Writing about Conflict in Africa: Stakes and Strategies
- Writing about Conflict in Africa:Stakes and Strategies
Writing about conflict in Africa is a tricky thing. Publications from nongovernmental organizations and human rights campaigners often read as if they were calibrated to maximize public distress, and thus the political or financial support that would keep human rights institutions in business. Many journalistic accounts are stitched together from the rhetorical and analytical remnants of a colonial and sometimes racist common sense. Against this backdrop, fine-grained empirical studies like those typically produced by anthropologists, historians and geographers take on a particular salience. They stake out a privileged space for explaining other logics, other incentives, and different causal relations that could make sense out of wars, insurgencies and other forms of violence that appear irrational to Europeans and North Americans.
Such demystification through careful description and analysis has been one of the objectives embraced by Africanist scholars since at least 1937, with the publication of Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande by Evans-Pritchard. That it continues to be a central concern of researchers working in Africa more than seventy years later is notable in itself. This may be linked to the increase in civil conflicts in the immediate post-Cold War era, but it may say as much about the failure of Africanists to put a dent in complacent stereotypes about the continent. Africanist scholars disseminate their work with a greater or lesser degree of [End Page 314] self-consciousness about this broader frame, and the three books reviewed here enter this conversation with different strategies for addressing the issue. They take on the relations of local versus international causes of conflict, the politics and causal influences of representations, and the mutual influences of historical contingency, socio-cultural patterns and political economy. The most successful volumes follow the reliable writer's dictum to 'show, don't tell', relying on the sometimes disturbing and frequently surprising analyses that emerge from fine-grained description.
Writing for, Writing Against
Few combatant groups in the world are as reviled as Uganda's Lord's Resistance Army. Known primarily for wanton massacres of civilians and their signature mutilations of cutting off their victims' lips and ears, they are portrayed as being motivated by a half-baked messianism that aims to make the Ten Commandments the law of Uganda. If that weren't enough, many Ugandans offer little sympathy to the predominantly Acholi victims of the LRA's depredations, suggesting that they are now experiencing a kind of cosmic revenge for past abuses visited upon Ugandans in the centre and south of the country under the rule of Milton Obote and Idi Amin, both from the north, and their armies, both said to have had a large proportion of Acholi soldiers.
To take on the challenge of attempting to make sense of such a 'stigmatized combatant group' (Richards and Peters 2007) is a heroic, if thankless task, all the more so when the conflict in question is ongoing. This adds a serious methodological challenge to the analytical ones. Sverker Finnstrom's Living with Bad Surroundings: war, history and everyday moments in northern Uganda welcomes this challenge as he tries to make the LRA make sense for his readers. He is obliged to remind us at regular intervals that he neither condones nor admires the LRA's tactics. He nonetheless insists that the LRA (like the Acholi more generally) have been mischaracterized as lacking any political project, being motivated rather by savagery. Thus while part of the book systematically debunks a series of stereotypes about Acholi people and the LRA, another...
