Violence, Peace and Everyday Modes of Justice and Healing in Post-Colonial Africa

At least 1 million people died during the Mozambican civil war (1976/7-92). Unfolding after gaining independence from Portugal (1975) and alongside experiments with Afro-socialism in the 1980s, the war, despite its brutality, has not been subjected to global templates of reconciliation processes. Thus it comprises a unique case to probe what irreconciliation might mean -both as a political horizon and as an analytical concept. This text juxtaposes ethnographic material from rural, central Mozambique from the late 1990s and early 2000s emphasizing reconciliation with material from the same spaces from the 2010s onwards, where I identify what I term a 'politics of irreconciliation'. I will make three arguments. First, informed by Hannah Arendt, I approach irreconciliation as fundamentally about the rejection of a world of violence in search of a world shared in common. Second, drawing on recent anthropological theorizing about temporal regimes and chronopolitics, I argue for the salience of a non-linear understanding of the politics of irreconciliation to grapple with the fact that civil war violence is understood as dangerously uncontained rather than nominally past. Third, within the context of Mozambique, forgiveness and its other, irreconciliation, are not only intimately tied to the temporally past or present; they are also, as I show, produced by a tangible and intense absence of a productive future.From 1976/7 to 1992, Mozambique was devastated by a civil war that razed the countryside and thoroughly transformed the social and political landscape (Morier-Genoud, Cahen & do Rosário 2018). The war engulfed society, generating an estimated 1 million casualties with a further 5 million of the around 18 million population (in 1975) becoming internal or external refugees (Lubkemann 2008). Heavily simplified, the civil war involved the forces of the liberation movement-turned-political party Frelimo (Frente de Libertação de Moçambique) fighting a guerrilla war of insurrection waged by Renamo (Resistência Nacional de Moçambique). 1 Alongside the civil war, Frelimo spearheaded an Afro-socialist revolution under the charismatic leadership of Mozambican President Samora Machel. Fuelled by the vision of unlocking the potential of a country downtrodden by Portuguese colonial violent rule since the 1500s, Frelimo revolutionized the country's sociopolitical order (Isaacman 1978). Rolling out a

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Everyday peace in a ‘post‐conflict’ African metropolis: Radio encounters, indeterminacy, fugitivity

Cante

2023

Trans Inst British Geog

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Drawing on the ethnography of a multi‐ethnic local radio listeners' club in post‐war Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire, the article provides an original account of everyday peace in an African metropolis. It bridges peace geographies and African urban studies to document the informal and often invisibilised practices through which residents re‐make the city in the wake of war. In doing so, the article expands existing understandings of everyday peace while reaffirming the concept's radical, decolonial proposition: to seek peace in subaltern lifeworlds, rather than in institutional and interventionist programmes that too often reproduce violent power asymmetries. Through the story of the UFARA listeners' club, emerging out of radio encounters, the article shows how everyday peace articulates a response to different forms of conjunctural and structural violence, including precarity and territorial control. It also points to indeterminacy and fugitivity as lived, affective and political figurations of peace which, while eschewing the trappings of resistance, nonetheless point to the need to imagine peace otherwise.

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Violence, Peace and Everyday Modes of Justice and Healing in Post-Colonial Africa

Cited by 3 publications

References 59 publications

Violence in Africa: Reflecting on a Broad Concept

Violence in Africa: Reflecting on a Broad Concept

Civil war and the non‐linearity of time: approaching a Mozambican politics of irreconciliation

Everyday peace in a ‘post‐conflict’ African metropolis: Radio encounters, indeterminacy, fugitivity

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