Violence and Belonging: The Quest for Identity in Post-Colonial Africa

256 Pages·2004·1.15 MB·English

by  V. Broch-Due

Violence and Belonging
Modernisation in Africa has created new problems as well as new freedoms. Multiparty
democracy, resource privatisation 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: The Quest for
Identity in Post-colonial Africa explores the formative role of violence in shaping
people’s ideas about who they are in uncertain post-colonial contexts. 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, case studies
consider how everyday violence ties in with wider regional and political upheavals, and
how individuals experience and legitimise violence in its different forms. The chapters
also challenge the popular image of an African or ‘ethnic’ violence that is primordial,
anarchic and ‘primitive’, arguing instead that violence, even in its most terrifying form, is
integral to modern social, political and business interests. The Zimbabwean and Sudanese
civil wars, Kenyan Kikuyu domestic conflicts, Rwandan massacres and South African
Truth and Reconciliation processes are among the contexts explored.
Contributors: Jocelyn Alexander, Astrid Blystad, Vigdis Broch-Due, Harri Englund,
John G.Galaty, Amrik Heyer, Sharon Elaine Hutchinson, Björn Lindgren, Jo Ann
McGregor, Isak Niehaus, Johan Pottier, Fiona C.Ross and Kjetil Tronvoll.
Vigdis Broch-Due is Professor in International Poverty Research and Social
Anthropology at the University of Bergen in Norway. She has held senior teaching and
research positions at the universities of Washington, Oslo, Cambridge and London, and at
Rutgers University. Her books include Carved Flesh/Cast Selves: Gendered Symbols and
Social Practices (1993), The Poor Are Not Us: Poverty and Pastomlism in Eastern Africa
(1999) and Producing Poverty and Nature in Africa (2000).

Violence and Belonging
The quest for identity in post-colonial Africa
Edited by Vigdis Broch-Due

LONDON AND NEW YORK
First published 2005 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York,
NY 10016
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.
“ To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of
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Selection and editorial material © 2005 Vigdis Broch-Due; contributions © 2005
individual contributors
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or
by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission
in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from
the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Violence and belonging: the quest for identity
in post-colonial Africa/ edited by Vigdis Broch-Due. p. cm. “Most of the chapters of this volume
come from a larger collection of papers produced for a conference held in 2000 under the auspices
of the Research Programme ‘Poverty and Prosperity in Africa: Local and Global Perspectives’ at
the Nordic Africa Institute, Uppsala, Sweden”—Pref. Includes bibliographical references and
index. 1. Polltical violence-Africa-Case studies-Congresses. 2. Poverty-Africa- Congresses. 3.
Africa-Politics and government-1960-Congresses. 1. Broch-Due, Vigdis. HN780.Z9V585 2005
303.6′096-dc22 2004009258
ISBN 0-203-49997-2 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-60032-0 (Adobe e-reader Format)
ISBN 0-415-29006-6 (hbk)
ISBN 0-415-29007-4 (pbk)
Contents

Notes on contributors vi
Preface viii
1 Violence and belonging: analytical reflections 1

VIGDIS BROCH-DUE
2 ‘Nowadays they can even kill you for that which they feel is theirs’: 37
gender and the production of ethnic identity in Kikuyu-speaking Central

Kenya
AMRIK HEYER
3 Conflicts in context: political violence and anthropological puzzles 54

HARRI ENGLUND
4 Hunger, violence and the moral economy of war in Zimbabwe 68

JOCELYN ALEXANDER and JO ANN McGREGO
5 Violence and the boundaries of belonging: comparing two border 83
disputes in the South African lowveld
ISAK NIEHAUS
6 Fertile mortal links: reconsidering Barabaig violence 102

ASTRID BLYSTAD
7 ‘Food itself is fighting with us’: a comparative analysis of the impact of 119
Sudan’s civil war on South Sudanese civilian populations located in the

North and the South
SHARON ELAINE HUTCHINSON
8 The politics of identity and the remembrance of violence: ethnicity and 139
gender at the installation of a female chief in Zimbabwe
BJÖRN LINDGREN
9 Double-voiced violence in Kenya 157

JOHN G.GALATY
10 Escape from genocide: the politics of identity in Rwanda’s massacres 177

JOHAN POTTIER
11 Women and the politics of identity: voices in the South African Truth 195
and Reconciliation Commission
FIONA C.ROSS
12 Ambiguous identities: the notion of war and ‘significant others’ among 216
the Tigreans of Ethiopia
KJETIL TRONVOLL
Index 234
Contributors

Jocelyn Alexander, Lecturer in Commonwealth Studies, University of Oxford, and Jo
Ann McGregor, Lecturer in Human Geography, University of Reading, have
researched and written on Zimbabwe for the past fifteen years. They are co-authors
with Terence Ranger of Violence and Memory: One Hundred Years in the ‘Dark
Forests’ of Matabeleland and of numerous other articles and chapters.
Astrid Blystad is Associate Professor at the Department of Public Health and Primary
Health Care, University of Bergen. She heads the cross- disciplinary research
programme entitled Gender, Generation and Communication in Times of AIDS: The
Potential of ‘Modern’ and ‘Traditional’ Institutions. She has published several articles
on the Barabaig/Datoga of Tanzania.
Vigdis Broch-Due is Professor at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of
Bergen. She also holds the Professoriate in International Poverty Research in the
Faculty of Social Science. Her books include Carved Flesh/Cast Selves: Gendered
Symbols and Social Practices; The Poor Are Not Us: Poverty and Pastoralism in
Eastern Africa; Producing Poverty and Nature in Africa. She has published numerous
articles on many aspects of life among Turkana, Kenya.
Harri Englund is Lecturer in African Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. He
is the author of From War to Peace on the Mozambique-Malawi Borderland, the
editor of A Democracy of Chameleons: Politics and Culture in the New Malawi, and
the co-editor (with Francis Nyamnjoh) of Rights and Politics of Recognition in Africa.
John G.Galaty is Professor in the Anthropology Department, McGill University. His
books include World of Pastoralism: Herding Systems in a Comparative Perspective;
Herders, Warriors, and Traders: Pastoralism in Africa, and Power and Poverty:
Development and Development Projects in the Third World.
Amrik Heyer is a social anthropologist and development consultant working on Africa
and India. She is currently developing a new research project on middle-level traders,
markets and states in Kenya and Africa. Previous work includes research on gender
and processes of formalisation/informalisation in Kenya’s Central Province and
conflicts between entrepreneurs, pastoralists and the state over control of territory,
labour and markets in Northern Kenya.
Sharon Elaine Hutchinson is Professor of Anthropology and African Studies at the
University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the author of Nuer Dilemmas: Coping with
Money, War and the State. She continues to carry out field research in war-torn Sudan,
and acted as an official monitor on the Civilian Protection Monitoring Team—Sudan
during early 2003.
Björn Lindgren has a Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from Uppsala University. He has
a background in journalism which he studied at Stockholm University. Lindgren has
published several articles on politics, ethnicity and gender in Zimbabwe. He is
currently working on issues of local governance.
Jo Ann McGregor, see Jocelyn Alexander.
Isak Niehaus is Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Archaeology at the
University of Pretoria in South Africa. His research interests are cosmology, gender
and sexuality in South African rural areas. He is the author of Witchcraft, Power and
Politics: Exploring the Occult in the South African Lowveld.
Johan Pottier is Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at SOAS,
University of London. His books include Anthropology of Food: The Social Dynamics
of Food Security, Practising Development: Social Science Perspective; Migrants No
More: Settlement and Survival in Mambwe villages, Zambia.
Fiona C.Ross lectures in Social Anthropology at the University of Cape Town, South
Africa. Her recent research on women and violence appears in Bearing Witness:
Women and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. She is
currently engaged in research on the meanings of home among poor residents of an
informal settlement in Cape Town.
Kjetil Tronvoll is Senior Research Fellow in African Studies at the Norwegian Centre
for Human Rights, University of Oslo. He is author of Mai Weini: A Highland Village
in Eritrea, co-author of Brothers at War: Making Sense of the Eritrean-Ethiopian War
and The Culture of Power in Contemporary Ethiopian Political Life, and is co-editor
of Ethiopia Since the Derg: A Decade of Democrat ic Pretension and Performace.
Preface

Most of the chapters of this volume come from a larger collection of papers produced for
a conference held in 2000 under the auspices of the Research Programme Poverty and
Prosperity in Africa: Local and Global Perspectives at the Nordic Africa Institute,
Uppsala, Sweden. This was the third and final conference organised by this five-year
programme, headed by Vigdis Broch-Due. Entitled Conflict’s Fruit, it focused on the
interplay between poverty, violence and the politics of identity in the African post-
colony. To explore these vexed issues, we invited leading specialists on these topics from
Scandinavia, Europe, USA and Africa.
The impetus for the conference and this volume came from research cooperation
between the Poverty and Prosperity Programme at NAI and the Gender Institute at the
LSE. The convenors, Henrietta L.Moore and Vigdis Broch-Due, had collected a group of
researchers and graduate students from Scandinavia and Britain to get fresh research data
on the intersection of gender, conflict and impoverishment in selected field locations in
Kenya, Zambia, Ethiopia and Eritrea. The research co-operation was the result of a
growing unease shared by the convenors that despite the frequent occurrence and
ubiquitous nature of conflicts in Africa, their complex causes and widespread effects
were little understood.
Conflicts occur in different arenas of social life and on widely different scales: from
region-wide upheavals to factional disputes, but also in clashes of identity politics,
between genders, generations, classes and ethnicities. When resources are scarce,
disputes flourish and social identities become the arena of conflict and negotiations. Our
research and the subsequent conference focused on how conflict in all its forms
profoundly affects peoples’ access to resources and all the modalities of exchange, both
material and symbolic. Conflicts disrupt livelihood strategies, thus reconfiguring the
social topography of poverty and prosperity. This gives rise to hegemonic struggles
erupting into violence, transforming the social arena with its own particular logic of
sexual, racial and ethnic ‘othering’.
This volume contains case studies ranging from war and genocide to recurrent
conflicts producing changes in the wider political economy—those associated with
globalisation, commodification, large-scale movement of populations and diverse forms
of resource extraction, coercion and constraint. The images of brutal anarchy that
dominate the mass media’s representation of conflicts in Africa are countered by detailed
studies, highlighting the views and experiences of both victims and perpetrators. This
volume provides an analytical window into the formation and deployment of violence in
such contexts as ritual, sorcery and the domestic domain. It also scrutinises efforts to go
beyond violence to forms of healing and reconciliation.
Much of the material has been considerably changed since the original conference. I
am grateful to the authors who have been so willing to rewrite and reorganise their papers
along the theoretical lines suggested. I would also like to acknowledge the vital
contributions to the discussions at the conference by those participants who for various
reasons could not be represented by a separate chapter in this book. From this list I am
particular grateful to James Ferguson, Henrietta L.Moore, Karen Tranberg Hansen, Ann
Whitehead and Richard Werbner, who all served as excellent discussants. Mekonnen
Berhane, Michael Barrett, Pamela Kea, Todd Sanders and Mats Utas actively participated
in the discussions and, together with the discussants, helped to develop the theorisation of
the volume.
Thanks are also due to all those at NAI who worked so tirelessly to make the
conference a success. Ellen Selvik, who so efficiently co-ordinated all the practicalities
involved in the conference, and Abraham Bariamikael, my supportive programme
assistant, each deserves a special mention. Last, but not least, the editor would like to
acknowledge the financial support to the original conference by the Nordic Africa
Institute and, by extension, the Foreign Affairs Ministries of Denmark, Finland, Norway
and Sweden who jointly funded the activities of the above-mentioned research
programme. The editor is particularly grateful to the Research Council of Norway in
general, and its section of Environment and Development in particular, whose generous
funding enabled me to explore issues of violence and belonging in my more recent
research and, thus, produce this volume.
I am also grateful to Henrietta L.Moore for placing the ethics of theory so firmly on
the agenda of our workshop; to James Ferguson for elaborating on the point that scholarly
ethics is significantly linked to our ability to captivate the imagination of larger
audiences; to Sharon E. Hutchinson for suggesting some key comparative issues
concerning conflicts; and to Graham Townsley for his constructive reading of my own
chapter.
Vigdis Broch-Due