WEST AFRICA REVIEW ISSN: 1525-4488 Issue 6 (2004)

Peyi Soyinka-Airewele

“Whereas I, James Thomas Kruger, Minister of Justice, am satisfied that you engage in activities which endanger or are calculated to endanger the maintenance of public order, I hereby, in terms of section 9(1) of the Internal Security Act, 1950, prohibit you.” -- (Mandela, 1984:14).

With that decree from the South African Ministry of Justice, Winnie Mandela was banished in 1977 to remote Brandfort, in a continuation of the legalized violence that had earlier flung her, pregnant with a threatened miscarriage of daughter Zindzi, to the prisons of apartheid South Africa. In the secretly filmed 1984 documentary, South Africa Belongs to Us, and in her autobiography, Part of My Soul Went With Him, which was compiled from a series of personal interviews, the much younger Winnie speaking from that isolated outpost reflected on the transformative impact of state violence on her personal and political identity.

Before I went into solitary confinement, I must tell you the truth, I made pronouncements on platforms and said things I hadn’t tested myself on. I was a social worker, I was a mother; I knew that even though I was in a violent situation, if I was myself given a gun and told to go into a battlefield and shoot, I knew I wouldn’t be able to do it . . . . What happened during my detention was quite extraordinary. Now if the man I ‘m dealing with appeared carrying a gun—in defense of my principles I know I would fire. That is what they have taught me. I could never have achieved that alone. You learn to test the quality of your ideals when they do those things to you year in and year out, they actually make a politician out of you. . . . I cannot pretend that today I wouldn’t gladly go and water that tree of liberation with my own blood, if it means that the children I am bringing up under these conditions will not lead my kind of life . . . .That is the bitterness they create in us. You want to put an end to it. And if need be, you will use their own methods because that is the language that they understand. (Mandela, 1984: 126-7)

A major challenge confronting African countries is the task of reconstituting stable polities in the aftermath of struggles of resistance, socio-political claims and communal antagonisms that have marked the continent in the past few decades. In Rwanda, the government of President Paul Kagame repealed the laws mandating the inscription of ethnic identity on national identity cards, in the hope perhaps that such a change would help prevent the polarizations that facilitated the cataclysmic events of 1994, fixed in global memory as the Rwandan genocide. Will such a policy reform hasten the quest for justice, restoration and rehabilitation? Kagame’s action was no novelty. It is outdone in intent and reach by the policies of some other African governments, one of which (Burundi), had dramatically proscribed even the use of culturally identifiable names. If nothing else, such desperate measures by governments reveal the challenge of refashioning a nation in the aftermath of violence.

This paper is concerned with investigating violence as a force that is encased within the very processes that instigate, generate and facilitate socio-political transitions. It seeks to explore tentatively, the implications of that force for the struggles to construct stable and relatively integrated nationhoods in place of violently contested public spaces. By adopting a basic conceptualization of violence as the exertion of physical force with sufficient intensity and intent to cause injury or harm, the paper avoids the more limiting definitions that equate violence with sadism, brutality or cruelty. A central argument in the paper is that while violence is often conceptualized as a tool utilized by the various agencies producing injury, it is imperative that we understand that significant subjectivities are in turn produced and transformed by violence. Such subjectivities then present the most critical issues, tensions and challenges to the peace building projects typically enshrined in the rhetoric of transitional governments.

The post-apartheid state for instance, encases multiple constituencies, including various cadres in the resistance and the erstwhile political apparatus, remorseful beneficiaries, witnesses and sufferers as well as individuals like J.P Opperman, a former intelligence officer, who stated calmly during South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation hearings that, “depending on the circumstances, I don’t have a problem with killing children” (Asmal, 1997: 74). Thus, it is imperative that structures of transitional governance should not be created in abstraction or in alienation from our understanding of the constituencies that were birthed during and as a result of armed conflict and other forms of socio-political violence. Exploring the connections between the different forms of violence that pervade our contemporary world and which challenge our notions of normality and pathology, Veenas Das and colleagues argue that the violence that increasingly occurs between social actors who ‘lived in the same local worlds and knew or thought they knew each other’ cannot be understood through earlier theories of contractual violence, but compel us to reexamine the manner in which everyday life is transformed in the engagement with violence” (1997:2). I have employed the concept of ‘subjectivities’ to capture both the notion of subjectivity as conveyed in the “felt interior experience of the person that includes his or her positions in a field of relational power” (Veenas Das et.al.: 1), as well as the human agencies, identities and socio-pathologies that are formed through the production and consumption of violence, and the cultural representation and reproductions of human suffering.

While acknowledging the vast array of actors and social forces implicated in struggles for change, I have chosen to focus on those increasingly characterized by ethno-cultural identities and claims and to examine in particular, the dilemmas and options for: (a) governments overseeing a period of recovery from social or political violence; (b) elected governments superintending sharply polarized nations in which racial, ethnic or religious identities have been violently mobilized and anchored to social and political goals; and (c) governments charged with guiding the movement from predominantly authoritarian rule to a liberalized public space in which the rights of citizenship – of equality, voice and access are being constantly redefined.

In such a political terrain, the government must be able to understand the complex ways in which violence, regardless of its rationale and modality, creates new forms of subjects and other constituencies. Winnie Mandela’s words, uttered in detention — “now I know I would fire . . . ” — were an eerie and possibly prescient glimpse into her political future and a challenge to the furor that greeted allegations in the 1990s that her young bodyguards had dealt violently and abusively with alleged informers. If the primary goals of the transition period(s) include instituting new modes of empowerment, peaceful discourse, democratically navigated claims and entitlements, political responsiveness and accountability, reclamations of citizenship, the reinstitution of rights and justice and possibly inter-group reconciliation, then it is imperative that we identify the ways in which the deployment of violence by various interests on the socio-political landscape, have recreated and reconstructed the public arena and those who inhabit it.

Political transitions of course, are as complex and unpredictable as Kelechi Kalu (2003) and Celestin Monga (2002) have noted in their treatment of those turbulent processes in the African continent. While transitions are popularly interpreted as a progression toward some great democratic end project, these scholars have warned that there should be no assumption of a linear movement toward a ‘true democracy’, however that may be defined. The starting point of transitions in Africa have often been delimited by the “launching of the process of dissolution of an authoritarian regime” and at the endpoint, by the “installation of some form of democracy, the return to some form of authoritarian rule, or the emergence of a revolutionary alternative (O’Donnell and Schmitter, 1986: 8). I suggest that we should also see the transition as that intermediate period, in which various domestic constituencies contend most vigorously with the legacies of the past and their implications by seeking to resignify the past during an interval of social and political uncertainties and change.

Avoiding a rigid conceptualization of the actual end-product of that change, I concur with Kalu’s (2003) and van Eewen’s (1996) position that the political interregnum is characterized at the very least by tentative movements or desires toward the further opening of political spaces and the recognition and institutionalization of principles of citizenship. However, the experiences of Congo, Zambia, Nigeria and several other African countries demonstrate that the mechanics of power, voice and rights’ struggles generate considerable turbulence in the drive for a stable and just peace (Monga, 2002: 7).

Conflict and the Entrenchment of Violence

It is hard to escape the conflict problematic in studies of the African postcolony. The pervasiveness, obduracy and spasmodic nature of violent conflicts have taken a heavy toll on the continent as millions become victims of trauma and social anomie that often have their roots in the structures of European colonial exploitation (Soyinka-Airewele, 2003). Relatively recent wars of liberation were fought by Algeria, Angola, Eritrea, Guinea Bissau, Kenya, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Western Sahara and Zimbabwe (Turshen, 1998: 6). In the post-colonial period, rapidly spiraling waves of violent struggles in Algeria, Angola, Burundi, Chad, Congo (Kinshasa), Djibouti, Ethiopia, Gambia, Liberia, Mali, Mozambique, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Africa, Sudan, Tanzania and Uganda, had generated over 8 million refugees by 1996 constraining the goals of economic, social and human security (U.N report, 1998; Turshen, ibid.; Adejumobi, 2001:149).

While interstate wars and regional destabilizations have been ubiquitous parts of the continental landscape, a recurring theme is that of “communal conflicts,” or conflicts that emerge within some common municipality or region. Since communal conflicts can incorporate diverse forms of difference, issues and stakes, they are not necessarily synonymous with ethnicity, as some scholarship suggests (Ejobowah, 2001). For my purpose in this paper, I use the term to refer to protracted, spasmodic or single processes of violence or contestations with a potential for violence, by groups or communities that may share some commonly identified territory, appreciable levels of integration or shared histories, but are sharply polarized along key social, political or economic stakes. The majority of conflicts erupting across Nigeria for instance, are of a communal nature. Often embodied in some identity discourse, these conflicts typically escalate over perceived or actual disenfranchisement of one community from a range of benefits such as political representation, farmland or territorial possessions, development projects, the location and control of political and administrative government offices, resource control (water, mineral, forest), or other unsettled accounts that have trailed from the past. (Soyinka-Airewele, 2003; Idowu, 2001:1)

Violent communal conflicts in Nigeria alone include the religious and ethnic conflicts in Kano, the Ife-Modakeke wars in Osun State, conflicts between the Ijaw and Ilaje, Ijaw and Itsekiri in Delta State, Tiv and Igala in Benue State, Igbo-Ora, Hausa-Fulani- Zangon-Kataf, Mangu-Bokkos on the Jos Plateau, the Tiv-Jukun, Bassa-Ebgura, Ugep-Idomi, the pastoralists and agriculturalists of the North-East, the Tafawa Balewa Local Government conflict in Bauchi State, the Yoruba-Nupe in Kwara state, Ifeku and Abegbette in Edo State, Aguleri-Umuleri War in the East, the Offa conflict and so on¹. While some of these conflicts may lack the visibility of inter-state wars and genocide, the levels of trauma, human suffering and dislocation, social, economic and ecological devastation are just as intense.

The entrenchment of violence has horrendous consequences in peacetime, including the physical horrors of the landmines in Southern Africa, the social consequences of gendered forms of violence against women, the fracturing of communal and family structures and the political debilitation and disenfranchisement that emerges from daily violence and the deliberate fostering of a culture of impunity and fear. As Adedeji summarizes, violent conflicts inflict “human suffering through death, destruction of homes and livelihoods, constant displacement and insecurity . . . .disrupts the process of production, creates conditions for pillage of the countries’ resources and diverts their application from development purposes to servicing war”(1999: xiii).

One of the most disturbing features on the continental landscape is the speed of the transitions from conditions of relative stability to violent hostilities. A conflict research project categorized 50% of Sub-Saharan African countries as having stable political situations in the first quarter of 1996. Two years later, using the same indicators, the project had determined that only 39 percent of those countries had stable conditions, the rest were either facing political turbulence or engaged in armed conflict or civil strife (Ibid.:4).

Such violence is generally the outcome of a realm of social claims and grievances regarding state terrorism, external interference, resource control, poverty and severe economic hardships, religious disaffections, social inequalities, exclusion and identity constructs.² The literature indeed offers a rich array of analytical categories for reviewing the impetus for violence — material, political, institutional and cultural. But when socio-economic and cultural cleavages are reproduced in the perception of threats to individual and group core values, rights, entitlements, belief systems and collective memories, the use of force tends to rapidly escalate out of control, overwhelming national or international capacities for peacekeeping and conflict transformation (Soyinka-Airewele,2003; Leatherman, 1998:46).

The cost of peacekeeping has clearly become prohibitive especially for governments following on the heels of corrupt regimes which have disdained to even pay lip service to the notion of public accountability. Despite its many failures and the role of external entrepreneurs in fomenting the conflict, while the three months of mass violence in Rwanda, ultimately cost international agencies approximately $4.5 billion for limited peacekeeping efforts; in Somalia, that cost was estimated at $7.3 billion (Brown & Rosencrance, 1999:65-69, 85). These sums might have helped to stanch the violence, but did not begin to address the real costs of the violence on those who experienced it and on the emergent transitional constituency. As Turshen observes in the case of refugees, the physical, psychological, social, and economic effects of the violence from which people flee spill over into the refugee experience and beyond (14).

Reconstituting Identity in the Aftermath of Violence and Resistance

For newly installed governments in Africa, the question of how to handle ethno-culturally defined constituencies after violent conflict is a volatile, yet unavoidable issue. Asmal and colleagues argue for ‘genuine reconciliation’ as a critical objective of the post-conflict period and carefully delineate such a process, in the political context, as a “shared and painful ethical voyage from wrong to right, and also a symbolic settling of moral and political indebtedness” (1997:47). Across the continent, such an ethical voyage by the state and citizens is deeply compromised by the high stakes in the political reformulation of the future and the interpersonal and collective burdens of the engagement with violence. When the rhetoric of reconciliation, for instance, is coupled with the principles of social justice, it compels a revisiting of the sites and consequences of violence, and as Asmal argues, a rejection of the temptation to allow yesterday’s immorality to govern today’s efforts at moral repair by denying state agents and even the resistance the automatic exculpation they demand for their actions (Asmal: 48).

Clearly, most transitional regimes would rather evade the turbulence that would be evoked by such moral imperatives and have therefore, tended to negotiate the political interregnum on the basis of politically expedient considerations such as:

• The prevailing identity and power configuration in the country.
• The political arrangements from which the transitional government derives its authority.
• The significance of the violence in national socio-political and economic calculations and the extent of volatility within the society.
• The resources available to the government for addressing grievances and structural problems.
• The mediative or legislative role of specific agencies and alliances (international corporations and financial institutions, religious entrepreneurs, non-profit groups etc) in supporting particular policy paths and exerting pressures either for meaningful resolution, avoidance or early closure.

While these are all vital political considerations for transitional regimes, the need to address violence and its ramifications is urgent, not merely because of its alarming potential for disruption, devastation and financial costs, but because it constantly alters and redefines the nature of human subjectivities and political constituencies within genderized, class, religious, communal or generational frames. For instance, studies in Sudan, Rwanda, South Africa and Mozambique reveal that the violence of armed conflicts create “new daily insecurities for women ― constant and overwhelming fear, exposure to abuse and obscenities, and threats of rape, kidnapping or death for themselves, their children or other relatives. Because of the civil nature of most of the conflicts . . . perpetrators are likely to be known to victims and their families and to live in close proximity; their presence is inhibiting; it deters women who are attacked from demanding prosecution of the men who raped them and compensation for abuses, and it prevents them from extending their human rights. The presence of perpetrators also discourages women, especially widows, from asserting their rights to land, the basis of life itself in agricultural societies like Rwanda where this issue is critical. And the presence of rapists and murderers hinders other women from participating in movements for democratic change (see Turshen: 8).

The Transforming Impact of Violence

The Political and Socio-Cultural Arenas

Because of the need to distinguish between the violence of the oppressor and that of the oppressed, it is easy to ignore the significance of the deployment of violence on and by the oppressed and to disregard the process of entrenchment of social violence and the erasure of frameworks for negotiated voice and difference within oppressed groups. Indeed, in several African countries, including South Africa, the transitional period is marked by pressures to consistently resist the revisionist discourse that equates the violence of the resistance to that of the state. It follows that a primary concern has been with decriminalizing the resistance philosophically and in the context of measures for transitional justice and legal redress. Ironically, such a project, strategically directed at resisting threats of criminalization by the state and its agents, who are often seen as morally violent in contrast to the functionally violent opposition, may inadvertently lend itself easily to a disregard for the transforming impact of violence, moral or otherwise, on those agencies that have had to deploy or bear it.

Violent hostilities that pit social and cultural identities and communal entities against one another, have substantive transmutative implications for such groups even when they were originally the constructs of the colonial imagination, as in the case of the Hutu and Tutsi of Rwanda. In the first place, in this confrontation between communal entities, the distinctions between perpetrators, beneficiaries and victims tend to defy simplistic definitions because the traditional notion of oppressor and oppressed so critical in the subjective imprints of collective memory may be assaulted by the mutual engagement of armed hostilities. The statutory concept of victims, applied in South Africa for instance, includes those “who, individually or together with one or more persons, suffered harm in the form of physical or mental injury, emotional suffering, pecuniary loss or substantial impairment of human rights” (Asmal: 25).

If we utilize this concept, it becomes clear that while it might be possible to denote and separate the collective perpetrators of a conflict and of aggression from its victims, on the basis of who initiated or provoked a violent engagement, it is difficult to make the same distinctions between victims and perpetrators of violence. That is, a community acting in defense might ultimately inflict greater violence on such a perpetrator of aggression while victims of an oppression may actually be the provocateurs of violent resistance, wars of liberation being an obvious case in point. Thus, as in the protracted history of warfare and violence between the Ile-Ife and Modakeke Yoruba communities in Nigeria, the meanings of perpetrator and victim often become increasingly blurred for the analyst; but not for those who have experienced the sufferings of violence. Clearly, the terminology of violence does not easily indicate absolute moral rights and wrongs, however much it might appear to lend itself to that purpose.

In addition, cultural memory redefines suffering beyond the immediate legalistic assessments of rights and wrongs. Regardless of the named identities engaged in violence, the very process of violent contestation reconstitutes their cultural memory and produces mythico-histories regarding the collective “self’ and the collective ‘other’. The language of such discursive histories adds to the volatility of the transitional state: the victimized, victimizers, powerful, vindictive, powerless, and wronged, cowards and the divinely vindicated. Violence ultimately generates and transforms social and power relations, hierarchies and perceptions within and between groups. It disrupts and refashions the moral universe and discourse, the framework of intergenerational relations and the nature of collective identity that is produced by cultural memory and mythico-histories. The notion of collective identity, in its racialized, genderized, ethnicized or even religious connotations is transformed by violence and its aftermath via the instrumentality of the narratives and cultural remembrances of the violence and its significance for the group.

The mutation of identity is often the goal of violence, pursued through erasure, erosion and tarnishing and by challenges to the ethno-cultural myths, privileges and constructions that are the center of group identity, pride and consciousness. Sexual violence and torture for instance, are increasingly instrumental in these objectives and have featured in the armed conflicts in Liberia, Chad, Sudan and elsewhere. In apartheid South Africa, mass rapes, forced intercourse with other prisoners, forcible insertion of foreign objects including rats in women’s vaginas, flooding fallopian tubes with water were just a few of the methods used to subdue and transform the resistance (Goldblatt & Meinjes, 1988: 37). Such horrendous abuses of a collective are not unusual, as accounts from Europe, Asia and Latin America amply demonstrate.

In Liberia, AFELL, the Association of Female Lawyers of Liberia, reports endless evidences of such violence. The account below was documented by a special committee of the organization:

I interviewed a young Liberian refugee woman in Duanane, Cote d’Ivoire, just before my visit to Monrovia. She had been arrested by Charles Taylor’s soldiers in October 1990 and jailed for 65 days. During that time she suffered torture and humiliation of the worst kind. She told me that . . . .she was whipped with a rope and repeatedly tied up in taipei position. I saw scars on both arms where she said she had been tied and also cut with a knife. In addition to this, she told me that for three days she was naked and had a 15 inch stick repeatedly thrust up her vagina until she bled. She received no medical treatment and was finally released in January 1991 after a relative interceded on her behalf.” (AFELL, 1998: 131)

The traumatization of collective identity can also occur through the deliberate desensitization of the conscience and the erosion of the value system of the group, whereby the perpetrators of violence seek to either erect or demolish the construct of moral difference between themselves and their victims. In Liberia where about 40% of womenfolk are reported to have been victims of rape during the civil war, soldiers often forced bystanders to become participants in collective violence by compelling them to not only watch the murder of fellow citizens but to applaud or laugh. People, particularly women, who showed any emotion when forced to watch the murder of their own children were shot. In an account typical of several similar incidents, over 40 people had to watch and applaud while a pregnant woman was held down, her belly cut open and her unborn baby removed and cut up by three soldiers (AFELL: 132).

Several scholars have concluded that such acts of depravity in wartime are clearly focused attacks on the integrity of the individual and collective identity, because “sexual assaults attack the ‘core constructions of identity and security in their most personal and profound sense’. The intent is to break down the fabric of society and . . . thus to break down political will and resistance”³ (see Goldblatt and Meinjes: 38).

The Violence of the State

In analyzing the violence of the citizen and not merely that of the authoritarian state, we must start with the role of state power in shaping the dynamics of violence within the system, and then consider the forces often arrayed in opposition to the state, mimicking its violence and perpetrating cycles of impunity. When the state demonstrates its capacity to exercise force with impunity and to resist punitive forms of justice within the complexities of negotiated peace and immunity, there is a transference of cultures of violence within the public space. This is evident in the unprecedented escalation of intra-organizational violence within some of the Nigerian movements most noted for their roles in the struggle for democratic change in the country, in particular within student associations, labor and religious movements.

Such outworkings of widespread violence are much in evidence during political transitions to democratically elected regimes and during the liberalization of the public space as the structures of violent containment by authoritarian regimes are loosened. Indeed, Robbins insists that since definitions of the state, “revolve around its claim to monopoly on the instruments of death and violence . . . violence remains one of the main tools of nation-building [and] the modern nation-state is essentially an agent of genocide and ethnocide” (Robbins, 2002: 103). Rummel has examined the evidence that the state is indeed the main conveyor of violence, whether in quelling conflicts or pursuing power and citizenry acquiescence and finds that . . . at least 170 million men, women and children from 1900 to 1987 have been “shot, beaten, tortured, knifed, burned, starved, frozen, crushed, or worked to death; buried alive, drowned, hung, bombed or killed in any other of the myriad ways governments have inflicted death on unarmed, helpless, citizens and foreigners. The dead could conceivably be nearly 360 million people. It is as though our species has been devastated by a modern Black Plague. And indeed it has, but a plague of power not germs”⁴ (Robbins, 2002:103).

The question of nation building, which typically occupies center stage in the policy objectives of most African states, has to be carefully reexamined if the transitional state is to address violence within the polity in any meaningful way. Unfortunately, the violence of the state is not easily redressed and most transitional governments have limited themselves to showcasing elaborate trials of selected individuals from a previous regime. Victims and radical reformers who wish to address the past in a more comprehensive manner are likely to encounter vigorous opposition from perpetrators and their allies who are invested in the selective suppression of the past and will attempt to reverse the tentative movements to political change if threatened with the possibility of transitional justice.

The Impact of Violence on Constituencies of Transitional Governments

In the narratives of African societies, the invocation of the past is most intense when it is embodied within the discourses and memories of violent struggles, of communities emerging from and through collective traumas, of oppression, violent resistance and the continuity of pain on the minds of those who have suffered. For many, the violence of war is reinforced by devastating transgressions of moral codes and of the communal spirit. The agony of those older women between 40 and 60 years who were raped by young soldiers in the Liberian war is compounded by the fact that this constituted a particularly shameful and unbearable breach of custom, since “in the African tradition, older women look upon young men as their sons, and to be raped by a young man is to be raped by one’s own son” (AFELL: 131).

Violence, its consequences and remembrances, possess the capacity to cripple the present, and constitute some of the most critical challenges for the reconstruction of meaningful citizenship, peace and justice. Furthermore, protracted periods of violence can create circumstances where the “custom of fell deed”, as Darby notes, can fundamentally alter the entire society’s norms of acceptable behavior. As entrenched violence integrates into the coming generations, it works its way into the very fabric of society and the relations of even those who may not be acquiescent to such violence (Darby, 2001:126). Below, I explore some of the meanings of violence for intersecting categories of Perpetrators, Beneficiaries, Victims and Witnesses.

Contending with Perpetrators of Violence

The term ‘perpetrator’, has quite unfortunately become shorthand for defining those who have committed abusive, criminal or inhumane behavior and it is rarely qualified by defining terms required for effective analysis. In fact, the term can be replaced by words as benign as architect, doer or even performer. So in speaking of perpetrators in this context, I am referring specifically to perpetrators of violence, that is, those responsible for or behind specific acts of collective violence. Since violence is not the sole preserve of the morally depraved, but involves those in the vanguard of the most laudable causes: liberation, independence, racial equality and so on, our analysis must cut across the philosophical and legalistic definitions commonly applied to perpetrators. Transitional governments may have to address issues as conflicted as the rehabilitation of “innocent” child soldiers in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Mozambique, the reintegration of impassioned rebel commanders and their forces, the militancy of student associations and labor unions as well as violent hostilities between communities comprising otherwise model citizens. Few constitutions provide clarity on how such political minefields are to be negotiated and we can only go as far as delineating specific challenges that might await societies emerging from such crises.

First, the society has to arrive at some understanding and consensus on how to handle the violence of an opposition that was mobilized against the oppressive state. Should the resistance be decriminalized, even when its representative organizations may have engaged in maverick forms of torture and civilian abuse? If so, what is the most effective strategy for decriminalizing the violence of the resistance while generating widespread respect for the rule of law? In the second place, the society has to deal with the complexities regarding how, if at all, to confront and address the violence of the state and its agents. The difficulty of excavating the truth, overcoming the constitutional and other protections by which former government officials ensure their immunity from prosecution and other modes of legal and social justice, and the political expediency that informs the selectivity of the process of transitional justice have been well covered in the literature and will not be reviewed at length in this paper. Finally, the society and certainly the incumbent government must wade into the intricacies that surround the violence perpetrated by organizations and groups engaged in mutual hostilities, ethnocidal and other violent campaigns against other groups.

The formulation of appropriate state policy is complicated not only by the range of involved collectives and the ideological and philosophical motivations and modalities by which they waged their struggle, but by the fact that such subjectivities have often been transformed in the aftermath of violence. Militant movements and ethno-national groups for instance, are rarely, if ever the monolithic organizations suggested by their cultural and ideological discourse. During a period of prolonged violence, they provide, as Darby notes, umbrellas for diverse interests: some may perpetrate violence against the state, others may engage in negotiations with it against an “other.” Their activities might include engaging in wars with other groups inside their own communities; “fundraising” through bank robberies, kidnapping, and drug dealing, vigilante or “policing” local communities often by force, intimidation, quasi-judicial proceedings, and sanctions; and even running an alternative civil administration with courts and the collection of levies and taxes (see Darby: 46).

Post-conflict governance must therefore involve a careful appraisal of the implications of such social transmutations. In particular, there must be an evaluation of the ways in which the myths and narratives of the group or nation have been transformed by the power shifts, losses, sufferings and traumas experienced by various groups especially when nationalistic violence then becomes redefined during peace-building processes. A study of peace processes in South Africa, Sri Lanka, Israel-Palestine and Northern Ireland revealed that during such peace initiatives, the militant umbrella tended to diffuse and fragment. However when such disintegration was a result of the loss of the myths, beliefs and structures that had lent coherence to the collective, it sometimes generated a seamless movement from violence for “the cause” to similar activities for private gain. This is even more likely when several sectors of the society, such as community businesses and bureaucracies, already primed to collaborate with the diverse interests of the militant group, remain linked to them (Ibid.).

Darby has built on Stedman’s typology of militants in the peace process to identify four elements that might threaten transitions through violent activities: Dealers, those prepared for transitional negotiations; Zealots, those who aim to destroy the process through violence; Opportunists, those violent groups that might be persuaded to end violence under particular circumstances, and finally Mavericks, those whose violence is motivated by personal rather than political objectives (47-48). Regardless of the realities of their socioeconomic class, educational and professional capacities or initial positioning in the group to which they give their allegiance, violence often changes those who have had to engage it into heroes, the voices and representatives of the collective. Whenever it confers temporary convictions of invincibility and empowerment even amidst the trauma and personal losses of conflict, the consequences can include the following:

• Gradual reformulation of internal mediating ethics and subversion of the capacity for democratic negotiations and voice.
• Rationalization of immunity in consecration of the larger ideological goals of the struggle.
• Internalization and institutionalization of violence and regimes of fear within the group or community. The escalation of intra-group violence following several years of intense mobilizations by student movements against the authoritarian state in Nigeria is illustrative.
• Creation of an exclusive domain of the powerful, those who command and control the means of coercion and recourse to violence.
• Institution of new ethics, principles and logic of leadership within the group or community, as redefined by the struggle. Often there is an intergenerational in-group revolution as the elders are jettisoned for the more volatile and mobile youth. Reversals often occur as the government later seeks to reconstitute the polity after the violence.
• Institution of new power relations within the group and between groups and the government.
• Critical psycho-social and affective disorders.

Boas suggests that we must try to understand how the experiences related to corruption, violence, and deep poverty over time have formed the social experiences of generations of young men who became part of armed groups such as the RUF, NPRC, AFRC, and the Kamajol in Sierra Leone. He argues that irrespective of their political polarizations, they share much in common, in particular, a common history of brutalization, abuse, marginalization and a lifestyle of war, the legacy of the Sierra Leonean conflict (Boas, 2002:64-5). It is tempting to conclude that such violent norms are intrinsically disempowering, but the paradox of violence is that it secretes modes of ‘power’ and illusions of empowerment that make the notion of demobilization often one of acute loss for perpetrators. Such a sense of loss is quite distinct from the loss that accompanies a failure to achieve the ostensible goals of the struggle, since it is directly linked to the empowering sense of violence itself.

In the period that follows a conflict, the loss of such facile modes of empowerment, position and place by erstwhile powerbrokers, including government officials can create a crisis of relevance that threatens the stability of the transitional society. This can be compounded with a disquieting confrontation with the emergence of public reconstructions and representations of the roles played by such perpetrators of violence ranging from the heroic to the criminal and abusive. Pue Zwane’s “chilling” study linking rape in the South African townships to the decline of political organization, highlights a group of youth in Sebokeng, who as Goldblatt also reports, have formed an organization called South African Rapist Association (SARA). One of the members of the group explained why he had helped put together the group:

I was a comrade before joining this organization. I joined it because we were no longer given political tasks. Most of the tasks were given to senior people. I felt that we have been use[d] by these senior comrades because I do not know why they dumped us like this (and) . . . . We decided to form our own organization that will keep these senior comrades busy all the time. . . . We rape women who need to be disciplined” (in Goldblatt and Meinjes: 46-47).

Thenjiwe Mtintso, a senior member of ANC’s liberation army tried to explain to interviewers the sense of despair, frustrations and experiences of violence that produces such pathologies within the ranks of liberation fighters in the camps, some of whom she described as “dented” individuals with aggressive behaviors; “most of the people that were in the camps are people that had gone through the hands of the police and I would then argue that in one way or another this affected them” (Ibid: 46-7).

For those who were indeed bearers of violence, but in the idealized mode of the resistance, the re-presentation of their activities in the negotiations to transitional governance can create of itself, altered convictions and the loss of trust in the processes of change underway as well as a sense of bitterness, alienation and victimhood. More important, their individual perceptions can be reconstituted and transmitted through narratives of the group as collective remembrances of suffering and continued betrayal, even though they are based on fears of individual disempowerment and dispossession. These tensions can sometimes be countered by a strategic repositioning of popular demobilized leaders in vital but contained social positions.

Addressing the Beneficiaries of Violence

To reflect on the experience of the TRC (South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission) is to ponder a harsh truth, that it may be easier to live with yesterday’s perpetrators who have lost power than to live with beneficiaries whose gains remain intact (Mamdani, 2001:183).

We are indebted to Mahmood Mamdani for so clearly identifying the critical distinctions between the perpetrators and the beneficiaries of atrocity. Traditionally, the shadowy human agencies between the world of perpetrators and victims were described as onlookers. In its most critical connotations, insider-bystanders were considered to have simply ‘looked-upon” human suffering because of their apathy, cowardice or moral ambivalence. The complex positioning of this group has been better explicated by scholars such as Mamdani who have determined that in situations where the entire apparatus of violence was targeted at the dispossession of an entire community, such as the colonial context, there is a strong link between perpetrators and the often substantial minority that constitute the beneficiaries of such violence (Mamdani, 2001:179-181). That link between power and privilege is also apparent in the many forms of dispossession that deny citizenship rights to a substantial population while generating millions of others who become complicit in upholding the various political and legal frameworks of violence and power that leads to mass suffering by others.

Beneficiaries of violence do not consider themselves to be guilty of atrocity as ‘perpetrators’, yet they form the social base of its power and derive substantive benefits through the law and through prevailing abusive institutions. If the divide between beneficiaries and victims is not made plain, transitional societies in which the law legalized crimes against the ‘other’ stand to lose the moral discourse that is necessary for a lasting peace. In efforts to create a national consensus on the past, beneficiaries cannot merely be represented as on-lookers or as victims equally betrayed by government officials who might be found guilty of individualized violations. The system of which they benefited systematically and which they upheld by popular support is rarely interrogated in the haste to generate broad consensus about the future. In the case of South Africa, Mamdani maintains that such a populist tactic for dealing with the past has backfired, creating a moral morass in the nations’ transition:

The TRC invited beneficiaries to join victims in a public outrage against perpetrators. . . . [But] On the one hand, the more beneficiaries were outraged at gross violations, the less they felt responsible for these. Not only did they see no need to be forgiven, they actually experienced forgiveness as humiliation. Hence, the growing opposition to the TRC process in the white community in general. . . . On the other hand, the more beneficiaries appeared complacent, indifferent, callous and lacking in empathy, the more victims are outraged. They feel forgiveness to be underserved. The more they feel so, the more they demand: justice. (Mandami 2001, 182-3)

The challenge for an incoming government is to find effective modes of creating a moral discourse in the reopened market place for democratic voice, to compel a new understanding of the complicities invoked by the positioning of the “bystander” not as a disengaged onlooker but as an invested beneficiary and to then facilitate locally germane approaches that may enable beneficiaries of violence to reconstitute and reinvest themselves as beneficiaries of the dividends of peace and social justice.

Responding to the Victims of Violence

For those who suffer as victims of violence, as oppressed collective constituents such as Nigeria’s Ogoni and other oil producing minorities, as individually targeted objects of the disaffection of governments, a powerful elite or opposing group, or as witnesses who indirectly partake psychologically and substantively in shared suffering, the experience of violence also produces its own unique subjectivities ― subversive, passive or otherwise. Regardless of the role or positioning of a victim in the struggle, either as a past or current purveyor of violence, as a passive observer, resistor, combatant etc, the trauma of felt violence evokes or may produce a sense of deep seated victimization particularly in conflicts activated by narratives of group identity, marginalization and contestation. In such conflicts, the death of a spouse or family member, the loss of material possessions, the experience of displacement and systematic dehumanization is not merely experienced as an individual trauma, but as a pain which is simultaneously alleviated and intensified because it is part of a collective imprint. This carries a range of pressures that might accelerate or retard healing, resolution and perceptions of justice.

Thus, even if a self styled transitional government of reconciliation, justice and peace were able to institute a measure of justice and legal redress for a victim of some horrific abuse, the intersectionality of individual and collective narratives and experiences of violence would be such that the sense of mediative justice in the case of one individual may not transform that individual’s sense of continued suffering. A conviction of collective injustice may continue even after an individual receives legal redress. Individual sufferers are well aware that their personal traumas were a result of a larger collective atrocity, occasioned because of a logic of violence directed against the collective. This awareness instigates insecurities, tensions and lack of confidence in the polity and the capacity of its laws and law enforcement capacities. Therefore, individualized redress responds to only one aspect of that lived experience, the measurable sufferings of the person, but not to the lived fears, insecurities and traumas endured through and on behalf of family, friends, and lost communities. Neither does it adequately address the anger, bitterness and sense of loss that results from the removal of place and being, the uprootedness and wastefulness that negates and diminishes the life of the individual through the dislocation and distress of the community.

The consequences of mass violence are so grave that few transitional African governments attempt to address them in any purposive way. Very often the political landscape of the transition is marked by such a ruthless contestation for power and resources that transitional regimes are unlikely to confront the volatility of memory especially when it appears to have receded into the shadows, however transitorily. Furthermore, the financial and other resources required for assisting victims of violence may appear prohibitive. Those who suffered wartime rape for instance, may face health consequences that include physical and mental injury, shock and paralyzing fear, sexually transmitted disease, including HIV infection and pregnancy (Twagiramariya, 2001: 108-9).

It would be tempting to assume that the much vaunted communal ethos in African societies would provide a locally relevant support system for such victims. Unfortunately, this is not necessarily the case. In Rwanda for instance, girls and women captured as war booty, the ‘ceiling girls’ (so-called because they were found hiding in the ceilings of huts) as well as the intsinzi, the supposedly “consenting” victims who offered themselves to RPF soldiers (but were in fact obliged to do so at risk of being accused of sympathy for the deposed government), have not received such communal support. In fact Twagiramariya and colleagues note that Rwandan victims of rape are now suffering the worst time of their lives:

they are being isolated by their own communities in spite of the mental and physical pain they endured and are still enduring. . . . Health workers have noted that with the return to normalcy, as schools and markets open, the problems of rape victims are manifest. Many widows we see now are withdrawing and dysfunctional, not capable of properly looking after their children . . . many contemplate suicide.” (110).

A gynecologist at the Butare University Hospital in Rwanda who has seen hundreds of such victims, notes that “you cure the direct illness but psychologically they are not healed . . . they continue to be sick. And there are no services that specifically deal with the problems they have” (Twagiramariya: 110). In the Sudan, the violence of the Northern based government, its army and civilian populations against Southern Sudanese will require decades of rehabilitation someday in the future. In its bid to extend Sharia (Islamic law) across the country, Southern Sudanese have suffered reprehensible violations in a prolonged civil war encased in racialized and religious frames. Normalcy in the future will not simply mean the reconstruction of devastated physical and economic landscapes, but the struggle to grapple with subjectivities created through the enslavement of fellow citizens and other systematized brutalities.

Governments must be willing to visit the trauma of the individual or they risk leaving suppressed memories to fester and erupt at a later date. On the other hand, they cannot afford to divorce and isolate the individual experience of violence from the collective claims of injustice and deprivations or they risk just as surely, the possibility of a future revisiting and mobilization around unaddressed suffering within the polity. It would not be overly idealistic to suggest that the effort of the state to respond to measurable or identifiable individual sufferings must be accompanied simultaneously by a clear attempt to redress where possible, the roots of volatility regarding inequality, marginalization, historic suffering and delayed justice.

One of the difficulties in such a process is that the orchestration of violence may have been led by those who deem themselves to have suffered from historic victimization by the state or by an “other”. This can be particularly complex in polities such as Liberia, where the terrain of conflict has been characterized by multiple reversals of position and power and the blurring over time, of the lines between victim and perpetrator. Yet the sufferings of victims of violence do not yield easily to the rationale of “mutual fault” or “accident of war” which has marked the philosophy of many transitional African governments that have tried to adjudicate a collective movement away from the past particularly in ethno-culturally polarized conflicts. So we find that political violence bequeaths a legacy that entwines past, present and future in particularly problematic ways.

1. Affirmation of Mythico-histories

The violence experienced by groups and individuals in the public space produces its own intuitive responses in affirming group narratives of historic injustice, sufferings, intolerance and historic wrongs. For all participants, felt violence tends to authorize, reinstitute and validate mythico-histories which previously might have been regarded with a degree of skepticism by younger generations. Thus in the aftermath of the most recent Ife-Modakeke armed conflict in Nigeria, the younger generation who had interacted intimately with and even intermarried members of the ‘other’ nation were ‘recaptured’ into the ethno-cultural narrative by the seeming reality of the brutal ‘otherness’ of their neighbor, irrespective of the mutuality of such sufferings.

2. Re-emergence of Buried Memories

A failure to effectively address the impact of violence on victims can result even after several years of calm to a forceful re-inscription of the narratives of the victim, deepened social polarizations and rigid reinterpretations of history and historical oppression. The contemporary Igbo communities in Nigeria who have endured repeated brutal pogroms as well as a crushing civil war defeat have reopened the lid on suppressed disaffections, with strident demands for compensation and inclusive political engineering as well as threats of autonomy to redress their historic marginalization in the nation’s political core. Newspaper headlines announce such turbulence with telling captions; “Igbo Politicians Set for War”. Ezeigbo (2001) and Amadiume (2001) have drawn attention to the failure of the reconciliation gestures of the victorious Nigerian state, which subdued the Igbo Biafran war of secession in the 1960s. The inability of post war ‘reconciliation’ to prevent an eruption of contemporary grievances is partly answered by the fractured conscience of the society and its failure to acknowledge the various complicities in the brutal victimization that gave rise to the war and by the lack of a moral discourse that would have correctly signified the meaning of that secessionist bid for the entire nation.

On the contrary, the civil war itself had become the offense, its perpetrators no longer defenders of an abused population, but traitors to the nation. In such a moral universe, it seemed logical to consider state ‘forgiveness’ as magnanimous and to fail to redress either the roots of the war or the consequences of violence on those who perpetrated and experienced it. Not surprising, in Ezeigbo’s analysis of Biafran war literature he concludes for the nation, “The ghost of Biafra continues to haunt Nigeria. Until it is exorcized, there can be no lasting peace. The injustices thrown up by the civil war . . . has not been addressed . . . the country has not recovered from the evils of that war” (65).

Reports in the 1960s and subsequent narratives referred to the Biafran war as Africa’s first genocide in which young women had their breasts slashed off, and their wombs publicly cut open, and young children were killed to prevent them growing into future rebel leaders (Assensoh, 2001:118). The traumas continued beyond those acts. A Nigerian witness to the war recounts that those Biafran women who suffered sexual assault were often doubly doomed, “paraded through the community, accused of infidelity. . . . I was told that even if their pleas were accepted, they were nonetheless stigmatized for the rest of their lives, and their children and children’s children were stained by it” (see Turshen 2001: 8-9). Thus, while it is important to acknowledge political reconciliation toward communal restoration, it is irresponsible to evade the layered consequences of trauma for its victims.

3. The Affirmation of Polarizations and Collective Identity

Finally, we see that violence and sporadic massacres permit the escalation of fears and insecurities that in turn constitute forces for containing and structuring the boundaries of the group and affirming the need for self preservation and protection against a feared other. For victims and perpetrators alike, systematic public violence and cultural myths of a glorious past will often vie for place in their remembrances of the past. Youths may seek to refine their power and place by reinvesting myths of the groups with violent heroism, positioning themselves as the representative voices articulating the cultural identity.

Forms of Victim Constituency

Victims of violence are not always or immediately transformed into active claimants on the political sphere in the period that follows violence. The most common manifestations of victim constituencies are evoked by the transformation of victimized and traumatized populations into armed resistance, ‘defenders’ of group rights and identities and oppositional militia. But in fact, one of the most pertinent dilemmas faced by post-violence governments is the fact that oftentimes, mass violence has created a polity in which the democratic voice and claims to access, rights and justice are repressed even in the aftermath of institutional change. Regardless of the vibrancy of political contestations amongst elites, our attention ought to be drawn to the other constituencies that may have been subdued by violence.

Without such an active citizenry, the context for social and political transformation will be weak. Transitional governments are rarely troubled by such passivity, but the crises of citizenship should rightly be of concern to democracy and rights activists because of its distinct potential for setting the stage for reversals in liberalization and democratization processes. The manifestation of such subdued subjectivities may be quite misleading. In the first place, there might seem to be a healthy process of resolution in which the society has popularly elected to contend for the future without unearthing and redressing the past. In societies such as Nigeria, with massive national resources and unequal distribution of wealth, such seeming complacency and pragmatic rapprochement might appear as a boon to transitional regimes eager to ignore any pressures for social justice and restitution.

Since discredited politicians appear to recycle through the system with some impunity, it is easy, mistakenly so, to assume that the impact of violence in the system has been contained. Such a notion seems to be supported by the public modes of ovation given to many of the elite who are known to be guilty of violence and exploitation. I suggest that these signs misread the degree of intense volatility within the system, the multiple centers of erratically focused anger that challenge the duplicity of the elites and the management of public affection. Volatility is apparent in the repeated allegations of group betrayal, cowardice and complicity that are bantered in even the most apparently collegial forums and the internalization of cultures of intolerance and violence that has swept the entire nation, within and between political parties, labor unions, educational institutions, government agencies and in the secret and public contestations for power.

This civilianizing of violence has led to an ascendancy in the use of subaltern armies and orchestrated mob action, numerous student cults, and vigilante groups, such as the Bakassi Boys and others that openly enjoy political privileges and protections based on their relationships with state governments, politicians and other powerbrokers (Ukiwo, 2002). There are evident transmutations in their roles and objectives and they have become notorious vendors of violence, with public killings and executions, sexual violence, assaults on political opposition and mafia style assassinations, including for instance, the slaying of Nigeria’s Minister of Justice, Chief Bola Ige for which there has been no conviction to date.

In the other scenario of the subdued victim constituency, there can be a palpable sense of apathy and retreat from the political and social spheres quite unlike that in Nigeria, as individuals and groups transit through a phase of transitional forgetting or remembering which enact inert modes of resolution that might correspond with the political leaderships’ desire for a premature closure. Dormancy of voice and passivity of citizenry are particularly salient in societies where the perpetrators of violence have been able to retain control over much of the apparatus of political power and economic positioning. In such a context, those who have suffered violence may not surrender the strategy of compromised survival without a clear assurance that the incumbent government is able to extend protection to those who seek to confront and challenge their past victimization and sufferings.

Conclusions: Addressing the Problem

While Latin America has provided so many examples of ambiguous political transitions, Africa is no stranger to the hazardous changes in which the power elite that oversaw the most violent modes of oppression in the nation remain firmly in place within strategic political and economic strata. Thus in that context of seeming contentment with amnesiac forgiveness and a public willingness to close the books on the past, political leaderships are liable to be caught unawares by a future resurgence in collective narratives and claims that signal the recovery of voice in the public space. Ultimately, even in those instances where widespread collective violence has temporarily eroded active citizenship, the challenge to the government and its agencies is no less urgent — to generate new modes of citizen action and active participation within an arena that will reinforce equal rights and access to political processes which inform collective and individual wellbeing./P>

The foregoing commentary suggests that violence can and should also be identified as a primary concern of African governments, with respect to the escalating violence of both the state and of the governed. As explained earlier, such a treatment does not preclude a simultaneous concern with the underlying factors, but suggests that uncovering new modalities for containing, defusing and redirecting constituents into alternative modes of contestations may be critical in preventing new sources of anger, victimhood, alienation, collective mobilization, deepening polarizations, social, ethnic and political stratifications.

It goes without saying that the outcome of such focused attention may provide ammunition for state violence against restive sectors that jeopardize the agenda of the transitional state. Certainly, transitional governments have not shown themselves to be void of the power calculus and authoritarian impulses that have bedeviled their predecessors. However, the history of hasty and heavy handed government policies that seek to proscribe and contain conflict should not negate the possibilities of generating a more meaningful program of post-conflict recovery and constructing a framework for lasting change. The goal here has been to draw attention to the fact that irrespective of the ideals to which it is anchored, violence will constantly press against the boundaries of its intended use, challenging and redefining the user, the observer, beneficiaries and victims and the arena in which the quest for rehabilitation must occur.

For these reasons, the art of transitional governance must become more relevant in uncovering and addressing the subjectivities created through its own struggles or that were inherited as a legacy of the past. It is likely that governments in the majority of African societies will have to pay more attention to fashioning sustainable, long-term, cost-effective and culturally relevant means of addressing the subjectivities of violence including:

• New modes of collective and individual treatment of post-traumatic stress syndrome.
• Rehabilitation and re-assimilation of former combatants and victims in communities
• The facilitation of local communities of remembrance in which alternative narratives and approaches to restitution, catharsis, and contestation are enabled and facilitated within groups and between groups. Such a contextualized process would enhance the local democratization of voice, opposition and power.
• Concern with the institutionalization of legal protection of voice and rights not only in terms of public-state relations, but also within social groups and institutions.
• Provision of resources, training and careful support of local processes of negotiation by the transitional state with the goal of reversing the entrenchment of modes of pernicious violence and power within social agencies and movements, warring communities and groups.
• A critical search for ways of indigenizing mechanisms for truth, healing, rehabilitation and reconstruction and possibly reconciliation within and between affected communities and organizations.
• A re-examination of the potential role of social agencies such as the academy in indirect peace building, rehabilitation, memory work and scholarship through professional and academic specializations that can address local problems related to violence and the need for physical, emotional, material and psychological recovery.

The difficulties of devising a workable framework of governance that takes account of cultural cleavages are many. In the case of Rwanda for instance, proportional representation would leave the Tutsi’s vulnerable in an 85% Hutu state and regional autonomy is unviable as there is no physical separation of the ethnic groups. In this case, some scholars propose a strong system of local governance, as yet not operational (Ottaway, 1999:92). Assefa suggests that it is more critical to address the economic and political inequities in the system, ensure popular participation and representation and respect for rights. He contends that the right of people to self identify with an ethnic group should be respected as long as that ethnic group also recognizes collective identity at the larger level, to paraphrase; ethno-nationalism can exist as long as it does not hamper state level patriotism. Thus he advocates a loose federalist system that legitimizes ethnicity while providing incentives for “higher levels” of integration and identification with the country at large. Interestingly, by revisiting the theme of regional supranationalism as Nkrumah before him, Assefa advises that the state be recast as an intermediate institution rather than the institution of last resort (1996: 43-47).

However, at this point in time, the questions we must ask are disquietingly simple: What domestically initiated and sustained mechanisms can be utilized in mediating conflicts and contested claims, in breaking cycles of violence and facilitating healing and recovery for subjectivities of violence? The role of violence in polarizing, splintering and reifying identities is too powerful to be ignored. The 2002 bloodshed in Nigeria by mobs claiming to act in defense of Islam following the staging of a Miss World Competition in the country and the irreverent remarks of a journalist cannot be understood in isolation of the fact that the country has hosted numerous similar beauty competitions in the past.

Thus the most disturbing aspects of that particular violence were that it affirmed the superficial citizenry empowerment and sense of immunity granted by the state governments which had unilaterally declared Sharia law in their provinces; it showcased the inability to prosecute in any meaningful way the perpetrators of various smaller religious pogroms in those states and the reluctance of the national government to intervene decisively against the violence, to bring perpetrators to account and to attempt to meet the needs of victims. Most of the dead were ultimately simply flung into mass graves. The inability of a government overseeing a transitional period to challenge and reverse the ambrosiac formulae of violence may generate new subjectivities, social and power relations within the democratizing polity in malignant ways. In the case of the religious violence in Nigeria, not only was the government unable to halt the violence, it hastened to mollify the protagonists of violence, thus affirming the desirability and effectiveness of such a mode of contestation, invalidating the basis of a moral universe in which a transitional society can construct its intra-national relations and challenge the relationship of might and right in public dialogic engagements.

The questions posed in a study of world mental health are pertinent and still not fully answered: “What are the lingering effects of large-scale conflicts on the sensibilities, mores and ways of life of a society or nation? What happens to communities or societies after the fighting dies down? (Turshen: 18-19). Notwithstanding the indifference of governments to dealing with the impact of the past on their constituencies, it is clear that African societies can no longer afford to ignore the significance of past traumas and violence. In Nordstroms summing up, such violence maims cultures, jars their very foundations, destroys crucial networks and frameworks of knowledge and peoples sense of reality, ruins social institutions and infrastructure, and jeopardizes identities based on place and community (see Ibid.). Therefore a crucial policy focus has to be the development of governmental capacity to “build” and “keep” the peace and to address and seek to redress the consequences of violence for those that have engaged it.

While such a concern might not initially address all the underlying issues, social, economic, historic and structural that generate armed hostilities, it does recognize that as a short and long term goal of transitional states, the ability to intervene decisively in defusing, redirecting and preventing acts of violence and to respond effectively to the multiple needs of the subjectivities of violence is critical.

Notes

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Citation Format:

Peyi Soyinka-Airewele. “Subjectivities of Violence and the Dilemmas of Transitional Governance,” West Africa Review: Issue 6, 2004.

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