This article explores the ways that the institution of the avunculate has been used as an idiom for negotiating forced displacement, dispossession, and insecurity in the forested region where modern‐day Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Côte d'Ivoire converge. The essay analyses the ways that the rights and responsibilities that inhere in the MB‐ZS relationship are both invoked ‘aspirationally’ by those with no prior link of kinship and parried by those who should in principle be bound by them. This degree of play suggests that the avunculate in this region is best understood as one of several idioms used to legitimate claims made on others, often in times of uncertainty and instability. Rather than treat this relationship as an always‐already existing social institution, the article suggests that it is also the product of a historical experience of persistent warfare, displacement, and flight.
Le discours du président Conté le 9 septembre 2000 et les violences contre les réfugiés qui s’ensuivirent renvoient à plusieurs rationalités au-delà des attaques menées alors à partir du Liberia voisin. Si certaines relèvent des guerres dans les États voisins et des alliances militaires du gouvernement guinéen, il faut aussi prendre la mesure de l’histoire, notamment de l’ancrage, par la rhétorique politique, de schèmes coercitifs dans la culture politique guinéenne actuelle.
This article uses an analysis of discussions of the November 1970 Portuguese attack on Guinea as a window into issues that continue to be raised concerning the country's first post-independence regime (1958–1984). We analyze ongoing debates among Guineans regarding the legacy of the former president, Sékou Touré, and whether or not there is a need for truth-telling and/or justice for abuses committed under his rule. One strand of this discussion focuses on legitimate political tactics and another on the politics of ethnicity in contemporary Guinea. The frequent assertion by Guinean interlocutors that “history is stubborn” points to both the perceived power of truth-telling and the ethno-political stakes with which these debates have become imbued. Debates among Guineans often focus on the uses and abuses of “truth and reconciliation” testimony, which for some Guineans is essential to breaking past cycles of violent state repression and for others is a kind of Pandora's box that could fuel not reconciliation but retribution. We show that Guineans are also engaged in a third order of analysis, of the status of “imported” notions of justice, agency, and culpability in an African setting.
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