lies in its exploration of the precise linkages between wider regional upheavals and the routinised forms of violence in everyday life: how violence infiltrates not just public, political arenas but the most intimate spaces of the personal also. Thus contributors concentrate on how individuals experience and account for violence, using history and memory to make claims about its legitimacy or illegitimacy. From the troubling narratives and testimonies of violence collected here, we discover how violence is formative of people's perceptions of who they are and what values they adhere to.

The individual chapters speak eloquently for themselves so what I can hope to do in my introduction is to paint aspects of the wider landscape of social and political upheaval in Africa which forms the backdrop against which all local examples take place. In doing so, I will inevitably call on some of my own work and experiences in Turkanaland, Kenya. What I also hope to do is explore some of the extreme ambiguities which make violence such a vital and troubling part of what it means to be human, ambiguities explored to the full in the ritual worlds of the Turkana and many other African societies too. This volume seeks to cast violence as a force for social (re)construction far beyond the confines of cosmologies and local warfare, into the working of the post-colonial state and its international relations, seeing violence as a ‘force that achieves its repetitive and expanding energy simply because it is such a force’ (Kapferer 2001: 63).

The larger, perhaps more unfamiliar, point I want to establish in the context of this volume is this: if we think of violence as an aspect of power in a double valence of subordinating and producing, of destroying and creating, it becomes easier to explore the possible interconnections between different modalities of violence – structural, symbolic, physical – as they play themselves out in social relationships (Bourdieu 1977, Nagenast 1994). And if we expand the conceptual horizon of the social processes contributing to the formation of violence, it becomes easier to reframe the analysis of identity politics away from the reification of ethnicity as the only beast loose on the streets in the post-colony.

This over-reliance on ethnic identity in studies of violence at the expense of other identities has roundly and rightly been criticised in recent scholarship in Anthropology. Yet the typical response is to expand the list including additional identities formed around gender, generation, region, nation and so on. While this empirical strategy produces more ethnography, it does not necessarily produce more theoretical clarity. The problem with a lot of identity thinking is the ‘thinglike’ and bounded character of its conceptual parameter, as if the construction of gender and ethnicity, for example, belongs to separate fields of experience, rather than being embedded in each other (Moore 1994). This entanglement of relations with their ensuing identity projects constitutes forces within highly disparate and fluid social and political fields. At particular heated moments during the historical formation of nationalist or sectarian sentiment or during class struggles, a chain reaction of energy within these entangled identities can be unleashed into vicious cycles of violent action.

We have all worked hard on Violence and Belonging and believe it is an innovative attempt to explore the emergent and elusive matrix of violence and identity politics in modern Africa.

Disconnection and the shrinking African state

This volume addresses violence and sociality in at least two senses that are interrelated. First, we are concerned with large-scale war scenarios in which the distinctions between civilians and combatants are collapsing, causing the greatest casualties to be among women, children and the elderly rather than soldiers. Second, we are concerned with a range of conflicts born of radical impoverishment, contested resources and their attendant flux of identities. From one perspective, all these forms of violence can be viewed as the bitter fruit of transformations in the meaning of citizenship as they have worked themselves out during the last decades in post-colonial Africa.

The broader canvas for this change in the contours of citizenship is bound up with the inability of African states after independence to live up to the expectations of their subjects to provide welfare, security and prosperity. Grand schemes to develop public services have been nipped in the bud by the combined effects of homebred corruption and the push toward privatisation imposed by the global banking and development conglomerate. This has lead to a breakdown of the redistributive function of the state and its ability to provide welfare, education, health and service to its citizens This is not simply a quantitative shift, a decrease in the resources flowing from the state to its citizens but, more significantly, it is also a qualitative shift. Many of the vital obligations the state has towards its citizenry are being erased, some taken over by NGOs and private institutions while others are simply left in the hands of the citizens themselves (Comaroff and Comaroff 1997).

The transformation of the meaning of citizenship throughout most of the continent is itself born out of the changing position of the post-colonial nation state on the world arena. Stripped of most statecraft functions but for their sovereignty, contemporary African states are increasingly in the pocket of business corporations, NGOs and international aid bureaucracies. These translocal organisations have usurped many state functions but without any legitimacy from African constituencies, making their plans and decisions in Western capitals and being very distant, geographically and conceptually, from the local arenas where their investments subsequently are set to work. Under the banner of ‘liberalism’ this consortium of private and public capital has pushed through the implementation of devastating ‘structural adjustment’ policies engineered by IMF and the World Bank to ease the flow of capital, goods and labour, a process now called ‘globalisation’. Yet this new, celebrated form of ‘connectivity’ has been very selective in who the engineers of these policies find promising and profitable enough to connect. While most commoners have experienced that the flow of capital and concern have passed them by to settle on the elite, the destructive forces of globalisation have turned in on them with a vengeance as the ‘glorification of the gun’ is rapidly spreading alongside destitution (Hutchinson 1996, Broch-Due and Schroeder 2000).

Clearly this reconfiguration in the relationship between the state and citizen has opened up new divides between wealth and want. In the absence of accountable democracy or any clear comprehension of the dynamics at play, many ordinary Africans feel caught up in a maelstrom of mysterious forces forever beyond their control. Called ‘structural adjustment’ or ‘tariffs’, these forces are as intangible and inescapable as witchcraft and, like witchcraft, are seen to be powered from afar, inflicting damage on the fragile heart of people's existence, not just on their material well-being but on their very soul, and leaving the afflicted with little hope of redress. Overt violence is but an inevitable accompaniment to the growing chorus of despairing voices raised against the economic and political failures of post-colonial states in Africa, and their corrosive effects on everyday relationships (Berry 1993, Geshiere 1998, Anderson and Broch-Due 1999).

This is what James Ferguson in Expectations of Modernity (1999) so succinctly has called ‘the feeling of abjection and sense of having become second class’. The profundity of the sense of marginalisation expressed by his Zambian informants is dramatically evident to visitors in any African capital city nowadays. During my last trip to Nairobi, for example, I was struck by the decay of many of the high-rise buildings down-town. Once the pride of a modern nation-in-the making, these skyscrapers have become symbols of pervasive disrepair and neglect into which the post-colonial state has fallen: decay and corrosion are steadily creeping up their stairs, from one dusty floor to another, eating into the very foundation of the buildings.

Flying in the face of the connectivity trumpeted by enthusiasts of globalisation, urban Kenyans share with the Zambian informants of Ferguson the experience of disconnection and exclusion. Where they once felt included in an imagined modern world and its ‘progress’, they now feel utterly excluded. When, on this same recent trip, educated Kenyans talked to me about their material poverty they not only spoke of having lost the measure of material prosperity they once possessed but also expressed their sense of exclusion from the world ‘out there’. They too were not simply lamenting a lack of connection, but articulating a specific experience of ‘disconnection’. Thus the African ‘middle-class-in-the-(un)making’ share an experience of their new-found poverty not simply as a lack, but as a loss.

As I once again drove along the dusty highway from Nairobi to Lodwar, crossing the district boundaries, I was amazed by the almost total absence of traffic. The tarmac road, finished two decades ago, was once a busy thoroughfare. Now it stretched out in a straight, silent line through the vast, empty landscape, traversed only by herds of livestock. It was deserted: a striking contrast to the busy state of affairs a decade ago. The mid-eighties were the heyday of high-spending by NORAD (the major aid agency) – a time when Lodwar even got a roundabout and the town was permanently veiled in the fumes and noises of lorries and Landrovers. This boom in town life and ‘development’ corresponded with a bust in livestock holdings and a loss of pastoralist control of their pasture land.

By the mid-1990s, the situation had completely turned around. NORAD had been forced to close down all activities and stop all funding of projects in the wake of the breakdown in diplomatic relations between Kenya and Norway. Other donors had left Lodwar too, rushing up north to the border with the Sudan. Here a tiny Turkana village had been turned into the headquarters for the huge UN co-operation called ‘operation life-line’. This corresponded not just to the seriousness of the civil war in the Sudan but also to the changing fashion in development philosophy in which the figure of ‘the pastoralist’ had been replaced with the figure of ‘the refugee’ as the prime recipient of aid and concern.

Turkana suddenly found themselves on the wrong side of two boundaries, one a national frontier, the other a definitional one: they were not in Sudan and they were not refugees. While their pastoral neighbours, the Toposa, luckily located on the ‘right side’ of both these boundaries, received free rations of food and veterinary services, local Turkana received nothing but for the bullets from the revitalised Toposa warriors. They were abandoned in what was once again a dusty hinterland, now even drier because of a rapidly dwindling water supply caused by the excessive water consumption of UN personnel and refugees. Back in Lodwar, a few NGOs and the Catholic Mission were left with limited resources to buttress the devastating effects of the recently implemented World Bank structural adjustment programmes.

In the space of fifteen years, modernity had come and gone in the most surreal and paradoxical way. On the sites of closed-down irrigation and fishing facilities animals once again wandered, but now amongst the rusting machines of the old development projects. Herders were clearly in the process of claiming back the old paths and pastures from which they had been expelled by ‘modernisation’. While contentment and prosperity seemed to have returned to most pastoral camps on the plains, the situation amongst most town people had become one of desperate poverty. Ethnic clashes on a national scale, orchestrated by the rulers, had the effect of ending all external marketing of small stock, simply because the traders were not willing to take the risk of transporting live animals on trucks through these troubled zones. This loss of a significant source of cash, coming on top of the regular restrictions placed on cattle sales from Turkanaland, had spreading effects that curtailed other types of local trading. Among those who were settled all this contributed to severe economic depression. While the pastoralists could subsist directly from the nurturing powers of their milk herds, few townspeople had any cash left to spend on food and even less to cover the increased fees for schooling and hospital treatment (Broch-Due 1999).

This regional crisis had percolated into the most intimate spheres of personal life and all too often its expression was violent. I noticed it on my first night there, which was a deeply unsettling one. The soundscape of Lodwar, once that of a booming frontier town filled with the noise of engines and raucous entertainment, was now eerily empty, punctuated only by the furious shouting of men and the screams of women as they were beaten or mourned their dead children. It was a tragic reminder of the way the personal becomes a barometer of wider social conditions. It is precisely this complex interconnectedness of different social arenas which many of the studies of violence in this volume illustrate.

The idiom of blood revisited

In popular descriptions of African violence, one idiom is privileged above all others: ethnicity. This is not just the creation of foreign journalists, for ethnic opposition frames extensively the explanations of the perpetrators and victims themselves. Yet the tendency to privilege ethnicity in the storyline of violent encounters by participants and spectators alike should not blind us to the fact that ethnicity is not some isolated social fact of African existence. It is deeply embedded in other social relationships and identities formed around gender, generation, locality, class, religion and nationality. Indeed ethnicity typically gains its momentum in conflicts by tapping into the structure and content of these underlying sets of relations with which it is so deeply enmeshed (Werbner and Ranger 1996, Wilmsen and McAllister 1996) Collectively, the chapters demonstrate very clearly that the quest for identity and belonging in post-colonial Africa is a process of struggle fought out at every level of existence.

If it is the case that many Africans currently embroiled in conflicts and warfare share the social experience of economic contraction and impoverishment, why is it that ethnicity features so prominently in the reporting of violent events both by the media and those directly involved? Why are class interests, or the role of the state, or the international community virtually absent in popular accounts of violence? Indeed, as demonstrated by Johan Pottier in his chapter dealing with the genocide in Rwanda, even scholars will resort to reductive and simplified frames of ancient, tribal hatred if asked by a journalist for an ‘expert’ opinion on the...