Violence in Contemporary Africa
Content
African Affairs, 104/417, 685–695
doi:10.1093/afraf/adi072 Advance Access Publication 23 September 2005
© The Author [2005]. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Royal African Society. All rights reserved
REVIEW ARTICLE VIOLENCE IN CONTEMPORARY AFRICA REASSESSED
MARK LEOPOLD
Violence, edited by Neil L. Whitehead. Oxford: James Currey and Santa Fe: SAR Press (School of American Research Advanced Seminar Series), 2005. 306 pp. £45.00 hardback. ISBN 0-85255-973-9 (hardback); £16.95 paperback. ISBN 0-85255-972-0 (paperback). Violence and Belonging: The quest for identity in post-colonial Africa, edited by Vigdis Broch-Due. London and New York: Routledge, 2005. x + 261 pp. $110.00 hardback. ISBN 0-415-29006-6 (hardback); $36.95 paperback. ISBN 0-415-29007-4 (paperback). No Peace, No War: An anthropology of contemporary armed conflicts, edited by Paul Richards. Oxford: James Currey and Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005. x + 214 pp. £45.00 hardback. ISBN 0-85255-936-4 (hardback); £16.95 paperback. ISBN 0-85255-935-6 (paperback). Shadows of War: Violence, power, and international profiteering in the twenty-first century, by Carolyn Nordstrom. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004. xii + 306 pp. $24.50 hardback. ISBN 0-520-23977-6 (hardback); $9.46 paperback. ISBN 0-520-24241-6 (paperback). Vanguard or Vandals: Youth, politics and conflict in Africa, edited by Jon Abbink and Ineke van Kessel. Leiden: Brill, 2005. ix + 300 pp. $46.00 paperback. ISBN 90 04 14275 4 (paperback). Child Soldier, by China Keitetsi. London: Souvenir Press, 2004. xiii + 274 pp. £13.29 hardback. ISBN 0-285-63690-1 (hardback).
THE BOOKS LISTED ABOVE represent the latest wave in a rising flood tide of academic work on violence and warfare in the post-Cold War era. This interdisciplinary field of study involves historians, economists, political scientists, psychologists, sociologists and many others, but social and cultural anthropologists have been increasingly prominent in the discussions, and the present books are predominantly by anthropologists. The sad centrality
Mark Leopold is Senior Associate Member at St. Antony’s College, University of Oxford.
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of Africa in this burgeoning academic debate is demonstrated by the fact that, excluding general theoretical chapters, the edited collections under consideration that are not exclusively concerned with Africa devote six out of ten case studies (Richards), and four out of nine case studies (Whitehead) to African examples. Nordstrom’s book too, while ostensibly global in its reach, in fact concentrates largely on Africa. Moreover, if Africa dominates the debate on violence, Africanists know that studies of violence in its many forms are increasingly prominent in the study of Africa. It seems a timely moment to try to assess the contribution of this literature to our understanding of violence and warfare in contemporary Africa. Much of the late twentieth-century literature on ‘new wars’1 was concerned with finding a predominant ‘root cause’ of all or most conflicts. Richards offers a useful typology of these theories
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Malthus with guns, the view that war is ultimately caused by competition over scarce resources.2 New Barbarism, the idea that the end of the Cold War unleashed longsuppressed ethnic hatreds, leading to inevitable and insoluable conflicts (especially in Africa and the Balkans) and setting the stage for a new religious-based cold war between Christendom (plus Judaism) and Islam.3 Greed, Not Grievance, the theory that economic motivations lie behind all wars.4
Richards demonstrates the inadequacies of all of these approaches as monocausal explanations but, quite rightly, he does not suggest that they are entirely without merit. It is clearly true that competition over scare natural resources, the possibilities of economic gain for some and the historical circumstances of the US superpower monopoly in the post-Soviet world (changing, as it has, the possibilities of international support for one side or another in local conflicts) are all factors in most, if not in all contemporary conflicts. But they do not separately, or even together, seem to explain very much about why wars start, continue or stop, nor about the relationship between social and interpersonal violence, why particular
1. The phrase is that of the political scientist Mary Kaldor, New and Old Wars: Organised violence in a global era (Polity Press, Cambridge, 1999). 2. Associated with the work of T. F. Homer-Dixon, Environment, Scarcity and Violence (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1999). 3. Associated with the American journalist Robert Kaplan, The Ends of the Earth: A journey at the end of the twentieth century (Random House, New York, 1996), and the veteran US political scientist Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order (Simon and Schuster, New York, 1997). 4. Two of the more sophisticated versions of this approach, discussed by Richards, are those of David Keen, The Benefits of Famine: Political economy of famine and relief in southwestern Sudan, 1983-1989 (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1994) and ‘Who’s it between? “Ethnic war” and rational violence’, in Tim Allen and Jean Seaton (eds), The Media of Conflict: War reporting and representations of ethnic violence (Zed Books, London, 1999); and Paul Collier, Economic Causes of Civil Conflict and Their Implications for Policy (The World Bank, Washington, DC, 2000).
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conflicts take particular forms or why some participate and others do not, among many other issues raised in the books discussed here. Richards’s own preferred approach is a fourth, the ethnographic perspective, which turns out to mean that ‘ “new war” needs to be understood in relation to patterns of violence already embedded within society’ and to be studied through ‘the ethnography of practice’ (Richards, ed., p. 11). This is, of course the way that anthropologists (and some historians and others) have long studied war and violence, and perhaps such specific, careful studies of particular cases are the only way to approach an understanding of the subject. Others, however, still yearn for a general theory of violence. Whitehead goes so far as to argue that
[V]aluable though such calls for ethnographies of violence are, they become credible only if such ethnographies are searching for the kinds of explanations that make violence intelligible. It is all too easy to suggest that violence itself, as a negation of reason or intelligibility…cannot be so understood, and we are left to merely portray the particular in the expectation that actual explanation will somehow follow. But this kind of intimacy then invites the charges that such ethnographic interest itself appears as prurient, as a species of journalism that may tend to augment the performance of violence, not inhibit it….5
This begs a number of questions. One set concerns the notion of ‘intelligibility’; in what or whose terms does violence become ‘intelligible’? Those of a Western rationalist or empiricist philosophical tradition? Or is it possible for the ethnographer to explain (perhaps within such a tradition) the motivations and ideas of those with very different cultural assumptions (as E. E. Evans-Pritchard famously attempted in his work on witchcraft)? These are questions with which anthropologists have long grappled. Another set of relevant questions concerns how ethnographic work can or should be carried out in a war situation.6 It is noticeable that many of the chapters in the edited collections under consideration offer informed commentaries on, or cultural analysis of, violent events, rather than detailed ethnographic accounts of the processes involved (in this context, the one non-academic book under discussion, Keitetsi’s autobiography, offers a level of engagement and detail lacking in the more rigorous accounts of the anthropologists). Where Whitehead, Richards, Broch-Due and many of the other writers considered here agree,7 is in their view that violence cannot, as some of the
5. Whitehead (ed.), pp. 56-7. 6. Elsewhere, I have taken issue with Alex de Waal’s rhetorical question, ‘How would a social anthropologist participate in a war? By shooting people? By being shot?’; [Alex de Waal, Famine that Kills: Darfur, Sudan, 1984-1985 (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1989), p. 3]. My somewhat flippant response was that the anthropologist ‘participates’ by doing what most people around are doing; trying to avoid being shot (Leopold, Inside West Nile; violence, history and representation on an African Frontier. Oxford, James Currey; Santa Fe, School of American Research press; Kampala, Fountain Publisher, 2005, p. 16). 7. E.g. Harri Englund in Broch-Due (ed.), p. 71, advocates ‘a perspective in which ethnographic enquiry resists the inevitable temptation to see in political violence a radical rupture’.
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theories of the 1990s suggested, be seen as something deviant from or outside ‘normal’, ‘peaceful’ society, but has to be understood as part of society, as embedded in history and culture. This, again, is a venerable anthropological argument, but it is also another one stressed in the current wave of literature on violence. Where Richards’s collection is particularly interesting is in its reverse twist to this argument, in showing ‘peace’ as an analytically more problematic, and socially much rarer phenomenon than ‘war’.8 The first problem with understanding violence, one that is grappled with but not solved by several of the books under consideration, is that of definition. As Whitehead points out, there has been a traditional disjuncture between
[T]he disciplinary scholarship practiced by theorists of war and those theorizing violence, usually from interpersonal or domestic/marital situations. In the latter case, psychology and sociology have produced a large literature. In the former, political scientists and economists are notably active.9
Anthropologists have increasingly tried to find definitions that show the links as well as the obvious differences between the two kinds of violence. Although Broch-Due claims that her edited collection makes ‘a novel contribution to social theory…in its exploration of the precise linkages between wider regional upheavals and the routinised forms of violence in everyday life’ (p. 2), this theme has been relatively common in recent literature and is shared by the editorial approach of the Whitehead volume and by Nordstrom’s work, as well as much other recent work on violence.10 As Whitehead writes, however,
‘[V]iolence’ is often referenced as an immediate interpersonal relationship, leading to an emphasis on the phenomenological experience of violence by victim and perpetrator. This focus on the interpersonal therefore tends to exclude not only the structuring factors of society, culture and history but ipso facto the whole domain of warfare and military action, which places much emphasis on a depersonalization of ‘the enemy.’ It is hard to see how approaches that begin in the psychodynamics of interpersonal aggression can ever adequately conceptualize the organized, collective expression of violence over time that is military action or war. To some extent, these differences in approach show an undercurrent of counterposing humanistic to social scientific explanation, which is further reflected in orientations to issues of either identity or experience as the focus for understanding respectively war and violence.11
8. See, e.g. Sverker Finnstrom, ‘Northern Uganda’ in Richards (ed.) 9. Whitehead (ed.), p. 56. 10. See, e.g. Veena Das, Arthur Kleinman, Mamphela Ramphele and Pamela Reynolds (eds), Violence and Subjectivity (University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, 2000); Veena Das, Arthur Kleinman, Margaret Lock, Mamphela Ramphele and Pamela Reynolds (eds), Remaking a World: Violence, social suffering and recovery (University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, 2001). 11. Whitehead (ed.), p. 56.
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Many of the contributors to Broch-Due’s edited collection do focus on ‘identity’ (seen, in this context, as more or less synonymous with ethnicity) in this way. In her introduction, she speaks of ‘the emergence and elusive matrix of violence and identity politics in modern Africa’.12 But if ‘ethnicity’ or ‘identity’ is defined (as much contemporary anthropology tends to define it) in terms of a shifting set of techniques for boundary maintenance, some of which may take violent forms, then such an emphasis on identity becomes circular as a wider explanation of war and violence (as opposed to a specific problematic in particular cases, where it may operate as one element in historical or ethnographic explanation). Definitions are important in understanding such a complex set of issues as those raised by the notion of violence. The most widely used anthropological definition of violence, cited as such by Broch-Due, Richards and Whitehead, is that developed in David Riches’s 1986 edited collection, The Anthropology of Violence,13 described by Whitehead as ‘[u]ndoubtedly, the most influential current definition of violence’.14 Riches’s definition of violence is based on a triangular relationship between ‘perpetrator’ (or ‘performer’), ‘witness’ (or ‘observer’) and ‘victim’, where ‘violence’ means ‘an act of physical hurt deemed legitimate by the performer and illegitimate by (some) witnesses’ (p. 8). This means that ‘the performance of violence is inherently likely to be contested on the question of legitimacy’ (Riches, p. 11). This has the virtue of being applicable to both ‘political’ and ‘interpersonal’ violence. Whatever its analytical value, however (and I outline some criticisms below), such a definition, as Whitehead suggests (p. 57), does not get us very far in understanding violence, even when the three points of the triangle are explicitly defined to include social groups as well as individuals. This is the approach taken by Stewart and Strathern in their interesting comparative study, which covered Papua New Guinea, Rwanda, Sri Lanka and Northern Ireland,15 demonstrating how, by seeing the three categories of Riches’s triangle of violence as collective, social entities and historicizing their positions, victims can become perpetrators through a series of cycles of revenge. As Whitehead puts it ‘in this frame, warfare itself emerges as a special subset of violence that particularly engages these collective identities’.16
12. Broch-Due (ed.), p. 3. 13. D. Riches (ed.), The Anthropology of Violence (Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1986). Other recent collections using Riches’ definition include Göran Aijmer and Jon Abbink (eds), Meanings of Violence; a cross cultural perspective (Berg, Oxford, 2000), and Bettina E. Schmidt and Ingo W. Schroder (eds), Anthropology of Violence and Conflict (Routledge, London, 2001). 14. Whitehead (ed.), p. 56. 15. Pamela J. Stewart and Andrew Strathern, Violence: Theory and ethnography (Continuum, London and New York, 2002). 16. Whitehead (ed.), p. 59.
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Two developments of Riches’s analysis have proved particularly influential in the current generation of works on violence. One is an emphasis on the aspect of performance in acts of violence, the other is the implication that political violence or warfare is just a subset of the wider social category of violence. The first is explored by many of the contributors to Whitehead’s volume, which stands out among the edited collections here in its unusual intellectual coherence, thanks to the format of the School of American Research Advanced Seminar series, in which participants discuss and revise their contributions together over an extended period. However, there remain considerable differences among Whitehead’s contributors: the historical approach adopted by Stephen Ellis on Liberia, for example, contrasts with the phenomenological, highly personal, style favoured by Carolyn Nordstrom. Here, as in her own most recent book, Shadows of War: Violence, power, and international profiteering in the twenty-first century, Nordstrom writes a confessional, first-person, journalistic prose which some find very readable. Others may see her writing style as sentimental, and her rhetoric of ‘fieldwork under fire’17 as potentially somewhat selfaggrandizing. Whitehead’s own contribution to the collection seeks to bring the phenomenological and the social/historical approaches together, through the notion of a ‘poetics of violence’. He writes that
[P]articular cultural meanings of…modalities of violence will produce the specific instances of killing, maiming, and assault that otherwise appear unintelligible. Ethnic cleansing in Bosnia that emphasized rape and execution with mallets and hammers, civil war in Sierra Leone that took the hands and feet of prisoners, anal impalement that invokes key cultural categories in Rwanda, kneecapping in Northern Ireland and so on — all these specific forms of violence are not produced by the febrile excess of savage or pathological minds but are cultural performances whose poetics derive from the history and sociocultural relationships of the locale. However, representations of such intimate violence are also globalized through the media so that the intimacy of local violence is paraded on a global stage.18
This of course raises wider questions about the notion of ‘terror’, and the ways in which its more spectacular performances may serve both to strike fear into the enemy, and sometimes to do so through mass media coverage. This is perhaps the only thing in common between the 9/11 terrorists in the United States and an African group such as Uganda’s Lords Resistance Army, which is similarly classified by the US State Department as a ‘terrorist organization’.
17. The title of an earlier edited collection: Carolyn Nordstrom and Antonius C. G. M. Robben (eds), Fieldwork Under Fire: Contemporary studies of violence and survival (University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, 1995). 18. Whitehead (ed.), pp. 73-4.
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The use of the term ‘poetics’, however, leaves me uneasy. It runs the risk of aestheticizing violence and exoticising certain of its forms. While spectacular dramatic performances of violent acts may be important in some cultural areas (Amazonia and parts of West Africa spring to mind), in other places violence takes more mundane if no less horrific forms. Aestheticizing African and other ‘Third World’ forms of violence has its own long history, and citizens of wealthy Northern states that prefer to fight their wars in other continents using advanced technologies should perhaps avoid an excessive sense of moral superiority vis-à-vis poorer nations and people who can only afford to fight at home, with cruder weapons. One aspect of such a sense of superiority derives from a Weberian notion of violence that runs deep in Western political theory: the distinction between violence performed on the part of a state (especially against its own population), seen as at least potentially legitimate (even if this legitimacy may be contested in certain circumstances), and violent acts carried out by non-state actors, such as rebel groups. In many African circumstances, however, this distinction is hard to sustain. Leaving aside any question as to the legitimacy of governments and the artificial and contested nature of state borders in parts of Africa, the distinction between state and non-state actors collapses when ‘rebel groups’ are supported by neighbouring states. In my own work in Uganda in the late 1990s, by the borders with Sudan and what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo, it was obvious that each of the three countries was using ‘rebel groups’ in the others as surrogates for national forces. Sudan and (what was then) Zaire supported various Ugandan rebel groups, and the former bombed northern Ugandan towns, while Ugandan troops took part in military advances by the Sudan People’s Liberation Army and the Allied Democratic Front for the Liberation of Congo–Zaire.19 This is not particularly unusual in African wars and should at least cause us to question the applicability of the Weberian distinction between legitimate use of force by established states and the illegitimate use of force by non-state actors against the interests of national governments. Another problem with much of the recent literature on African wars, also derived from Euro-American philosophical assumptions and exemplified in the northern Uganda situation, is precisely the use of Riches’s triangle of violence. The distinction between ‘victim’, ‘perpetrator’ and
19. See Mark Leopold, ‘ “Trying to hold things together”: International NGOs caught up in an emergency in North Western Uganda, 1996-97’, in Ondine Barrow and Michael Jennings (eds), The Charitable Impulse: NGOs and development in east and north-east Africa (James Currey, Oxford and Kumarian Press, Bloomfield, CT, 2001), and Mark Leopold, Inside West Nile: Violence, history and representation on an African frontier (James Currey, Oxford; School of American Research Press, Santa Fe; and Fountain Publishers, Kampala, Uganda [World Anthropology series], 2005), chapter 2. The same point is made by Finnstrom in Richards (ed.).
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‘witness’, even when collectivized and historicized à la Stewart and Strathern to take into account cycles of revenge — as in Rwanda and, arguably, northern Uganda — is thoroughly based in Western legal/political categories. Riches himself (Whitehead, ed., pp. 57–8) sees it as rooted in Anglo– Saxon cultural traditions (which relate to the same distinction between legitimate and illegitimate force I have noted above as ‘Weberian’), but we can also see a more recent precursor in the legal forms deployed in the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war crimes. The three positions in the triangle thus relate to a European political and legal tradition. They also fail to explain the position of, let us say, a twelve-year-old girl abducted by Uganda’s Lords Resistance Army, forced to kill her mother and to witness (and take part in) numerous atrocities, and then displayed by a nongovernmental organization (NGO) to the world’s media as simultaneously a victim, a perpetrator and a witness. While Stewart and Strathern argued that the addition of a social and historical dimension shows how the same people may occupy different roles in the triangle at different times, I would go further and suggest that the same people may be simultaneously perpetrator, victim and witness.20 The above example raises another set of issues around violence and warfare: the roles of age and gender. The former is the focus of Abbink and van Kessel’s edited collection. In his introduction, Abbink writes that
Being young in Africa is widely and consistently perceived as problematic in essence. Social analysts, policy makers, NGOs, governments and international organisations all reiterate that African youth is in deep trouble and enmeshed in violence. While understandable, this view is overburdening and prejudges the issues before understanding them…Both theoretically and empirically one needs to avoid positing ‘youth’ and generational tension in Africa as an inherently destructive or exceptional factor in the social order. This reveals a kind of Hobbesian worldview applied to Africa.21
On the other hand, he makes the point that ‘young people are prominently involved in most of the existing armed conflicts and criminal networks on the African continent’22 and goes further than Whitehead in seeing aspects of the performance of violence as resulting from a non-rational excess, which Abbink is happy to allude to as ‘evil’:
Another serious question is that of ‘cultures of violence’, more or less durable, socially rooted patterns of repeated violent practice or performance among certain groups that become integrated in a way of life and that thrive on intimidation and the abuse of
20. I am not suggesting that this complication of roles is a particularly African phenomenon. See the historian Joanna Bourke’s An Intimate History of Killing: Face-to-face killing in twentieth-century warfare (Granta Books, London, 1999), for many European and North American examples. Within Africa itself, Keitetsi’s book is a vivid, first-person, example, from the ‘opposite side’ of Ugandan politics, of the same phenomenon. 21. Abbink and van Kessel (eds), p. 3. 22. Ibid., p. 17.
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power…. [A] political economic explanation of such violence simply falls short here…. The elements of enjoyment are disturbing and perhaps have to be explained in another way.23
Here, he cites a book with the uncompromising title Evil: Inside human cruelty and violence.24 The problem with this is not the notion of ‘evil’ as such. A number of recent writers, particularly philosophers and cultural theorists, have similarly evoked the theological notion of evil as a way of understanding such situations of excessive violence, which seem to transcend the usual categories of ‘rational’ explanation.25 What is problematic is when such excess is seen as a peculiarly or particularly African phenomenon, evoking the old and pernicious tradition of displaying the continent as a unique ‘Heart of Darkness’ (this is explicitly not Abbink’s position, although his co-edited collection is devoted to Africa). If the roots of African violence lie in such an ineluctable and inexplicable cause as ‘evil’, then what is the point of trying to understand, never mind attempting to ameliorate, it? Both for academics and for the ‘[s]ocial analysts, policy makers, NGOs, governments and international organisations’ previously mentioned by Abbink, this would be a counsel of despair. Fortunately, Abbink and van Kessel’s contributors do not take such a position; Jok Madut Jok’s interesting chapter on ‘War, changing ethics and the position of youth in South Sudan’, for example, concludes that ‘violence perpetrated by or exercised against youth is not just the immediate outcome of a prolonged war but is also the sharp end of a long historical process’.26 One serious problem with emphasizing the role of children and youths in violence and war is once again one of definition. Abbink points this out in his introduction but does not resolve the issues. The fact is that in Africa local definitions of childhood and youth tend to differ from those used in international law and by bodies such as the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). People who would be considered minors in Europe and North America are frequently expected to assume a range of ‘adult’ roles, including working and being sexually active, as well as fighting in wars, while others may not count as full ‘adults’ until their late thirties. One may deplore this, but it remains true and makes it problematic to use the concepts of youth or childhood in describing and analyzing African societies. Another specific ethnographic factor is the existence of formalized ‘age sets’ in some
23. Ibid., pp. 18-9. 24. R. F. Baumeister, Evil: Inside human cruelty and violence (W. H. Freeman, New York, 1996). 25. See e.g. Gary Banham and Charlie Blake (eds), Evil Spirits, Nihilism and the Fate of Modernity (Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2000); John Kekes, Facing Evil (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1990); Joan Copjec (ed.), Radical Evil (Verso, London and New York, 1996); Jennifer L. Geddes (ed.), Evil After Postmodernism (Routledge, London and New York, 2001). 26. Abbink and van Kessel (eds), p. 143.
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African pastoralist societies.27 Finally, it is important to note, as many of Abbink and van Kessel’s contributors do, the more ‘positive’ image of associations between ‘the youth’ and violence in Africa’s liberation struggles, as well as in post-colonial uprisings against various dictatorships.28 One factor that is perhaps surprising in most of the chapters and books I have discussed here is the comparative lack of gender analysis. This is not to advocate a simplistic view of males as inherently violent: one look at Keitetsi’s account of her life as a ‘child soldier’ with Uganda’s National Resistance Army would swiftly disabuse anyone of the notion that women (or girls) are somehow inherently non-violent. The extraordinary tale it tells (however unreliably in detail) of a child choosing to leave her abusive family and join a — then — rebel group (now Uganda’s much-admired government) offers a valuable correction against many of the pieties in the academic literature about children, women, ‘liberation fighters’ and conflict in general. Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that violence, in its varied forms, is almost always strongly gendered. Moreover, gender violence, rape and so on demonstrate two points made by many of the contributors to these volumes: the close links between organized warfare and less public forms of violence, and the ways in which violence is embedded in wider social processes. There are still too few works that have followed up the pioneering work of Suzette Heald on the relationship between models of masculinity in Africa and violence.29 Another important issue, which could be further developed than in much of the current wave of volumes on violence, is the role of religion, both the so-called ‘world religions’ and more local practices and beliefs, in producing and shaping the forms of violence. An exception here is Jok’s chapter on South Sudan in Abbink and van Kessel’s book. He suggests that one cause of ‘inter-generational breakdown of communication’ in the region is
[T]he mass conversion to Christianity on the part of thousands upon thousands of younger South Sudanese boys and girls…[which] has driven an ideological wedge between them and many of their seniors…has undercut the former religious authority of community elders and has splintered, socially and spiritually, numerous families and communities.30
Another interesting account of the role of religion in violence is that of Stephen Ellis, who writes in Whitehead’s collection that Liberians’ interpretation of ‘the deeper meanings of their country’s war [are] generally
27. Abbink’s own ethnographic work has been amongst such a group, the ‘Suri’ of southern Ethiopia. Another article in his co-edited collection, by Simon Simonse, is also about a pastoralist group, the Karamojong of north east Uganda, for whom age sets are important. 28. E.g., in addition to those mentioned elsewhere in this article, Murray Last, pp. 37–54, G. Thomas Burgess, pp. 55–78, Karel Arnaut, pp. 110–142 and Sara Rich Dorman, pp. 189–204. 29. See Suzette Heald, Controlling Anger: The sociology of Gisu violence (Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1989). 30. Abbink and van Kessel (eds), p. 155.
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expressed in religious idioms’. He concludes (in terms that foreshadow some of my own points in the present article),
It seems increasingly clear that social scientists confronted with interpretations of violence that place it within a religious cosmology should not have recourse only to the classics of a social science literature that, however brilliant, were the product of authors steeped in European history; like all of us, Weber and Durkheim were children of their time. Increasingly apparent is the need for analysts to study the particular content of religious thought, rather than assuming from the outset of their inquiry that spiritual beings represent only the translation of other, secular forces, such as economic and political structures, that are deemed to be more real.31
The different roles played by religious beliefs and organizations in different conflicts and forms of violence in Africa are complex and worthy of more sustained attention in future work. In this article, I have discussed a wide range of recent work on violence in Africa, but it has not been possible, within the confines of space and coherence, to do justice to all the many interesting writers that have contributed to these volumes. Instead I have focussed on some of the definitional questions that continue to bedevil the field and have suggested that many of these issues arise from the ethnocentric nature of some basic assumptions of social science. Others are due to the bewildering variety of phenomena under discussion. Despite the widespread and intellectually lively nature of current academic interest in violence, I am left with a niggling suspicion that all these problems of definition may in the end indicate that there are limits to the analytical usefulness of such a broad and baggy conceptual category.
31.
Whitehead (ed.), p. 121.
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doi:10.1093/afraf/adi072 Advance Access Publication 23 September 2005
© The Author [2005]. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Royal African Society. All rights reserved
REVIEW ARTICLE VIOLENCE IN CONTEMPORARY AFRICA REASSESSED
MARK LEOPOLD
Violence, edited by Neil L. Whitehead. Oxford: James Currey and Santa Fe: SAR Press (School of American Research Advanced Seminar Series), 2005. 306 pp. £45.00 hardback. ISBN 0-85255-973-9 (hardback); £16.95 paperback. ISBN 0-85255-972-0 (paperback). Violence and Belonging: The quest for identity in post-colonial Africa, edited by Vigdis Broch-Due. London and New York: Routledge, 2005. x + 261 pp. $110.00 hardback. ISBN 0-415-29006-6 (hardback); $36.95 paperback. ISBN 0-415-29007-4 (paperback). No Peace, No War: An anthropology of contemporary armed conflicts, edited by Paul Richards. Oxford: James Currey and Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005. x + 214 pp. £45.00 hardback. ISBN 0-85255-936-4 (hardback); £16.95 paperback. ISBN 0-85255-935-6 (paperback). Shadows of War: Violence, power, and international profiteering in the twenty-first century, by Carolyn Nordstrom. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004. xii + 306 pp. $24.50 hardback. ISBN 0-520-23977-6 (hardback); $9.46 paperback. ISBN 0-520-24241-6 (paperback). Vanguard or Vandals: Youth, politics and conflict in Africa, edited by Jon Abbink and Ineke van Kessel. Leiden: Brill, 2005. ix + 300 pp. $46.00 paperback. ISBN 90 04 14275 4 (paperback). Child Soldier, by China Keitetsi. London: Souvenir Press, 2004. xiii + 274 pp. £13.29 hardback. ISBN 0-285-63690-1 (hardback).
THE BOOKS LISTED ABOVE represent the latest wave in a rising flood tide of academic work on violence and warfare in the post-Cold War era. This interdisciplinary field of study involves historians, economists, political scientists, psychologists, sociologists and many others, but social and cultural anthropologists have been increasingly prominent in the discussions, and the present books are predominantly by anthropologists. The sad centrality
Mark Leopold is Senior Associate Member at St. Antony’s College, University of Oxford.
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of Africa in this burgeoning academic debate is demonstrated by the fact that, excluding general theoretical chapters, the edited collections under consideration that are not exclusively concerned with Africa devote six out of ten case studies (Richards), and four out of nine case studies (Whitehead) to African examples. Nordstrom’s book too, while ostensibly global in its reach, in fact concentrates largely on Africa. Moreover, if Africa dominates the debate on violence, Africanists know that studies of violence in its many forms are increasingly prominent in the study of Africa. It seems a timely moment to try to assess the contribution of this literature to our understanding of violence and warfare in contemporary Africa. Much of the late twentieth-century literature on ‘new wars’1 was concerned with finding a predominant ‘root cause’ of all or most conflicts. Richards offers a useful typology of these theories
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Malthus with guns, the view that war is ultimately caused by competition over scarce resources.2 New Barbarism, the idea that the end of the Cold War unleashed longsuppressed ethnic hatreds, leading to inevitable and insoluable conflicts (especially in Africa and the Balkans) and setting the stage for a new religious-based cold war between Christendom (plus Judaism) and Islam.3 Greed, Not Grievance, the theory that economic motivations lie behind all wars.4
Richards demonstrates the inadequacies of all of these approaches as monocausal explanations but, quite rightly, he does not suggest that they are entirely without merit. It is clearly true that competition over scare natural resources, the possibilities of economic gain for some and the historical circumstances of the US superpower monopoly in the post-Soviet world (changing, as it has, the possibilities of international support for one side or another in local conflicts) are all factors in most, if not in all contemporary conflicts. But they do not separately, or even together, seem to explain very much about why wars start, continue or stop, nor about the relationship between social and interpersonal violence, why particular
1. The phrase is that of the political scientist Mary Kaldor, New and Old Wars: Organised violence in a global era (Polity Press, Cambridge, 1999). 2. Associated with the work of T. F. Homer-Dixon, Environment, Scarcity and Violence (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1999). 3. Associated with the American journalist Robert Kaplan, The Ends of the Earth: A journey at the end of the twentieth century (Random House, New York, 1996), and the veteran US political scientist Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order (Simon and Schuster, New York, 1997). 4. Two of the more sophisticated versions of this approach, discussed by Richards, are those of David Keen, The Benefits of Famine: Political economy of famine and relief in southwestern Sudan, 1983-1989 (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1994) and ‘Who’s it between? “Ethnic war” and rational violence’, in Tim Allen and Jean Seaton (eds), The Media of Conflict: War reporting and representations of ethnic violence (Zed Books, London, 1999); and Paul Collier, Economic Causes of Civil Conflict and Their Implications for Policy (The World Bank, Washington, DC, 2000).
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conflicts take particular forms or why some participate and others do not, among many other issues raised in the books discussed here. Richards’s own preferred approach is a fourth, the ethnographic perspective, which turns out to mean that ‘ “new war” needs to be understood in relation to patterns of violence already embedded within society’ and to be studied through ‘the ethnography of practice’ (Richards, ed., p. 11). This is, of course the way that anthropologists (and some historians and others) have long studied war and violence, and perhaps such specific, careful studies of particular cases are the only way to approach an understanding of the subject. Others, however, still yearn for a general theory of violence. Whitehead goes so far as to argue that
[V]aluable though such calls for ethnographies of violence are, they become credible only if such ethnographies are searching for the kinds of explanations that make violence intelligible. It is all too easy to suggest that violence itself, as a negation of reason or intelligibility…cannot be so understood, and we are left to merely portray the particular in the expectation that actual explanation will somehow follow. But this kind of intimacy then invites the charges that such ethnographic interest itself appears as prurient, as a species of journalism that may tend to augment the performance of violence, not inhibit it….5
This begs a number of questions. One set concerns the notion of ‘intelligibility’; in what or whose terms does violence become ‘intelligible’? Those of a Western rationalist or empiricist philosophical tradition? Or is it possible for the ethnographer to explain (perhaps within such a tradition) the motivations and ideas of those with very different cultural assumptions (as E. E. Evans-Pritchard famously attempted in his work on witchcraft)? These are questions with which anthropologists have long grappled. Another set of relevant questions concerns how ethnographic work can or should be carried out in a war situation.6 It is noticeable that many of the chapters in the edited collections under consideration offer informed commentaries on, or cultural analysis of, violent events, rather than detailed ethnographic accounts of the processes involved (in this context, the one non-academic book under discussion, Keitetsi’s autobiography, offers a level of engagement and detail lacking in the more rigorous accounts of the anthropologists). Where Whitehead, Richards, Broch-Due and many of the other writers considered here agree,7 is in their view that violence cannot, as some of the
5. Whitehead (ed.), pp. 56-7. 6. Elsewhere, I have taken issue with Alex de Waal’s rhetorical question, ‘How would a social anthropologist participate in a war? By shooting people? By being shot?’; [Alex de Waal, Famine that Kills: Darfur, Sudan, 1984-1985 (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1989), p. 3]. My somewhat flippant response was that the anthropologist ‘participates’ by doing what most people around are doing; trying to avoid being shot (Leopold, Inside West Nile; violence, history and representation on an African Frontier. Oxford, James Currey; Santa Fe, School of American Research press; Kampala, Fountain Publisher, 2005, p. 16). 7. E.g. Harri Englund in Broch-Due (ed.), p. 71, advocates ‘a perspective in which ethnographic enquiry resists the inevitable temptation to see in political violence a radical rupture’.
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theories of the 1990s suggested, be seen as something deviant from or outside ‘normal’, ‘peaceful’ society, but has to be understood as part of society, as embedded in history and culture. This, again, is a venerable anthropological argument, but it is also another one stressed in the current wave of literature on violence. Where Richards’s collection is particularly interesting is in its reverse twist to this argument, in showing ‘peace’ as an analytically more problematic, and socially much rarer phenomenon than ‘war’.8 The first problem with understanding violence, one that is grappled with but not solved by several of the books under consideration, is that of definition. As Whitehead points out, there has been a traditional disjuncture between
[T]he disciplinary scholarship practiced by theorists of war and those theorizing violence, usually from interpersonal or domestic/marital situations. In the latter case, psychology and sociology have produced a large literature. In the former, political scientists and economists are notably active.9
Anthropologists have increasingly tried to find definitions that show the links as well as the obvious differences between the two kinds of violence. Although Broch-Due claims that her edited collection makes ‘a novel contribution to social theory…in its exploration of the precise linkages between wider regional upheavals and the routinised forms of violence in everyday life’ (p. 2), this theme has been relatively common in recent literature and is shared by the editorial approach of the Whitehead volume and by Nordstrom’s work, as well as much other recent work on violence.10 As Whitehead writes, however,
‘[V]iolence’ is often referenced as an immediate interpersonal relationship, leading to an emphasis on the phenomenological experience of violence by victim and perpetrator. This focus on the interpersonal therefore tends to exclude not only the structuring factors of society, culture and history but ipso facto the whole domain of warfare and military action, which places much emphasis on a depersonalization of ‘the enemy.’ It is hard to see how approaches that begin in the psychodynamics of interpersonal aggression can ever adequately conceptualize the organized, collective expression of violence over time that is military action or war. To some extent, these differences in approach show an undercurrent of counterposing humanistic to social scientific explanation, which is further reflected in orientations to issues of either identity or experience as the focus for understanding respectively war and violence.11
8. See, e.g. Sverker Finnstrom, ‘Northern Uganda’ in Richards (ed.) 9. Whitehead (ed.), p. 56. 10. See, e.g. Veena Das, Arthur Kleinman, Mamphela Ramphele and Pamela Reynolds (eds), Violence and Subjectivity (University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, 2000); Veena Das, Arthur Kleinman, Margaret Lock, Mamphela Ramphele and Pamela Reynolds (eds), Remaking a World: Violence, social suffering and recovery (University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, 2001). 11. Whitehead (ed.), p. 56.
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Many of the contributors to Broch-Due’s edited collection do focus on ‘identity’ (seen, in this context, as more or less synonymous with ethnicity) in this way. In her introduction, she speaks of ‘the emergence and elusive matrix of violence and identity politics in modern Africa’.12 But if ‘ethnicity’ or ‘identity’ is defined (as much contemporary anthropology tends to define it) in terms of a shifting set of techniques for boundary maintenance, some of which may take violent forms, then such an emphasis on identity becomes circular as a wider explanation of war and violence (as opposed to a specific problematic in particular cases, where it may operate as one element in historical or ethnographic explanation). Definitions are important in understanding such a complex set of issues as those raised by the notion of violence. The most widely used anthropological definition of violence, cited as such by Broch-Due, Richards and Whitehead, is that developed in David Riches’s 1986 edited collection, The Anthropology of Violence,13 described by Whitehead as ‘[u]ndoubtedly, the most influential current definition of violence’.14 Riches’s definition of violence is based on a triangular relationship between ‘perpetrator’ (or ‘performer’), ‘witness’ (or ‘observer’) and ‘victim’, where ‘violence’ means ‘an act of physical hurt deemed legitimate by the performer and illegitimate by (some) witnesses’ (p. 8). This means that ‘the performance of violence is inherently likely to be contested on the question of legitimacy’ (Riches, p. 11). This has the virtue of being applicable to both ‘political’ and ‘interpersonal’ violence. Whatever its analytical value, however (and I outline some criticisms below), such a definition, as Whitehead suggests (p. 57), does not get us very far in understanding violence, even when the three points of the triangle are explicitly defined to include social groups as well as individuals. This is the approach taken by Stewart and Strathern in their interesting comparative study, which covered Papua New Guinea, Rwanda, Sri Lanka and Northern Ireland,15 demonstrating how, by seeing the three categories of Riches’s triangle of violence as collective, social entities and historicizing their positions, victims can become perpetrators through a series of cycles of revenge. As Whitehead puts it ‘in this frame, warfare itself emerges as a special subset of violence that particularly engages these collective identities’.16
12. Broch-Due (ed.), p. 3. 13. D. Riches (ed.), The Anthropology of Violence (Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1986). Other recent collections using Riches’ definition include Göran Aijmer and Jon Abbink (eds), Meanings of Violence; a cross cultural perspective (Berg, Oxford, 2000), and Bettina E. Schmidt and Ingo W. Schroder (eds), Anthropology of Violence and Conflict (Routledge, London, 2001). 14. Whitehead (ed.), p. 56. 15. Pamela J. Stewart and Andrew Strathern, Violence: Theory and ethnography (Continuum, London and New York, 2002). 16. Whitehead (ed.), p. 59.
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Two developments of Riches’s analysis have proved particularly influential in the current generation of works on violence. One is an emphasis on the aspect of performance in acts of violence, the other is the implication that political violence or warfare is just a subset of the wider social category of violence. The first is explored by many of the contributors to Whitehead’s volume, which stands out among the edited collections here in its unusual intellectual coherence, thanks to the format of the School of American Research Advanced Seminar series, in which participants discuss and revise their contributions together over an extended period. However, there remain considerable differences among Whitehead’s contributors: the historical approach adopted by Stephen Ellis on Liberia, for example, contrasts with the phenomenological, highly personal, style favoured by Carolyn Nordstrom. Here, as in her own most recent book, Shadows of War: Violence, power, and international profiteering in the twenty-first century, Nordstrom writes a confessional, first-person, journalistic prose which some find very readable. Others may see her writing style as sentimental, and her rhetoric of ‘fieldwork under fire’17 as potentially somewhat selfaggrandizing. Whitehead’s own contribution to the collection seeks to bring the phenomenological and the social/historical approaches together, through the notion of a ‘poetics of violence’. He writes that
[P]articular cultural meanings of…modalities of violence will produce the specific instances of killing, maiming, and assault that otherwise appear unintelligible. Ethnic cleansing in Bosnia that emphasized rape and execution with mallets and hammers, civil war in Sierra Leone that took the hands and feet of prisoners, anal impalement that invokes key cultural categories in Rwanda, kneecapping in Northern Ireland and so on — all these specific forms of violence are not produced by the febrile excess of savage or pathological minds but are cultural performances whose poetics derive from the history and sociocultural relationships of the locale. However, representations of such intimate violence are also globalized through the media so that the intimacy of local violence is paraded on a global stage.18
This of course raises wider questions about the notion of ‘terror’, and the ways in which its more spectacular performances may serve both to strike fear into the enemy, and sometimes to do so through mass media coverage. This is perhaps the only thing in common between the 9/11 terrorists in the United States and an African group such as Uganda’s Lords Resistance Army, which is similarly classified by the US State Department as a ‘terrorist organization’.
17. The title of an earlier edited collection: Carolyn Nordstrom and Antonius C. G. M. Robben (eds), Fieldwork Under Fire: Contemporary studies of violence and survival (University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, 1995). 18. Whitehead (ed.), pp. 73-4.
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The use of the term ‘poetics’, however, leaves me uneasy. It runs the risk of aestheticizing violence and exoticising certain of its forms. While spectacular dramatic performances of violent acts may be important in some cultural areas (Amazonia and parts of West Africa spring to mind), in other places violence takes more mundane if no less horrific forms. Aestheticizing African and other ‘Third World’ forms of violence has its own long history, and citizens of wealthy Northern states that prefer to fight their wars in other continents using advanced technologies should perhaps avoid an excessive sense of moral superiority vis-à-vis poorer nations and people who can only afford to fight at home, with cruder weapons. One aspect of such a sense of superiority derives from a Weberian notion of violence that runs deep in Western political theory: the distinction between violence performed on the part of a state (especially against its own population), seen as at least potentially legitimate (even if this legitimacy may be contested in certain circumstances), and violent acts carried out by non-state actors, such as rebel groups. In many African circumstances, however, this distinction is hard to sustain. Leaving aside any question as to the legitimacy of governments and the artificial and contested nature of state borders in parts of Africa, the distinction between state and non-state actors collapses when ‘rebel groups’ are supported by neighbouring states. In my own work in Uganda in the late 1990s, by the borders with Sudan and what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo, it was obvious that each of the three countries was using ‘rebel groups’ in the others as surrogates for national forces. Sudan and (what was then) Zaire supported various Ugandan rebel groups, and the former bombed northern Ugandan towns, while Ugandan troops took part in military advances by the Sudan People’s Liberation Army and the Allied Democratic Front for the Liberation of Congo–Zaire.19 This is not particularly unusual in African wars and should at least cause us to question the applicability of the Weberian distinction between legitimate use of force by established states and the illegitimate use of force by non-state actors against the interests of national governments. Another problem with much of the recent literature on African wars, also derived from Euro-American philosophical assumptions and exemplified in the northern Uganda situation, is precisely the use of Riches’s triangle of violence. The distinction between ‘victim’, ‘perpetrator’ and
19. See Mark Leopold, ‘ “Trying to hold things together”: International NGOs caught up in an emergency in North Western Uganda, 1996-97’, in Ondine Barrow and Michael Jennings (eds), The Charitable Impulse: NGOs and development in east and north-east Africa (James Currey, Oxford and Kumarian Press, Bloomfield, CT, 2001), and Mark Leopold, Inside West Nile: Violence, history and representation on an African frontier (James Currey, Oxford; School of American Research Press, Santa Fe; and Fountain Publishers, Kampala, Uganda [World Anthropology series], 2005), chapter 2. The same point is made by Finnstrom in Richards (ed.).
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‘witness’, even when collectivized and historicized à la Stewart and Strathern to take into account cycles of revenge — as in Rwanda and, arguably, northern Uganda — is thoroughly based in Western legal/political categories. Riches himself (Whitehead, ed., pp. 57–8) sees it as rooted in Anglo– Saxon cultural traditions (which relate to the same distinction between legitimate and illegitimate force I have noted above as ‘Weberian’), but we can also see a more recent precursor in the legal forms deployed in the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war crimes. The three positions in the triangle thus relate to a European political and legal tradition. They also fail to explain the position of, let us say, a twelve-year-old girl abducted by Uganda’s Lords Resistance Army, forced to kill her mother and to witness (and take part in) numerous atrocities, and then displayed by a nongovernmental organization (NGO) to the world’s media as simultaneously a victim, a perpetrator and a witness. While Stewart and Strathern argued that the addition of a social and historical dimension shows how the same people may occupy different roles in the triangle at different times, I would go further and suggest that the same people may be simultaneously perpetrator, victim and witness.20 The above example raises another set of issues around violence and warfare: the roles of age and gender. The former is the focus of Abbink and van Kessel’s edited collection. In his introduction, Abbink writes that
Being young in Africa is widely and consistently perceived as problematic in essence. Social analysts, policy makers, NGOs, governments and international organisations all reiterate that African youth is in deep trouble and enmeshed in violence. While understandable, this view is overburdening and prejudges the issues before understanding them…Both theoretically and empirically one needs to avoid positing ‘youth’ and generational tension in Africa as an inherently destructive or exceptional factor in the social order. This reveals a kind of Hobbesian worldview applied to Africa.21
On the other hand, he makes the point that ‘young people are prominently involved in most of the existing armed conflicts and criminal networks on the African continent’22 and goes further than Whitehead in seeing aspects of the performance of violence as resulting from a non-rational excess, which Abbink is happy to allude to as ‘evil’:
Another serious question is that of ‘cultures of violence’, more or less durable, socially rooted patterns of repeated violent practice or performance among certain groups that become integrated in a way of life and that thrive on intimidation and the abuse of
20. I am not suggesting that this complication of roles is a particularly African phenomenon. See the historian Joanna Bourke’s An Intimate History of Killing: Face-to-face killing in twentieth-century warfare (Granta Books, London, 1999), for many European and North American examples. Within Africa itself, Keitetsi’s book is a vivid, first-person, example, from the ‘opposite side’ of Ugandan politics, of the same phenomenon. 21. Abbink and van Kessel (eds), p. 3. 22. Ibid., p. 17.
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power…. [A] political economic explanation of such violence simply falls short here…. The elements of enjoyment are disturbing and perhaps have to be explained in another way.23
Here, he cites a book with the uncompromising title Evil: Inside human cruelty and violence.24 The problem with this is not the notion of ‘evil’ as such. A number of recent writers, particularly philosophers and cultural theorists, have similarly evoked the theological notion of evil as a way of understanding such situations of excessive violence, which seem to transcend the usual categories of ‘rational’ explanation.25 What is problematic is when such excess is seen as a peculiarly or particularly African phenomenon, evoking the old and pernicious tradition of displaying the continent as a unique ‘Heart of Darkness’ (this is explicitly not Abbink’s position, although his co-edited collection is devoted to Africa). If the roots of African violence lie in such an ineluctable and inexplicable cause as ‘evil’, then what is the point of trying to understand, never mind attempting to ameliorate, it? Both for academics and for the ‘[s]ocial analysts, policy makers, NGOs, governments and international organisations’ previously mentioned by Abbink, this would be a counsel of despair. Fortunately, Abbink and van Kessel’s contributors do not take such a position; Jok Madut Jok’s interesting chapter on ‘War, changing ethics and the position of youth in South Sudan’, for example, concludes that ‘violence perpetrated by or exercised against youth is not just the immediate outcome of a prolonged war but is also the sharp end of a long historical process’.26 One serious problem with emphasizing the role of children and youths in violence and war is once again one of definition. Abbink points this out in his introduction but does not resolve the issues. The fact is that in Africa local definitions of childhood and youth tend to differ from those used in international law and by bodies such as the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). People who would be considered minors in Europe and North America are frequently expected to assume a range of ‘adult’ roles, including working and being sexually active, as well as fighting in wars, while others may not count as full ‘adults’ until their late thirties. One may deplore this, but it remains true and makes it problematic to use the concepts of youth or childhood in describing and analyzing African societies. Another specific ethnographic factor is the existence of formalized ‘age sets’ in some
23. Ibid., pp. 18-9. 24. R. F. Baumeister, Evil: Inside human cruelty and violence (W. H. Freeman, New York, 1996). 25. See e.g. Gary Banham and Charlie Blake (eds), Evil Spirits, Nihilism and the Fate of Modernity (Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2000); John Kekes, Facing Evil (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1990); Joan Copjec (ed.), Radical Evil (Verso, London and New York, 1996); Jennifer L. Geddes (ed.), Evil After Postmodernism (Routledge, London and New York, 2001). 26. Abbink and van Kessel (eds), p. 143.
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African pastoralist societies.27 Finally, it is important to note, as many of Abbink and van Kessel’s contributors do, the more ‘positive’ image of associations between ‘the youth’ and violence in Africa’s liberation struggles, as well as in post-colonial uprisings against various dictatorships.28 One factor that is perhaps surprising in most of the chapters and books I have discussed here is the comparative lack of gender analysis. This is not to advocate a simplistic view of males as inherently violent: one look at Keitetsi’s account of her life as a ‘child soldier’ with Uganda’s National Resistance Army would swiftly disabuse anyone of the notion that women (or girls) are somehow inherently non-violent. The extraordinary tale it tells (however unreliably in detail) of a child choosing to leave her abusive family and join a — then — rebel group (now Uganda’s much-admired government) offers a valuable correction against many of the pieties in the academic literature about children, women, ‘liberation fighters’ and conflict in general. Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that violence, in its varied forms, is almost always strongly gendered. Moreover, gender violence, rape and so on demonstrate two points made by many of the contributors to these volumes: the close links between organized warfare and less public forms of violence, and the ways in which violence is embedded in wider social processes. There are still too few works that have followed up the pioneering work of Suzette Heald on the relationship between models of masculinity in Africa and violence.29 Another important issue, which could be further developed than in much of the current wave of volumes on violence, is the role of religion, both the so-called ‘world religions’ and more local practices and beliefs, in producing and shaping the forms of violence. An exception here is Jok’s chapter on South Sudan in Abbink and van Kessel’s book. He suggests that one cause of ‘inter-generational breakdown of communication’ in the region is
[T]he mass conversion to Christianity on the part of thousands upon thousands of younger South Sudanese boys and girls…[which] has driven an ideological wedge between them and many of their seniors…has undercut the former religious authority of community elders and has splintered, socially and spiritually, numerous families and communities.30
Another interesting account of the role of religion in violence is that of Stephen Ellis, who writes in Whitehead’s collection that Liberians’ interpretation of ‘the deeper meanings of their country’s war [are] generally
27. Abbink’s own ethnographic work has been amongst such a group, the ‘Suri’ of southern Ethiopia. Another article in his co-edited collection, by Simon Simonse, is also about a pastoralist group, the Karamojong of north east Uganda, for whom age sets are important. 28. E.g., in addition to those mentioned elsewhere in this article, Murray Last, pp. 37–54, G. Thomas Burgess, pp. 55–78, Karel Arnaut, pp. 110–142 and Sara Rich Dorman, pp. 189–204. 29. See Suzette Heald, Controlling Anger: The sociology of Gisu violence (Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1989). 30. Abbink and van Kessel (eds), p. 155.
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expressed in religious idioms’. He concludes (in terms that foreshadow some of my own points in the present article),
It seems increasingly clear that social scientists confronted with interpretations of violence that place it within a religious cosmology should not have recourse only to the classics of a social science literature that, however brilliant, were the product of authors steeped in European history; like all of us, Weber and Durkheim were children of their time. Increasingly apparent is the need for analysts to study the particular content of religious thought, rather than assuming from the outset of their inquiry that spiritual beings represent only the translation of other, secular forces, such as economic and political structures, that are deemed to be more real.31
The different roles played by religious beliefs and organizations in different conflicts and forms of violence in Africa are complex and worthy of more sustained attention in future work. In this article, I have discussed a wide range of recent work on violence in Africa, but it has not been possible, within the confines of space and coherence, to do justice to all the many interesting writers that have contributed to these volumes. Instead I have focussed on some of the definitional questions that continue to bedevil the field and have suggested that many of these issues arise from the ethnocentric nature of some basic assumptions of social science. Others are due to the bewildering variety of phenomena under discussion. Despite the widespread and intellectually lively nature of current academic interest in violence, I am left with a niggling suspicion that all these problems of definition may in the end indicate that there are limits to the analytical usefulness of such a broad and baggy conceptual category.
31.
Whitehead (ed.), p. 121.
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