MATTHIEU'S TWO (OR MANY…) BODIES

The origin of this article lies in my puzzling over two acts of killing humans by the same man, and their different outcomes. The killings took place in northeastern Central African Republic (CAR), a vast, little-populated zone in which the central government shows only occasional interest that is mostly designated conservation land. The area occupies a purgatory position: formally part of a state, but mostly left to its own devices. The realm of capital-L law is occupied by an entity (the state) that people in the area see as absent, and this leaves legal and cosmological orders in the area fundamentally plural and contested, as are the relevant categories of “we” and “they,” which depend on the particular circumstances in which their content becomes contentious. It therefore seems, at first glance, to be a space of non-sovereignty. And yet it is also a space where a variety of people (among others, anti-poaching guards, herders, and rebel group members) inflict violence that people categorize as neither criminal nor sacrifice, and that is seen as playing a role in preserving social values, which have been described as hallmarks of sovereignty. This raises a question that is the focus of this paper: what might we learn about sovereignty by looking at a place, northeastern CAR, where that fundamental sovereign prerogative of subjecting violence is exercised and contested by many different people?

The author of the killings that preoccupied me was Matthieu Laboureur, born in France but raised on his father's safari hunting concession in northeastern CAR and a lifelong hunting guide there. He has been explicit that violence is needed to stop ivory hunters and cattle herders from using the region's vast parklands for their profit, writing in a youthful memoir, “Me, I am ready to go to the end.… That is to say, to kill if it is necessary” (Reference Laboureur1988: 12Footnote ¹). He avowed a “pact” with the elephants: to kill anyone trying to kill them, and in the pages that followed described doing just that. He and two Central African wildlife guards ambushed a group of hunters, killing five people and their pack animals and seizing their stock of ivory. As Laboureur continued his tale he recounted how he cared for an orphaned baby elephant and won the affections of a beautiful American tourist. No one asked after the men they had killed, and he described no effort to ascertain who they were or otherwise account for their deaths. No doubt these silences stem partly from the stylistic conventions of the safari hunter memoir as a tall-tale genre. But I came across many accounts of similarly reported-yet-followed-by-silence killings in less flamboyant sources, such as the reports of internationally funded conservation projects.

Then, in January 1990, Laboureur and his father Jean were on patrol when they came across several men. Many of the details of what happened next are contested, but one is not: Gilbert Bangandombi-Kotali was shot dead. He was working as a road-clearer for a massive conservation project that had started two years earlier. Rumor had it that he was also one of the president's personal game-purveyors. When word of the killing reached the conservation project staffers, they drove to the Laboureurs’ concession to hold them to account. In Jean Laboureur's statement, he explained that he and his son had been out on rounds when they came across some poachers who were not speaking Sango, CAR's national language. In the ensuing altercation Jean shot and killed one of the men, namely Bangandombi-Kotali. Conservation project staffers found the story suspicious. They noted that the area had little known poacher presence and that the bullets used were from Matthieu's gun (Djouma Reference Djouma1990). In popular understanding, “everyone knows” that Matthieu pulled the trigger. But from the perspective of the conservation staff, ascertaining the truth of what happened or applying a rule were less important than communicating that the Laboureurs’ right to exercise extra-legal, sovereign-prerogative violence and determine how people would live had been abrogated. The symbolic proof of this was that Jean Laboureur was made to leave the country he had devoted his entire adult life to. He never returned.Footnote ² Note that he was not tried for the killing—it was not treated as a criminal, legal matter. He simply could no longer be proximate to the others in the space.

The conservation project staff described the Laboureurs, derisively, as would-be sovereigns. And indeed, the Laboureurs had killed people in ways that would be difficult to fit into frameworks of law or sacrifice. (In the years to come, the conservation militia took on the most sustained role in that kind of violence.) But when it came to Bangandombi-Kotali's killing, the Laboureurs were stopped. Why did Bangandombi-Kotali's killing become a problem, whereas those of the poachers Matthieu described in his memoir, or those that project conservationists told of killing in their reports, did not? Part of an answer lies in the issue of nationality: Bangandombi-Kotali was a more stable resident of the area, whereas Matthieu's poachers were more itinerant. Yet that explanation is insufficient, for, as we will see, other killings of transnational actors did become problems. Another part of an answer lies in personality clashes between the Laboureurs and the conservation project staff; each was looking for ways to discredit each other. But such dislikes do not in themselves explain the differential reactions to the killings. Dislike could help people mobilize their relations to perform particular moral and performative projects after the death, but the dislike did not do that on its own.

The young Laboureur, almost despite himself, had a useful formulation of the problem. Describing the people he killed, he wrote, “They are without scruples and assured of impunity. Who could denounce them? If they surprised us they would not hesitate to take us down. Easy to exterminate five men [the size of Matthieu's party] when you're the stronger ones. Much easier than massacring a troop of elephants. Tomorrow, they would cross the border into their own country. Five cadavers in the bush are quickly swallowed; there would not remain even a trace after a few hours” (Reference Laboureur1988: 91).

Laboureur's emphasis was misplaced in that he overstated the role of geography. Though the area is vast and little-peopled, those factors are not in and of themselves determinative. Remote spaces, and particularly frontiers, are especially active sites for dehumanizing violence in which victims are construed as killable animals (Gordon Reference Gordon and Crummey1986; Bjork-James Reference Bjork-James2015), but in fact only some bodies are “swallowed,” while others, including those of peasants like Bangandombi-Kotali, are not. Therefore, to understand the differences between the two killings we must transform Laboureur's rhetorical question, “Who could denounce them?” into a literal one: who can denounce?

DENUNCIATION AND SOVEREIGNTY

People in northeastern CAR, both those born in the area and those who, like Laboureur, were born further afield, often describe violenceFootnote ³ they participate in using the idiom of vengeance. Perhaps because of the ways it has been understood in northern European history, the term vengeance directs the mind toward calculating logics. One death or harm is cancelled or balanced by another, with punishments ideally carefully calibrated to equal the harm done (Miller Reference Miller2005). The Central African violence addressed here, in contrast, has a very different function: it makes a claim to freedom from violence that subjects others without including them, and in so doing, it communicates a value, namely liberty. The violence says, “You cannot treat me/us that way, and the proof is that we can treat you that way.” The term that captures that (violent) demand for the respect of fundamental values is the one Laboureur uses: denunciation.

Denunciation is renunciation of another as part of a bid to set fundamental values and communities of privilege. This claim is made through action, often violent, that is meant to awe without thereby making its audience into fellows. As such, in northeastern CAR denunciation is the key dynamic of action within contests over sovereign prerogatives. Denunciation, in other words, is a dynamic of sovereignty. This point raises conceptual and comparative issues around denunciation and sovereignty.

Denunciation is a matter of declaring—by verbal means or through the threat or enactment of violence—that a particular action undertaken by another is so fundamental an attack on core values as to require that it be stopped. Most studies of denunciation have focused on Western cases in which denunciation plays out through a state or religious enforcer or organizer. For example, a person might denounce their neighbors to the secret police, who carry out punishment (Fitzpatrick and Gellately Reference Fitzpatrick, Gellately, Fitzpatrick and Gellately1997). The enactors of and audiences for these denunciations are demarcated. Some have considered denunciation to be a quintessential product of totalitarianism (e.g., Arendt Reference Arendt1973). Those living in sites of contested sovereignty have generally not been portrayed as denouncers, but rather as raiders, bandits, or seekers of revenge. Perhaps this is due to the assumption that law and order are the only values whose breach a person could denounce, but people living in places without centralized, coercive law also have values that they may fight to maintain. Elsewhere in the region, people value anarchy or autonomy more than order (Scheele Reference Scheele2015). In many places where people are neither authoritarian nor anarchy-loving, values and the bounds of community are in flux, and denunciation can be a means of popularly asserting them. This is what happened during the French Revolution (Lucas Reference Lucas, Fitzpatrick and Gellately1997). Who participates in the denunciation, who is denounced, and who bears witness or hears about such actions—the audiences—are not fixed categories that are re-inscribed by the denunciation. The people in each category change, and denunciation is a means of shuffling them in ways that can be both productive and destructive.

A range of values can underlie people's denunciatory actions, from desires for law and order in a totalitarian context to anarchy in a government-rejecting one. In northeastern CAR's colonial and conservation histories, people's denunciatory actions are, instead, generally oriented toward liberty, in the sense of freedom from molestation, or what Isaiah Berlin (Reference Berlin1969) termed “negative liberty.”Footnote ⁴ Theirs is not a protest against violence exercised either in the name of claiming sovereign prerogatives or the idea of rules. Nor is it a means of severing themselves off as an autonomous unit. Rather, they denounce in order to participate in projects that require coercion of others and that extend beyond their place of residence, while also contesting who violence can legitimately target.

Denunciation in these cases entails a two-part claim: “You cannot remove our liberty; but we can circumscribe yours.” Bangandombi-Kotali's death was not denounced with physical violence against the person(s) who had caused it, but the killers’ powers in the realm of violence and determining how to live were usurped, and to confirm this at least one key person had to depart the area. In the other cases I will discuss, violence plays a more prominent role in denunciation. Denunciation indexes struggles to elaborate and enact moral tenets amidst moments and processes marked by both fission and fusion. Put differently, it requires, and helps conjure,Footnote ⁵ an association of people who will together defend a value. This defense takes the form of actions that, if they were done to themselves, people would perceive as overreach and, if possible, denounce. In this sense, denunciation is a process of sovereignty, yet one that seems never to reach a stable resolution.

Sovereignty is a famously slippery concept (Bartelson Reference Bartelson1995). That European philosophical accounts of sovereignty as unitary do not accurately describe politics in much of the world has long been recognized (Maine Reference Maine1915 [1988]; Keene Reference Keene2002; Benton Reference Benton2009). Yet calls to “fully engage questions of sovereign rule” by tracing “how logics of authority, power, and reality itself shift across time and space and compete in the same polity with regularity” (Grant Reference Grant2011: 658) introduce conceptual ambiguity since they so broaden the frame of what sovereignty might consist of.Footnote ⁶ Therefore, it is helpful to be explicit about what sovereignty—whether conceived as consolidated or contested—has a particular ability to designate: namely, that sometimes people and/or offices try to “get away with” (Graeber Reference Graeber2011) violence or other behavior that exceeds social or legal bounds, and such sovereign-prerogative violence is part of a claim to the right to make decisions about how to live (Cattelino Reference Cattelino2008). In comparison to elsewhere where sovereignty seems more settled, often people in northeastern CAR do not ultimately “get away with” their claims, but that does not change that they are claims to sovereignty. In other words, sovereignty describes the relationships among and boundaries created by exceptions, values, sociality, and violence. And when it comes to that formulation, northeastern CAR's plural, violent claims to liberty index sovereign struggles aplenty.

More commonly, sovereignty has been explored through its unitary instances, such as those defined by the “sovereign decision” (Schmitt Reference Schmitt and Schwab2005 [1922]). In these accounts, the sovereign is the one who decides when the law will be suspended in order to preserve the polity, such as by creating a class of people who are neither included nor excluded, but instead “bare life” (Agamben Reference Agamben1998). Those conceptions are “limit cases,” more totalizing than most cases of actually observed sovereignty, but they nevertheless evoke fundamental problems encountered in constituting political orders (Fiskesjö Reference Fiskesjö2012). As such, they are instances “marking one end of a continuum of different configurations that can be taken by a particular set of dynamics” (Rutherford Reference Rutherford2002: 229), and the continuum must have another end. That other end, of which CAR's northeastern borderlands are a compelling example, is equally illuminating of core workings of sovereignty as it is exercised in the world. This is not just because the CAR case is an outlier, one that because it does not fit the usual theories therefore reveals their taken-for-granted assumptions. More importantly, denunciation there points to popular and processual aspects of how sovereign claims are made that also obtain in other times and places.

Some of the lessons of denunciation echo those of recent work on sites of contested sovereignty. For instance, any sovereign claim is just that, a claim, and consideration of it must continue after the moment the claim is made, to explore also how it is received (Rutherford Reference Rutherford2012). Even in cases of sovereign decisions, in the manner Schmitt (Reference Schmitt and Schwab2005) described, one must consider what happens next. Is that decision accepted, its existence itself evidence of its power, in the manner of a miracle, or is it denounced?Footnote ⁷ Another lesson, one that comes from considering denunciation in northeastern CAR, has been less plumbed, and it should inspire new comparisons that draw out unexpected similarities in addition to contrasts. It is that the values that sovereign claims are intended to uphold might not be about, on one hand, law, order, and the bounded integrity of a group, or on the other, self-regulation and autonomy. Instead, the value is liberty: participating in political and economic processes beyond one's home while claiming exceptions from norms for certain people, namely those who denounce. That is, claims to freedom from molestation without as vociferous a claim to set the rules for everyone (in a term, negative liberty) can themselves be the object of sovereign contests. Such denunciations involve relations that mobilize, rather than exclusive groups.

METHODS AND LOCALES

This article is based on research in CAR that I started in 2003, when I met a young American who was helping to set up a private conservation militia in the country. I have conducted field research in the country almost every year since then (sometimes several trips in a year), including twelve months in 2009–2010. My methods are both ethnographic and historical. I spent time on anti-poaching bases, interviewing and hanging out with the guards, as well as talking with key figures in the history of armed conservation. I combed the archives of the European Union-funded conservation projects in CAR, the French military archives at Vincennes, and colonial records in Aix-en-Provence.Footnote ⁸ In the stories I recount here I draw mostly on incidents for which there are at least some written records. To protect my interlocutors’ confidentiality I limit my discussion of personalities involved to those with public presences. I include few “ethnographic characters” so as to avoid projecting the ideas of particular actors as if they were dominant, since such a variety are at play and my access to certain perspectives has been limited (e.g., that of herders, with whom I was only able to speak in minimal ways).

Northeastern CAR's borderlands provide fertile grounds for considering the processual and relational factors and questions of value that have been given short shrift in attempts to grapple with the problems of sovereignty.Footnote ⁹ Contests over sovereign claims made with violence have been common in the area since the nineteenth century, when it was first integrated into long-distance processes of accumulation and trade (Lombard Reference Lombardn.d.). These took particularly intense forms in the early decades of colonial rule, and then again during the anti-poaching initiatives marshaled around the close of the twentieth century. I will first discuss some historical cases to give a sense of how sedimented violence-denunciation processes are in the historical-social landscape. I will then explore three cases of denunciation, each of which demonstrates how misguided it would be to treat an act of sovereign-prerogative violence as itself evidence of a successful claim to sovereignty. The cases demonstrate how important relations mobilizing to protest after a death are to processes of figuring out who gets to enact violence that establishes their privilege to decide how they will live. To paraphrase Laboureur: who can denounce? Denouncers in northeastern CAR bid to change the mutable boundary of who can be targeted for sovereign-prerogative violence and who can enjoy liberty.Footnote ¹⁰

A HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY OF DENUNCIATION, LIBERTY, AND VIOLENCE

As the nineteenth century drew to a close, the lands today known as northeastern CAR were the meeting point for two major frontier processes, one led by Muslims and the other by Europeans, particularly the French. Muslims had arrived first in the area. Their earliest presence probably dates to the eighteenth century, but not until about 1850 did their commercial and educational activities gain intensity and reach. The demand for workers grew with the development of standing armies in the polities to the north, increasing centralization in settlements, and the rise of plantation agriculture (Cordell Reference Cordell1985). Since Islam frowns on conscripting co-religionists, the people not yet converted, who lived in small autonomous settlements along footpaths (Giles-Vernick Reference Giles-Vernick1996), became the labor reserves. Raiding parties hunted down people to enslave them. They would encircle a village and attack at dawn, firing their guns for shock and awe, detain as many people as they could, and then wait in case any escapees came back. Tens of thousands were hunted and captured in this manner (Santandrea Reference Santandrea1957; de Dampierre Reference de Dampierre1983; Cordell Reference Cordell1985). And yet, however much greater the firepower of the people-hunters, their dominance was far from assured. They had no repeating rifles and so a shooter had to laboriously reload after each round fired (Cordell Reference Cordell, Cordell and Gregory1994). More to the point of this paper, the categories of authors and victims of this form of violence were constantly changing. Once captured, a man could “become a man” by being given a gun and sent off to hunt others. Some in the region were “inclined to admire, revere and even praise, strength even if used for evil purposes” (Santandrea Reference Santandrea1957: 155), while others abhorred it and fled. Such political-economic-social upheaval gave rise, not to polities that could be understood as “discrete entities,” but rather to “open communities” that became “interdependent and integrated by the facts of settlement, subordination, and resistance to external pressures” (Sikainga Reference Sikainga1991: 54–55). When, decades later, colonial officials tried to implement indirect rule along ethnic lines they found it impossible to do so because no identifiable groups existed (ibid.: 55).Footnote ¹¹ Even in the midst of being terrorized, people would denounce, and in so doing claim liberty for themselves and those who joined them (Cordell Reference Cordell, Cordell and Gregory1994; Reference Cordell2002).

When French adventurists began arriving in the area at the close of the nineteenth century, they had enormous quantities of equipment that required carriers. Champagne to counter European stomach ills was just the start; they even brought disassembled steamships that they reconstituted at Lake Chad (Prioul Reference Prioul1981). People enacting sovereign-prerogative violence frequently try to categorize their targets as non- or subhuman (Appadurai Reference Appadurai2006; Collins Reference Collins2009; Chamayou Reference Chamayou and Rendall2012), and the French were no exception: they worked to define the people they forced to carry out porterage toil as, at best, lesser humans, with lesser needs. For instance, administrators spread the belief that Africans ate less food than did Europeans, one colonial agent writing, “even half of what we eat would be too rich for them” (quoted in Mollion Reference Mollion1992: 64). However, some administrators were openly skeptical of such justifications, and the suffering and deaths of so many laborers were hard to ignore. The usual load for a porter was supposed to be about 30 kilograms, but depending on needs that could rise to 65 kilograms. For obvious reasons, few signed on willingly for this kind of work, and most did everything they could to avoid it. Some administrators lucidly described what the colonial project had become, such as one posted to Fort Crampel, where porterage needs were greatest, who called it “a veritable manhunt with all its consequences, and we have to track them in the bush where they prefer to seek refuge” (quoted in Mollion Reference Mollion1992: 95). The regional guards in French employ developed various tactics to apprehend those who fled, such as attacking their villages at night, or holding women and children hostage until their men had carried out stipulated labor duties.

The porterage and concessionary projects in Equatorial Africa were brutal and destructive (Metefia Reference Metefia1982; Dupré Reference Dupré1982; Mollion Reference Mollion1992; Toqué Reference Toqué1996 [1907]; Coquéry-Vidrovitch Reference Coquéry-Vidrovitch2014; Lombard Reference Lombard2016b), yet the Africans who they targeted vigorously and effectively denounced them. Some sought liberty by fleeing, and at one point established their own “Republic” (the colonial officers’ term), an anarchic haven from the demands of forced labor (Mollion Reference Mollion1992). Those who remained accessible to the French vigorously denounced the violence enacted against them. Oubangui-Chari (as CAR was then called) had a reputation for rebellion, as colonial officials termed the era's terrorizing protests. Some of these involved many people and were organized on a broad scale, while others were more acephalous or even initiated by individuals (Nzabakomada-Yakoma Reference Nzabakomada-Yakoma1986; Coquéry-Vidrovitch Reference Coquéry-Vidrovitch1972). While commentators both at the time and subsequently have often read their own politics into these rebellions (for instance seeing them as essentially anti-colonial or Marxist), they were inspired by polyvalent symbolic repertoires (Burnham and Christensen Reference Burnham and Christensen1983). The desire for negative liberty is so effective in mobilizing people today not just because it is somehow culturally appropriate to “a people”; it has been generated by political-economic-social configurations that, while often dynamic and innovative (Guyer Reference Guyer1996), have also been deeply exploitative and violent.

The Islamic and French-led imperialist processes met and augmented each other from about 1890 to 1911 (Cordell Reference Cordell1985).Footnote ¹² This was the period of most intense manhunting, whether instigated by the main Muslim leader Sultan Muhammad al-Sanusi, the French adventurists, or others in the area. Leaders in both imperial projects, as well as certain Central African notables, found each other useful for their projects of expanding their wealth and privilege. For instance, al-Sanusi would provide the French with laborers and foodstuffs, and the French would supply him with guns. Still, over time Captain Modat, the French administrator dispatched to al-Sanusi's city of Ndele, came to worry that al-Sanusi might decamp to a rocky plateau to the east that provided an ideal defensive position. This would cost the French the leverage they had managed to gain over al-Sanusi, and Modat determined not to let that happen (Simiti Reference Simiti2013). Early one morning in January 1911, he and an associate, Lt. Grünfelder, lured al-Sanusi into exposing himself and executed him (Government of Oubangui-Chari 1911; Grünfelder 1911).

What kind of a killing was the French officers’ felling of al-Sanusi? With more than a century of hindsight, it can appear as just another domino falling in the advance of territorialized French colonialism in Africa, but at the time it was a gamble. Though Modat was in touch with his superiors, messages traveled slowly and so he could not rely on his bosses to tell him what to do on short notice. He had no explicit authorization to kill (though “self-defense” was a capacious defensive cloak in the event he was taken to account for it). al-Sanusi's death was neither murder nor sacrifice, but rather a tactical move made in a context in which two aspirants to authority cooperated in certain domains at certain times and not in others. It was a move played in a game of sovereignty: violence exercised toward the end of being able to determine how oneself and others would live, in a situation in which the bounds of collaboration were mutable.

Modat did not kill al-Sanusi as a ruler killing his subject (all the treaties al-Sanusi signed with the French referred to him as “sovereign” of his “country”), and yet neither were the two men parts of separate political orders/communities. Ultimately, the killing was a claim to expand the sovereign writ of the French, and how people would respond to it was unknown. al-Sanusi’s army numbered several thousand (Cordell Reference Cordell1985), while the French military presence in Ndele, counting generously, added up to dozens. Would the people al-Sanusi had assembled at Ndele rise up in anger against the French and their West African guards? The French could have been easily overrun, but in the event, most of Ndele's population fled, many back to the villages they had been grabbed from. A few of al-Sanusi's sons and their entourages fought back heartily over the next few weeks, but the guards in French employ vanquished them sufficiently that those still standing departed for Darfur. Today, those ripostes are mostly forgotten, or at least they are seen as less important than the killing. But it would be wrong to read a killing such as Modat's of al-Sanusi as in and of itself evidence of French sovereignty rather than simply one key point in a longer process. As stated earlier, in such situations one must consider what happens next: whether people mobilize to denounce, to make the killing into a problem for the killer and his associates, and whether that denunciation is acceded to.

With al-Sanusi out of the way, the French colonial government at first had grand dreams of establishing a flourishing, “legitimate” economy in the area, rather than one dominated by the razzia (raids for humans). But they quickly realized that doing so would require massive inputs of money and labor, which they had little hope of obtaining. Northeastern Oubangui-Chari was too far from the capital, too sparsely populated, and too benighted of a terrain (half the year much of the area becomes swamp) to administer directly, so the government declared it an “autonomous district.” This was a placeholder status, and while formally part of the colony, the autonomous district was mostly left to its own devices (Lombard Reference Lombard, Carayannis and Lombard2015).

In occasional asides, French administrators bemoaned having ended up with such a lamentable possession; in 1915 they tried, unsuccessfully, to trade it to the British for a bit of Gulf of Guinea coastline (Brégeon Reference Brégeon1998: 272). As the commanding officer in Oubangui-Chari/TchadFootnote ¹³ noted drily even before al-Sanusi's death, this was “a country that too-pompous reports have unfortunately earlier presented as rich and fertile, which is far from the exact truth” (Colonie du Congo 1903: 32–33). Adding to the travails of would-be administrators, the human population had been decimated by slave-raiding, porterage demands, disease, and various brutal government policies. Today, few people live in the area. The size of France and Benelux combined, CAR is home to only about four million people, and although its three northeasternmost prefectures make up nearly a third of its territory less than 4 percent of the country's population lives there.Footnote ¹⁴

A sparsely populated, autonomous district, northeastern CAR has been simultaneously included yet excluded: it is not not part of the government polity, but neither is it part of it in any substantive way. Nor is it a frontier; that is, an area in the process of being swallowed up by global capitalist processes in newly-intense ways (Tsing Reference Tsing2003), and in which violence is a means of ineluctable dispossession. Historically, political expansion on the continent occurred through a distinctive “internal frontier” process. Latecomers to an established settlement would decamp in order to set up another settlement modeled on the first but with themselves as the privileged first-comers (Kopytoff Reference Kopytoff1987). The colonial-state form has ossified those frontier-making processes. Instead, the state form acts as a placeholder. State institutions remain absent, but the fact that this territory legally belongs to a state prevents any other kind of polity from being established (Lombard Reference Lombard2016b). Other borderlands are fecund sites for commerce (Hecht and Simone Reference Hecht and Simone1994; Bennafla Reference Bennafla2002; Roitman Reference Roitman2005), and/or central to state-making through border-making practices (Das and Poole Reference Das, Poole, Das and Poole2004; Reeves Reference Reeves2014), but northeastern CAR remains in a kind of remote purgatory. State law exists for the area, and people there recognize its privileged status to the extent that they know they cannot make their own laws, but state laws are spectacularly out of tune with the realities of people's lives and there is no effective means of enforcing them (Antonetti Reference Antonettin.d.; Lombard Reference Lombardn.d.). As a result, frameworks of law or sacrifice, which depend on consistent populace/polity relationships, are of limited use in explaining violence as it plays out in the area. Most people in the area live unmolested by projects of coercive control. When such projects do strike, people generally agree to them while expecting that they will be able to continue to evade control. The area is huge, after all. Nevertheless, sometimes they are targeted by sovereign-prerogative violence, and if people can be rallied, they denounce such treatment, often by targeting those they understand to have targeted them. “You cannot usurp our liberty—and we will infringe on yours to prove it,” the denunciation communicates. In this sense, the idea that such violence is an aspect of establishing authority is not contested so much as is the question of whom it can be exercised against. I met no one who described this state of affairs as ideal (Lombard Reference Lombard, Carayannis and Lombard2015; Reference Lombardn.d.).

That negative liberty would be an important value perhaps has a foundation in a cultural proclivity to live free from coercive control. To the extent the region once had centralized political formations, they often took the form of “sacred kingship” (Simonse Reference Simonse and Quigley2005). While people living under sacred kings expected them to assure a degree of general welfare, “most” did “not feel it necessary or desirable to grant them police powers in order to accomplish this” (Graeber Reference Graeber2011: 7). Yet this cannot be considered separately from the exploitative, brutal, and yet also neglectful ways in which the region has been drawn into long-distance political and economic processes. In many cases, these processes destroyed the “order” that existed (Dupré Reference Dupré1982) and created newly-ambiguous relations of power (Balandier Reference Balandier1966) in which claiming liberty was part value and part survival skill.

Moreover, the value of liberty has not been expressed and enacted only by Central Africans, but also by incomers to the area like concession operators and European and American big game hunters. One of the latter was in 1911 killed by one of his band in what might anachronistically be called a friendly fire incident, and reportedly dictated on his deathbed, “You remember what I have told you Doctor, I can't stand the religious people. If you are religious you have got to play up to your religion. I never had none so I could do what I liked. Well, Doctor, I'll soon know how I stand with all of your religious fellows” (quoted in Collins Reference Collins1960: 225). Liberty here emerges as less the province of a cultural group and more the product of a “place-in-the-world” (Ferguson Reference Ferguson2006) that is in a dependent but not docile position (Bayart Reference Bayart2000), and the people drawn to such a place.

Even as the number of people in the area plummeted, animals continued to abound, including charismatic ones like elephants, rhinoceroses, giraffes, and lions. For this reason, the official development plan for northeastern was to not develop it and to instead devote it to conservation. In the 1930s, nearly the entire region was designated as national park, hunting or fauna reserve, or otherwise protected. Safari hunting concessions were created around this time, and they expanded further after World War II when safaris became “democratized” to cater to not just aristocrats but also businesspeople and other wealthy hunters (Roulet Reference Roulet2004). In the 1950s, the few French officials in the area began to worry that the region's wildlife was being decimated by illegitimate claimants to the area's resources, such as herders. Military officers decided to carry out “actions de présence” (weeks-long tours of the region's villages and footpaths) in the hopes of catching hunters in the act and “marking our sovereignty” (Bertin 1959). They did not catch many, but they remained concerned about the illicit use of the space and its resources.

In the late 1970s, herding and hunting in the area both intensified dramatically. The increase in herding was due primarily to a major drought, part of a broader process of desertification that was sucking water from Chad and Darfur. Hunting escalated in large part due to spiking global prices for ivory, which was for a time both a valuable speculative currency in the West and increasingly in demand in Asia (Naylor Reference Naylor2005). Because of these developments, various people with stakes in conservation deemed it necessary to increase armed patrols in the parklands and surrounding areas. The Laboureurs were among the first to take up the charge, as Matthieu averred in his elephant pact. International donors became involved, notably the European Union, which funded the largest-ever project for the area, the Programme de développement pour la région nord (PDRN). It combined lutte anti-braconnage (LAB, anti-poaching patrols) with broad conservation education and the devolution of safari hunting taxes to villages in the areas around the hunting concessions.

The PDRN built four anti-poaching bases in northeastern CAR. As a donor-funded initiative, it was formally attached to a ministry but operated with a high degree of autonomy thanks to its separate financing and organizational structure. It mobilized as many as a hundred pisteurs (trackers/anti-poaching guards) at a time.Footnote ¹⁵ But they were not alone in carrying out armed patrols of the vast parklands. Some safari hunting guides had their own militias (Roulet Reference Roulet2004), and on occasion French soldiers in the country for military cooperation carried out operations as well. During gaps in project funding, a private association paid two foreign mercenaries and an elite corps of pisteurs to step in to ensure some continuity in the implementation of anti-poaching actions. These various people, though they theoretically shared the same goals, did not always view each other as allies, as is clear in the animosities between the Laboureurs and the conservation project (the PDRN) I described earlier.

In theory, these patrollers followed the same guidelines as had the military actions de présence of thirty years before: fire only in self-defense and otherwise take the poacher into custody to await trial. In practice, a variety of factors required those involved to develop their own ways of working. For one thing, courts in the region functioned only occasionally, and pisteurs would often find that people they had locked up had mysteriously been released, sometimes leaving without a trace. For another, tensions grew between the would-be users of the space, and people became convinced that if they did not shoot first their opponents would profit from their softness by striking them down. Thus, though a state-based legal regime inspired the anti-poaching project, its approach—surveillance and killing in ways that were neither mandated nor murder—applied principles of law and social norms inconsistently across different categories of people.

In short, conservation in northeastern CAR became a node for sovereign-prerogative violence and its denunciation. People participated in order to claim liberty. Pisteurs hunted both “poachers” (the guards’ designation, and not universally accepted) and herders. Parkland interlopers also hunted the guards, and dozens have lost their lives in the thirty years of anti-poaching patrols. There has been no comprehensive accounting of how many people the guards have killed, and so one must piece together a tally from collected fragments. Some of the conservation project reports refer to people killed with euphemisms. For instance, a number tell of “foreign poachers neutralized.” One particularly explicit report had the heading “animaux abattus” (animals slaughtered), under which the author had written two camels, eight donkeys, and three men (PDRN 1990). One person who had led the pisteurs on the hunt in the 1980s admitted with the self-conscious provocation that I came to associate with mercenary tales that he had found a successful tactic to locate the elephant hunters’ camps and then lie in wait until dawn. At sunrise, they would all arise and face to pray toward Mecca, making it easy to ambush them from behind. A conservation scientist working in the area on the projects’ behalf in the mid-1990s said that the pisteurs’ leaders would categorize their opponents as belonging to one of two groups: people they could potentially “sensitize” (that is, lecture about the importance of conservation) and those they could “sensitize definitively” (in other words, kill). As a terror tactic, some anti-poaching patrollers were known to have cut up the bodies of those they killed.

This account of macabre acts is not meant to vilify the anti-poaching guards, who were working under difficult circumstances. Those they targeted were not simply passive victims. They often stridently denounced the ways that those involved in conservation practice strove to ban their actions. Armed conservation's grisly side shows how sovereign-prerogative violence and its denunciation in the service of claiming exception from rule-bound life (without thereby renouncing it) again became central to the region's politics during the twentieth century's final decades, as it had been during its first few. The perception of who was rightfully denouncing and who was behaving egregiously depended on one's position.

This returns us to this article's main questions: What kind of a politics is produced out of a status quo in which the kind of violence usually imagined as the preserve of the sovereign (singular) is instead pluralized and contested? What can such a situation teach us about sovereignty more broadly? The next section explores this contested and plural end of the sovereignty continuum and shows that sovereign violence is not just the expression of (sovereign) decisions, but also a part of processes that turn on denunciation. Those denunciations aim to create liberty in the form of exceptions for the people doing the denouncing, which is itself a sovereign counterclaim.

Not all sovereign claims are denounced. The ability of the person targeted or killed to mobilize relations, including from beyond the grave (so to speak), is crucial in determining the extent of the denunciation. It is not that a “group” is activated by the targeting of one of their own; instead, relations are mobilized along different lines that vary with particular cases and aims. In this unstable mix, denunciation is a manner of protesting the use of egregious coercion against those particular persons who join in the denunciation, and it is frequently communicated with violence that either implicitly or explicitly claims such coercion as the preserve of the denouncers. The politics produced is one in which both violence and alliance/cooperation are prevalent, and stability less so. For those who participate, these are attempts to conjure a moral community of privilege and exception, grounded in neither law and order nor anarchy, but liberty.

ARMED CONSERVATION AND DENUNCIATION

The killing of humans in the name of conservation has been a sensitive topic in critiques of conservation. For all the nuance of these accounts, they generally portray two main classes of people. First are the victims, people dispossessed of land or means of making a livelihood, some of whom are killed despite much rhetoric and practice meant to inculcate “community participation” in conservation (Neumann Reference Neumann, L. Peluso and Watts2001; Reference Neumann2004; Hardin, Remis, and Robinson Reference Hardin, Remis and Robinson2014; Robinson and Remis Reference Robinson and Remis2014). Then there are the aggressors, usually state actors or their avatars whose goals may include domination, territorialization, and to inculcate new modes of discipline, and who sometimes kill toward achieving those ends (Brockington Reference Brockington2002; Neumann Reference Neumann2004; Peluso Reference Peluso1993; Duffy Reference Duffy2010; Reference Duffy2014). In some conservation wars, in addition to the killing there are public information campaigns to portray illicit hunters as criminals and/or enemies (Neumann Reference Neumann2004). That is, an attempt is made to relegate them to being a particular kind of outcast, beyond-the-pale of humanity, to portray them as persons who should be subjected to conditions of “bare life” rather than jail or re-education. These various accounts present their casting out as an effective decision, and they define who is targetable or killable.

Yet armed conservation in northeastern CAR does not present stable subject categories. A person resident year-round in the area is more likely to be dispossessed than killed, while the opposite is true of someone whose appearance suggests an “Arab” provenance,Footnote ¹⁶ though, as we will see, residence is not really the crucial metric. More important is the ability of the person targeted to denounce the attack, such as by mobilizing relations. The key variable is the network of relations the person or those he leaves behind can draw upon, and the tools they have for denouncing, whether by threatening or inflicting violence or by drawing in the concern of powerful people or institutions outside the space.Footnote ¹⁷ In armed conservation, the issue is not one of defining conflict between “us” and “them.” Instead, the relevant boundaries of socio-political association are constantly being negotiated and re-formed, and denouncing is a key mode through which this happens. People may collaborate, for example by teaming up to counter others, but in other contexts the lines would cleave differently and the same people might turn against each other. Relatives cannot always effectively denounce, whether because they are few or far away, or for some other reason. But in other cases there are people who rise up to denounce, with denunciation understood as being both verbal and embodied (e.g., violent retaliation) protest that communicates both anger at the wrongful death and a sovereign counterclaim: we will not abide this treatment, and to prevent it we will do it to you. In this manner, denunciation can be quite socially productive, though not toward the end of creating stability. Put otherwise, when those targeted by violence see it as disallowed overreach, their reaction is a key mode for never-finished processes of fission and fusion. It is not itself a marker of stable groups and categories of belonging and cooperation.

While the conservation laws passed far away in the CAR capital are clear in their extensive prohibitions, in the territory itself one finds a complex mix of ideas and practices regarding proper access to the space's sources of wealth. This is the perspective I take here, rather than according state law a priori precedence. Some herder and hunters pay grazing or hunting taxes to heads of villages for the rights to use the open spaces; others pay similar fees to the personal agents of the few mayors in the area. Some people welcome conservation, while others decry it. Some support conservation but denounce application of its strictures to themselves. Meanwhile, people see “the state” as absent.Footnote ¹⁸ In short, there is no single and coherent system of rules that governs access to the vast open spaces’ salable and livelihood resources. Given that the content of law is understood and enacted in multiple ways, even by the same person depending on circumstance (Lombard Reference Lombard2013; Reference Lombard, Carayannis and Lombard2015; Reference Lombardn.d.), we cannot understand what happens in the area by applying a framework of criminality. By extension, this also makes it difficult to think in terms of resistance to the laws, of people seeing their by-the-letter-of-the-law illegal actions as morally licit, such as Roitman found in northern Cameroon (Reference Roitman, Comaroff and Comaroff2006). There is an important situational-relational aspect to people's understanding of principle. People might support a principle while fighting for exceptions for those who band together to denounce its application to them. Denunciation and liberty show that sovereign-prerogative violence can catalyze both schism and the strengthening of alternate networks, rather than simply affirm sovereign power.

Let me illustrate this tendency with some examples of people who collaborated toward the cause of conservation, yet sometimes denounced each other. Idongo, a village near the Laboureurs’ concession, became the conservation project's “model village.” It had gained this status in part because people there had readily agreed to the project's terms. Idongo abutted several profitable hunting concessions, which meant people there would benefit handsomely from the project's taxation revenue-sharing scheme, and the project did in fact bring welcome resources to the village. As one glowing journalistic account noted in 2003, modern forms of security and governance had arrived in Idongo: “The elderly have a right to a small pension” (Agence France Presse 2003). Later that year, anti-poaching guards caught several people from Idongo hunting in a protected area and seized their guns. The next night, the guards caught Idongo's conservation committee president's son, with a few others, in flagrant délit, in the act of hunting, and jailed him. So far, so familiar: peasants coerced and oppressed by those with guns. However, the next morning many Idongo residents, joined by people from nearby villages (eye witness estimates ranged from eighty to three hundred) stormed the conservation project base and destroyed the radio post. They tried to confiscate the anti-poaching guards’ weapons and some shot off guns of their own, though mostly in the air. Villagers ripped the clothes from at least one guard's back.

Although others living in the area had been dispossessed and/or jailed before, those incidents had sparked no such rallying or popular uprising. Here, though, the conservation committee president, a man with some influence and capacity to mobilize, had seen his own son arrested and convinced people that the guards’ actions were egregious. Those who felt implicated in this affront to such an extent as to participate in denouncing it were not limited to the immediate families of the detained. Others, too, felt a need to communicate: we are not those who can be walked all over like that. A desire for vengeance was one inspiration for their demonstration, but their claim was not to take an eye for an eye. When the Idongo people attacked the anti-poaching base, their wish to punish or gain compensation for damage done to them was overshadowed by their desire to refuse being treated in a way that struck them as redolent of “bare life,” devoid of the courtesy due to associates, if not fellow-citizens. Courtesy in this context is more a matter of facilitating negative liberty than upholding a system of control or discipline (Lombard Reference Lombardn.d.).

A crucial element is “we”: the sense of relation and/or common cause that incites or even requires certain kinds of action in response to certain kinds of violence. This is an old idea in anthropology, that when violence against a particular person is experienced as an assault on “us,” and an attack by “him” can equally be construed as one by “them,” then new forms of mobilization, including war, become possible (Kelly Reference Kelly2000).Footnote ¹⁹ While the question of who is a friend and who is an enemy has been fundamental to understanding war and sovereignty in much Western theory, here it is less important than the question of who will help to protest unjust/demeaning, would-be sovereign behavior. Doing so does not foreclose future collaboration with those who one is now denouncing; it is not about “my group” against “yours,” but rather about who can enjoy privilege and exception and who will potentially be at the mercy of those bearing that liberty. And as such, it is about the relationship between sovereign-prerogative violence and assuring fundamental values about how to live.

The archives on armed conservation include many procès verbaux and other accounts of dispossession and killing that incited no outcry. But in other cases, like that in Idongo, such acts elicited a loud response. The relevant networks of association and mobilization can change, and depend on particular instances and personalities. The Idongo brouhaha ended with the anti-poaching guards releasing the people from the village they had captured. This was part of an underlying entente that stipulated that all involved would work harder to give each other space to pursue their projects. A Central African expression is evocative here: “I look, but I don't see” (in Sango: Mbi bâ, mais mbi bâ pépé)—that is, though they could not avoid “looking” at each other, they could refrain from “seeing” what specifically was going on (Lombard Reference Lombard2016a; Reference Lombardn.d.). And indeed, this is what they mostly did.

In northeastern CAR, freedom from self-consistency and freedom from molestation in one's projects, rather than the development of consistent self-regulation (Laidlaw Reference Laidlaw2013), take precedence over working together in a long-term way or submitting to hierarchical modes of organization (Lombard Reference Lombard, Carayannis and Lombard2015). Yet here, too, certain people emerge as visionaries and display an impressive ability to rally people. The following example concerns one such person, Yaya Ramadan, and the events that preceded and followed his violent death in 2002. These began with a repeated meting out of sovereign-prerogative violence, which, after Yaya's killing, led to a years-long process of back-and-forth denunciation. Neither the framework of criminality nor that of war fully capture the dynamics at work here, because these dynamics are fundamentally about who can act egregiously in the service of a value—liberty—to be enjoyed by the people participating in this claim, set amid a context with plural claimants to that status and without such claims being predicated on the stable exclusivity of groups.

Renowned as a Muslim cleric and a visionary, Yaya Ramadan was able to rally his fellow Gula-speakers and others in the area around his hometown of Tiringoulou as no one else could. People called him “Caliph.” The area has little in the way of organized associations; there are no farming cooperatives or similar initiatives. But when the Caliph asked people to do something, or suggested a policy, they listened. Armed conservation staffers explained to the Caliph that combating hunters and herders would bring revenue because it would permit safari hunting businesses to operate in the area. Caliph Yaya immediately saw the appeal of this scheme for his family, friends, and associates and asked to participate in the hunt for parkland interlopers (Roulet Reference Roulet2005).

Many Tiringoulou residents are armed, mostly with Kalashnikovs or hunting rifles, and about twenty men joined the Caliph to scour the parks and other restricted-access areas. This was far more support than the conservation project staff had received elsewhere. It showed initiative and organization to extents that surpassed how others had greeted conservation. Most people, like those from Idongo, while they explicitly rejected the project's terms only intermittently, did not help to enforce them. All involved agreed that it was the Caliph Yaya who, owing to his singular vision, intellect, and charisma, had made such operations possible and sustainable. The anti-poaching program archives detail the success of the Caliph's militia's work. Here is the tally from one incident: 750 kilograms of smoked meat seized, five camels slaughtered, and two hunters “eliminated” (PDRN 1998: 34). Note again the nature of these deaths: no enemies vanquished, acquaintances criminally killed, or friends sacrificed for a greater good; simply people eliminated. Their freedom was taken and that act was used to augment the sovereign writ of those who killed them. The victims were rendered neither inside nor outside the bonds of any locally-relevant political association. Their lives were erased.

In early May 2002, Caliph Yaya and his men carried out another successful operation, killing two poachers (as a later report described those killed), as well as nine donkeys, and confiscating 1,500 kilograms of meat. Examining the two corpses, they found a receipt issued by another local notable delivered against payment for the right to graze and hunt in the area. The receipt is evidence that imposing the framework of criminality would distort the multiple, overlapping, and person-specific ways in which what is legal or licit is determined in the area. The Caliph and his militia were less applying a law than attempting to transcend the messy realm of law by coercing others in ways the Caliph and his followers would not themselves abide.

Just a few days later, however, on 8 May 2002, associates of the dead men ambushed the Caliph while he was driving through the bush. He and three men accompanying him were shot dead. (Their associates also managed to kill a few of the attackers.) Being such a singular person, his death elicited tremendous denunciation among all of those who counted him a relation. People rallied to attack those they understood to have authored his death, namely Hemat and/or Ta'isha herders who move between this area and northern pastures in Chad and Sudan.Footnote ²⁰ Two pisteurs close to Yaya also threatened the regional head of the conservation project, rushing him and shooting in the air. They believed the project to have indirectly caused Yaya's death. They nevertheless remained with the project and faced no sanction because they were known as good fighters (Mbitikon Reference Mbitikon2002: 3). This indicates again how, rather than “groups,” what we find here is people who sometimes collaborate and sometimes denounce each other.

By the tenth of May, more herders, many of them armed, and others in Chadian military uniforms had crossed from Chad to CAR. They set fire to five villages, killed several people, and took hostages. Just over a week later, the deceased Caliph's supporters killed about one hundred Sudanese herders near the village of Mossabio. This kind of violence continued for several years, with varying details, dimensions, and participants (Roulet Reference Roulet2005).

The Sheikh Tidjani, an Islamic authority revered by most people in the region who lives in Nyala, in South Darfur, eventually became involved as a mediator. In late 2005, the Sudanese government promised material aid, specifically help toward rebuilding the Tiringoulou mosque and a gift of cash. With those promises, overt hostilities wound down. The money never arrived, which people in Tiringoulou found deplorable, but they did not know to whom to complain. Mistrust among people in the region has remained high, a tendency that has only been exacerbated by the post-2005 turn to rebellion.Footnote ²¹ And yet alliances, even between people from particularly mistrustful camps, are frequent too.

The attacks and counterattacks after Yaya's death look a bit like what used to be a fertile subject of inquiry in the anthropology of violence, namely feuding or raiding (Evans-Pritchard Reference Evans-Pritchard1940; Beidelman Reference Beidelman1961; Peristiany Reference Peristiany1965). Together, these concepts refer to processes of back and forth attacks among people whose relations are subject to fission and fusion, attacks that are motivated by a variety of material and moral aims and subject to varying degrees of institutionalized means of bringing the violence to an end (Radcliffe-Brown Reference Radcliffe-Brown, Evans-Pritchard and Fortes1940; Evans-Pritchard Reference Evans-Pritchard1940; Sahlins Reference Sahlins1961). And in fact all of those factors were at play in the longer processes of violence in which the Caliph Yaya's killing is one important event. The make-up of the parties in conflict changed dramatically over the course of the hostilities. Gula and Runga (categories both historians and people in the area describe as ethnic groups, though their boundaries and relations change) first worked in solidarity and then increasingly came to mistrust each other. Attacking and being attacked gave rise to suspicions: are you really on “our” side, or did you aid or abet those attacking us? Both Gula and Runga generally found Kara and Kaba suspicious, while people who self-described using the latter monikers mostly felt caught in the crossfire, but also joined in, in various ways.

That said, thinking in terms of feuding, raiding, or vengeance can confuse consideration of the processes under discussion here. One reason is that, though the difficulty of differentiating these concepts has long been recognized (e.g., by Radcliffe-Brown at the same time as he advocated their usefulness [Reference Radcliffe-Brown, Evans-Pritchard and Fortes1940]), such differentiation has nevertheless been key to arguments made about them (e.g., by Evans-Pritchard Reference Evans-Pritchard1940; or Pospisil Reference Pospíšil1971). Denunciatory violence in northeastern CAR presents a shifting mix of traits from all three categories.Footnote ²² But the more pertinent reason why denunciation and sovereignty are more useful frameworks here is that they allow for a cross-cutting factor that has been under-emphasized in other studies: the importance of liberty. Compensation, honor, punishment—some combination of these goods may be important to those involved in denouncing in northeastern CAR. However, their interests in denouncing are not just to balance out the wrong done (with wrongful death seen as equivalent to a payment) or to demonstrate superior prowess in a valued skill (defense of honor), but also to assert a particular kind of relationship between the parties involved: a relationship in which you cannot usurp my liberty, as proved by my disrupting yours.

Denouncers are protesting a violent subjection without inclusion that others have enacted against them. Their act turns on processes of solidarity that are not given but made in specific instances, in part as a function of the changing relationships between the person killed and his kin, in the broad sense of the term. In the process, those involved are asserting that it is not you, but we who can live with liberty. Of course, putting on a spectacle of sovereign violence—killing, burning villages—does not necessarily entail getting away with it. Such is the assumption in the idea of the sovereign decision, that the decision speaks for itself and can elicit no reply other than submission (Schmitt Reference Schmitt and Schwab2005). The Caliph Yaya, a person who authored that kind of killing that has been called the hallmark of the sovereign, was himself killed by people who claimed that sovereign prerogative as their own. But that only becomes clear if we continue the analysis past the moment of spectacle itself and consider that as an event in a longer process of using a capacity for sovereign-claim violence to denounce others’ enaction of the same and obtain a measure of liberty.

A final example illustrates that denunciation dynamics are about asserting special power to set values around how to live, with the value here being liberty for the denouncers. In early 2009, four members of an anti-poaching militia unit based at Gordil, the furthest north and east of the anti-poaching bases, led by a foreign “technical assistant” (an expatriate former military officer effectively in charge), were transporting a fellow pisteur injured during a shoot-out with hunters to the Tiringoulou airstrip for evacuation. Their route passed through a national park, and while crossing this stretch of land they encountered a large herd of cows. The guards wanted to shoot at the cows. “They are right in the middle of the park!” the pisteurs lamented. It felt like a provocation. However, the technical assistant counseled inaction, for they were too few to defend themselves if they found that the cattle were accompanied by well-armed minders. Equally, they would be unable to stay and protect nearby villages in the event the herders denounced the anti-poaching guards’ attack.

The truck soon came to a village named Mélé, and the village head (chef de village) waved it down and implored the pisteurs to shoot the cattle. The technical assistant explained why they could not do so, but the village head persisted—the cattle's presence was an affront he could not countenance. He promised that twenty men from Mélé would join the pisteurs. The technical assistant explained that they could not stay to protect the village, but, afraid of losing face, he agreed they could jointly go after the cattle in order to send a message to their minders. He doled out ammunition to the new, temporary members of his team. During the ensuing firefight, one herder was killed. The pisteurs continued to the airstrip and sent the wounded guard to hospital.

The next day, though, janjaweed (Central Africans’ term of choice to refer to men-in-arms with the aspect of those from the Chad/Darfur borderlands) surrounded the village and held it hostage. Some observers said there were forty of these armed janjaweed, some of them horse-mounted, and others said there were as many as eighty. In any case, there were enough to demand, with credibility, a blood payment of ten million CFA (about US$20,000). Contributions were cobbled together from Mélé residents and others in the region sympathetic to their plight. The armed attackers received a large enough portion of the cash they had demanded to agree to pull back.

When the herder was killed, his relations demanded redress in a manner consistent with a legal mode of reasoning, that, for instance, many Muslims in the region understand Sharia to dictate: a payment should be inflicted against the wrong-doer to compensate for the harm caused the family by losing their productive member. The matter did not end there, however. About a month after the Mélé incidents a few pisteurs were in their homes on the Gordil anti-poaching base when hundreds of armed herders or janjaweed surrounded the base. They fired no shots, and did not need to since the superiority of their force was obvious to all. The guards understood this show of force to be a denunciation expressing the sentiment, “You cannot infringe on our liberty, because we could do much worse to you.” Shortly thereafter, the anti-poaching unit abandoned the Gordil base. The herders who denounced them were right: the guards could not usurp their liberty. The relations among those who the guards sought to counter and even kill were too strong and wide, and they mobilized to denounce.

Desires for punishment, vengeance, and honor may all have factored into people's participation in that denunciation, but more fundamentally, their action demonstrated that it was not the anti-poaching guards, but they themselves who could enact sovereign-prerogative violence and determine how to live. Enjoying such exceptional status is generally not a stable status,Footnote ²³ the marker of one group or class as opposed to another. People mobilize along different lines in different cases; circumstances shift interests and influence. But while processes of denunciation do not create stable sovereigns, that does not change the fact that the things being contested are matters of sovereignty; that is, they are about the interplay between sovereign-prerogative violence and values about how to live.