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 Reference Richards and Peters2007) 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 part attempts to explain the logic that actually motivates the LRA.

Finnstrom's book is the product of several years’ research in the Gulu and Kitgum areas between 1996 and 2003. The first chapter provides a sophisticated discussion of Acholi ethnicity. While showing the many ways in which colonial policies shaped the emergence of an Acholi identity, Finnstrom insists that it was not invented by the British. Clans were more often the operative level of political and social activity, but a sense of distinct Acholi-ness (and ethnolinguistic relation to a wider Luo group) did exist before colonization. Where the British intervened most actively was in trying to create a hierarchical leadership structure within Acholi society, and then cementing what they saw as Acholi ‘martial’ tendencies by recruiting many of them into the King's African Rifles.

Finnstrom next details the ways that colonial biases, including the British tendency to use the Buganda polity as the yardstick by which all other Ugandan ethnic groups were measured, continued into the post-colonial period. He catalogues the abuses of Museveni's National Resistance Army against Acholi people, including the theft of thousands of heads of cattle. Livestock had been the place where most Acholi saved whatever wealth they were able to accumulate.Footnote ¹ The resulting resentment at this dispossession still looms large in Acholi narrations of their relationship to the Museveni government. This grievance is part of Finnstrom's rejoinder to the characterization by many Ugandans and some non-Ugandans of LRA violence as a kind of involution of the senseless barbarism that northern Ugandans had visited upon their compatriots under the Obote and Amin administrations.

Finnstrom also deconstructs some of the simplistic narratives of the religious roots of Acholi insurgency, which draw a straight line from Alice Auma (better known as ‘Lakwena’ or ‘messenger’) to her father, Severino Lukoya, and to LRA leader Joseph Kony, who is said to be her second cousin. Rather than religious zealots who ultimately turned to violent means, Finnstrom argues, they were marginalized figures who pursued their political objectives using a religious idiom. He finishes the chapter with a critique of the bad faith of the Museveni government, which has installed a structure of ‘grassroots’ democratic governance. This appears as something of a sham democracy, with particularly sharp limits on free expression imposed in the country's north: ‘The dilemma, as informants put it, is to openly criticize the government without being regarded as a rebel collaborator’ (p. 95).

Finnstrom continues his deconstructive work in the third chapter, entitled ‘Rebel manifestos in context’. Having amassed a relentless catalogue of the injustices and suffering that people in northern Uganda have withstood, Finnstrom now takes on the fact that, ‘most observers, including academics, have dismissed the LRA/M on moral grounds and thereafter also disqualified the movement as resolutely nonpolitical’ (p. 100). Over the course of the chapter, he dispenses with several pseudo explanations of the war, including a ‘documentary’ film that shows houses under (slow) construction as if they were signs of rebel destruction and shows footage of Sierra Leonean kamajor fighters in place of LRA footage, which the film's makers were unable to obtain.

However, as he begins to move towards an explanation of what the LRA/M actually is about, things become murkier. He quotes a young man who writes that since his father, who paid his school fees, was killed by the LRA, he would have no choice but to join them and fight the government. As an example of the frustration and despair an individual might feel at a particularly low point, this is powerful. However, as an actual explanation of the LRA or its possible legitimacy amongst Acholi speakers, it seems to be a stretch. Again, denigrating comments quoted by Finnstrom – like Museveni's comparison of Acholi to ‘grasshoppers in a bottle, where they will eat one another before they find the way through the bottleneck’ (p. 106) – do a good job of illuminating the sources of Acholi resentment of the government. They don't explain, however, how this resentment gets mobilized in the service of LRA recruitment, or broader Acholi tolerance of a group that largely preys upon them. While this resentment can be assumed to contribute to that dynamic, there must be several intervening steps in the process. There are marginalized and resentful citizens all over the world, but only a handful of groups like the LRA/M.

Finnstrom proposes the LRA/M's manifestos as a partial explanation of the group's objectives. In this section, there are several incongruities. We only read Kony's own words twice in the book, first from the preamble to one LRA/M manifesto. Kony writes,

Along with a quote where he describes Museveni's soldiers as being ‘armed from tooth to nail’, this is all we hear from Kony himself. By contrast, on the book's next page, Finnstrom quotes the LRA delegation's opening remarks from 2006 peace talks:

This passage does not seem to have been written by Kony, and there is nothing in the book to indicate that any of the LRA leadership are preoccupied with such issues as ‘undermining the position of women’ or ‘the erosion of social welfare provisions’. Finnstrom writes that he wants to ‘nuance the frequent claim that the manifestos of the LRA/M, on the Internet or elsewhere, are inauthentic diaspora creations and therefore “bear virtually no relation to anything actually happening in northern Uganda”’ (p. 120). This is welcome, but the small amount of evidence he presents actually seems to support the impression that the authors of these two passages have little to do with one another. Indeed it is Kony's awkward insistence that the LRA/M's members are just ‘ordinary and Practicing Christians’ that sounds like the plea of an insurgent to be taken seriously. The passages about structural adjustment read as if they were targeted precisely at foreign diplomats and researchers. It is not clear why Finnstrom should feel this is a bad thing; many insurgent groups, from Nigeria's MEND to the Tamil Tigers to the Zapatistas, have sophisticated communications strategies that successfully target global audiences. Whether they also achieve legitimacy among local constituencies is a different question. What comes across clearly is that the LRA/M's attempts to stake a claim to local legitimacy (or at least toleration) have been more successful than their parallel attempts on the international stage.

Locally, most of Finnstrom's interlocutors are both cautious and thoughtful, and many state something close to one young woman's observation that, ‘I do not support the rebels, nor am I supporting the government. I am just in a dilemma. I would like to support the rebels, but they are killing my people’ (p. 118). It is this space of divided consciousness and of survival in a no-win situation that the book's most searching passages explore. Finnstrom does a good job of showing how ethnic and racial stereotypes, Ugandan history, failed developmentalism and Western coddling of the Museveni government have all contributed to the context of the LRA/M insurgency. The pull of these stereotypes acts like an undertow in the book, constantly threatening to take the author's feet out from under him. We find out a great deal about ‘what we are not’, a phrase from an LRA website that Finnstrom uses as the title of a section heading in his book (p. 123). Yet we really want to learn more about what they are.

Finnstrom's atempt to enlighten us begins in Chapter 4, as he discusses the experience of displacement among Acholi civilians, the power of rumour in the ‘grey zone’ created by the noxious mixture of structural and wartime violence, the gendered aspects of this violence, and finally the ritual context in which the LRA/M insurgency takes place. In the end, the reader is convinced that Museveni operates mostly in bad faith when it comes to northern Uganda, that International Criminal Court prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo has been a self-promoting bully in the same region, that British colonizers were coercive and reified ethnicity, that the World Bank imposed disastrous policies that further impoverished those on the margins of the Ugandan economy and polity, and that most donors and diplomats have unquestioningly supported Museveni when they ought to have asked many more questions. We also learn a great deal about the misery these various interventions have imposed on Acholi civilians. If the LRA/M remains inscrutable, this is mostly the result of an insurmountable methodological challenge. Short of putting himself at an unacceptable level of risk, there is no way Finnstrom could have done participant observer research with them.

Anthropologists have been particularly successful at describing the contexts of marginalization, suffering and displacement that have constituted the grievances out of which many denigrated African insurgent groups have arisen. However these initial conditions are just one part of a dialectic. Legitimacy, based in part on whether different groups offer a plausible remedy or alternative to the status quo, is another part. This has been the side of the dialectic that has usually preoccupied political scientists, and they have used things like recruitment patterns as proxy measurements of legitimacy. Yet this too is an area where anthropologists like Finnstrom could usefully intervene. We have known since at least E. P. Thompson's work on the moral economy of the crowd in eighteenth-century England that poor people are not rational choice automatons, but rather are involved in a complex calculus of hedging their bets, avoiding the worst outcomes, and at the same time pursuing their own best interests to the extent that they can. In this context, the notion that the LRA might derive some partial legitimacy amongst ordinary Acholi both from their stand against an unpopular government, and because at least at first the messianic subtext of their message may have resonated with local people seems plausible. At the same time, the fact that almost all LRA recruitment is done by abduction and that areas of LRA activity seem to become rapidly depopulated suggest that most Acholi have come over time to believe that the LRA/M does not offer a legitimate response to the problems of Uganda's north.

The LRA/M, then, seems to operate within an ambiguous space of very partial local legitimacy similar to that we might find among many of the armed groups in the Liberian civil wars or in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. For peasants living in the zones controlled by such groups, the challenge is indeed one of living in bad surroundings, and of attempting to manage the violent and unpredictable forces wielded by the fighters. In the Ugandan setting this attempt not so much to control as to bind ex-combatants, and to assert communal rights of authorship, seems most clearly represented in the Mato oput ceremony by which ex-combatants are reintegrated into Acholi society. Finnstrom's ethnography in the end gives the reader a nuanced view of this space of foreshortened agency and of the ‘choiceless decisions’Footnote ² that face Acholi civilians, even if we learn little about LRA combatants or ex-combatants, or what social, cultural or political logics have caused them to keep fighting for so many years.

‘THE WORLD BANK MADE ME DO IT’

A central question in the three books is how to account for the influence of international actors in African conflicts. The issue surfaces as a veritable debate in Pratten and Sen's edited volume, Global Vigilantes. The chapters cover cases from Africa, Latin America and Asia, and some of the best are on Africa. David Pratten describes how and why Annang speakers in Nigeria classify armed robbers together with witches and murderers, while they place unarmed robbers in a different moral category. He traces the history of the uneasy relations amongst state-sponsored judicial authority, secret societies and hybrid village tribunals over a century of fractious competition. More interestingly still, he shows how changing notions about crime and justice – in the context of local micropolitics shaped by intergenerational competition between younger and elder men – led to a series of practices that emerged alongside changing political and economic realities. This allows him to walk the reader through a series of shifts in the constitution of ‘“legitimate” targets and appropriate punishments’ (p. 192) in a convincing way. The cultural construction of criminality, of shame, of masculinity and maturity are all elucidated, and we learn a great deal about actual political dynamics, while Pratten provides a running commentary on the broader issue of what Mbembe calls ‘private indirect government’.

Connerly Casey's chapter focuses on competition and cooperation between two groups of young Hausa men: ‘yan hisba, reformist Muslims charged with enforcing Shari'a law, and ‘yan daba, ganja-smoking street thugs who become allies or enemies of the ‘yan hisba according to circumstances. Like Pratten's finding that Annang armed robbers are placed in a radically different metaphysical category from the unarmed, Casey's chapter is full of the small surprises that ethnography and archival research can bring. She shows how the hard-partying petty criminal ‘yan daba were brought closer to the pious ‘yan hisba not by recourse to proselytization, but through the blandishments of a politics of autochthony. This united young Hausa men willing to use violence in order to dispossess (both Muslim and Christian) others on the basis of ethnic, and not religious, solidarity. Similarly, while ‘yan daba were not interested in joining their reformist ‘yan hisba colleagues in violence aimed at eradicating Bori possession cults or bars serving local alcoholic beverages, they did join them in misogynistic attacks on matan zamani (modern women), sometimes raping women as ‘punishment’ for circulating independently.

A different emphasis is represented by a chapter on lynching in Bolivia in the period around 2000–5. Author Daniel Goldstein sets out to contextualize these lynchings within the broader politics of contemporary Bolivia, with a special focus on the neo-liberal reforms pushed by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, and promoted by a neo-colonial United States government. He presents the arresting fact that the democratically elected Bolivian government killed more of its own citizens in 2003 than the prior military dictatorships had during any of the years of their rule. The explanation, he plausibly suggests, is that this violence under a democratic neo-liberal order is the collateral damage of privatization, informalization and the revocation of rights and entitlements of citizens and workers under the new ideology of ‘responsibilization’ and ‘flexibility’. From here, however, he quickly jumps to the claim that ‘Lynching, in a sense, fulfils the highest mandates of neo-liberal rationality; it represents the privatization of justice, the assumption by individuals of a service ordinarily provided by the state, and so points to the increasing importance of “flexibility” as a personal and communal survival strategy in neo-liberal society.’

There is a certain logic to this argument, but it has moved so fast that it is hard to know how to evaluate it. Who gets lynched? We learn only that they are ‘usually a supposed thief, child molester, or some kind of felon or petty criminal’ (p. 244). In the absence of further information, it is hard to accept that alleged child molesters are placed in the same category as ‘petty criminals’. If so, this would be significant. Goldstein finishes by observing that although they ‘stridently and publicly reject neo-liberalism, in their communities, ordinary Bolivians have adopted practices that clearly express and enact neo-liberal rationality’. The reason his argument remains unconvincing is that alongside the analysis of lynching as an internalized form of neo-liberal practice, Goldstein makes passing mention of the ‘Water War’ of 2000, when residents of the city of Cochabamba staged a popular uprising that forced the state to cancel its plans to privatize the city's water system; the Gas War, a 2003 uprising against the export of Bolivian gas to the United States; and the 2005 election of the indigenous populist Evo Morales, who staunchly opposes the ‘Washington Consensus’.

These concerted, self-assured and largely successful undertakings by poor and working-class Bolivians make one sceptical of the proposition that lynchings, which were becoming widespread during exactly the same period, were a kind of unconscious reflex of brainwashing by the World Bank. One wonders, indeed, if the lynchings were not a neighbourhood-level symptom of a shift from what Gramsci called the war of position towards the more assertive war of manoeuvre. Many instances of revolutionary politics have been accompanied by some degree of moralizing violence directed towards pickpockets, prostitutes and other lumpen types, but given the lack of detailed description, we can only guess whether this was the case in Bolivia.

As the example of ‘yan hisba's use of rape as a form of patriarchal discipline suggests, the material presented in the more convincing analyses of violence in these volumes insists on the agency of the actors involved, even when it is an agency we wish they had not exercised. This disturbs the predictable politics of blame, whether in its racist iteration or its anti-racist mirror image. It also opens the authors to the possible criticisms of Afro-pessimism, blaming the victim, or participating in what Valentine Daniel has termed a ‘pornography of violence’ (Daniel Reference Daniel1997). Yet this would seem to be the risk one must necessarily run in order to engage seriously with particular moral worlds. For it is those particularities that determine the fact that in the many places where neo-liberal reforms have been rammed down the throats of quasi-sovereign governments, some citizens have turned to practices of lynching, some to other forms of vigilantism, and still others to neither.

As Ray Abrahams (whose Reference Abrahams1998 book, Vigilant Citizens: vigilantism and the state inspired the essays in the edited volume) writes in the final chapter, ‘[E.P. Thompson] interestingly noted with regard to food riots that it may be worthwhile to ponder the apparent absence of rioting in some places as well as its presence when and where we encounter it’ (pp. 436–7). This and similar counterfactual questions are unlikely even to be asked within the frame of top-down political economic analysis (regardless of its ideological orientation), exactly because it manufactures an ex post facto inevitability for observed phenomena, implicitly banishing counterfactual evidence from the analytical frame. The argument from political economy has other risks, as well.

Pratten and Sen do a good job in the ‘Introduction’ to the volume of finding a balance between showing how large political economic trends set the conditions of possibility for the local dynamics described in the book's chapters, while insisting on the pre-eminence of local realities. As they write, ‘The link between vigilantism and globalization is a powerful argument, then, but only a partial one’, insisting that, ‘long historical trajectories, and particular cultural repertoires, are the proximate and pressing imperatives behind vigilante violence’. In his conclusion to the volume, Abrahams makes a useful comparison between the conservative tendency of vigilantes and those of social bandits. As Hobsbawm, Thompson and others have pointed out, poor people's uses of violence often support property relations that will reinforce their own disenfranchisement, but it would be a category mistake to assume that they are thus robotically reproducing the structures and ideologies of the rich. As these three books show, in this realm of extra-legal violence, both class and gender relations are far more complex than this.

THE DIFFERENCE THAT GENDER MAKES

All of this suggests that to take people as fully developed, three-dimensional actors, we as analysts have to take the good with the bad. This is perhaps nowhere more difficult to accept than in writing about African women in conflict settings. Yet in Bush Wives and Girl Soldiers, Chris Coulter seems to have done this with ease. The book is a model of clarity, with seven clearly structured main chapters repeating a pattern that never feels formulaic, and each chapter built elegantly on the sequence preceding it. The first chapter places the Sierra Leonean civil war in the context of a historical overview of Sierra Leone and of the sources and meanings of RUF violence. The next describes kinship, marriage and the gendered division of labour in Sierra Leonean society generally, and Kuranko society more specifically. The third chapter describes the patterns of abduction, sexual violence and social organization within the rebels’ camps. Chapter 4 describes the different roles assumed by women as bush wives and female soldiers, describing the ‘choiceless decisions’ facing almost all women within the structures of rebel life. Chapter 5 describes the deeply flawed disarmament, demobilization and reintegration (DDR) programme in Sierra Leone as well as the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and the Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL). The last two chapters describe the economic and social struggles of formerly abducted women as they attempt to construct new lives under extremely difficult circumstances.

The book is powerful. It combines copious material on life during and after the war from Coulter's participant observation and her many interviews with incisive analysis and great sensitivity to the harsh realities her interlocutors have experienced. Her question throughout is straightforward: what was it like to be a woman in the midst of a civil war? As she notes, this seemingly obvious question has garnered little attention within the large and growing literature on conflict in Africa. The war in Sierra Leone is probably the most studied of any in post-colonial Africa, and the quality of the analyses, some of which strongly disagree among themselves, has been high. Moreover, this literature has built upon a strong foundation of Sierra Leone and Upper Guinea Coast ethnography, a substantial portion of which has focussed on questions of gender (Ferme Reference Ferme2001; Leach Reference Leach1994; Little Reference Little1974; MacCormack Reference MacCormack, Rosaldo and Lamphere1974; Shaw Reference Shaw2002). This allows Coulter to take what might otherwise have been a risky decision, to work almost exclusively with women.

While the book is not easy reading, given the sometimes detailed accounts of sexual violence, it constantly proposes surprising material. Abducted women, we learn, were systematically gang-raped with great frequency and brutality for several days before being ‘rescued’ by a rebel, sometimes of commander rank, and taken as his ‘bush wife’. Perhaps in the light of their brutal initial abuse,Footnote ³ many of them seem to have developed real attachments to their rebel husbands. Whether this was the result of a dynamic like ‘Stockholm syndrome’ or something else is hard to determine, but this attachment was supplemented by the fear many women felt about trying to escape. Many of them recount seeing or hearing other women killed while attempting such a course.

There were many ways in which rebel life was not a pure state of exception. Some rebel camps had elder women who acted as midwives for those women who became pregnant in the bush. In other cases, elder women acted as ‘Mamy Queens’, with the authority to resolve disputes within the rebel community. Coulter describes how, just as the rebel commanders exercised despotic power over their subordinates, so their wives sat atop a parallel social hierarchy. They had other abducted women as servants to attend to their needs, and considerable power. It is only a slight surprise to learn that some young women who were so privileged during the war feel some nostalgia for that period.

One of the most interesting chapters in the book discusses the different ways that DDR and the transitional justice mechanisms of the TRC and SCSL failed from the point of view of her young female interlocutors. This chapter is one of the most troubling in the book. As we struggle to comprehend the enormity of the abuses endured by the abducted women, we follow their journey into the post-war dispensation, and find that they are not treated much better. Few women registered in DDR programmes because there were no provisions to protect them from further violence; registering, they feared, would expose them to arrest or even murder, and many of their families urged them simply to pretend that they were never involved in the war. In turning from DDR towards a discussion of the transitional justice process, Coulter rightly criticizes the Eurocentric assumptions about ‘talking cures’ that undergird the truth and reconciliation process. Like other anthropologists, she emphasizes that Sierra Leoneans do not share the assumption that retelling the stories of their past sufferings will be therapeutic.

This point is mitigated, however, by some of her other observations. Coulter writes: ‘Instead of therapeutic talking, many people in the communities, including some of the girls and women I worked with, believed that abducted women and female ex-combatants would be best served by forgetting the whole episode, never talking about it, and starting to behave in a culturally acceptable manner’ (p. 174). Coulter is clear that the ideal of public testimony promulgated by the TRC was culturally ‘unsuitable’ to Kuranko society. She is equally clear in other parts of the book, however, that the injunction to forget and remain silent was experienced by many women as a form of violence in which the desire of families not to be subjected to shame by their daughters/sisters/wives took precedence over the young women's desires or needs, whatever they may have been. After all, scores of women did talk with her about their experiences, many of them on multiple occasions. In many of the cases she describes, the explicit hesitation noted both by abductees and their families relates to publicizing the (re)telling of these stories that create a strong sense of shame, not the telling per se. In this, Sierra Leoneans don't seem that culturally different from anyone else.

The ambivalent nature of outside interventions comes to the fore again in the next chapter, on women's struggles to make a living after the war. Here, Coulter shows that many of the skills training programmes for women in the post-conflict environment did little to set them up with a skill that would allow them to support themselves and their families – though they did serve many of the women as a form of almost accidental ‘trauma healing’ (p. 191). Coulter quotes female ex-combatants extolling the ability of the programmes to give them self-confidence, to ‘come to terms with some of their more unpleasant wartime experiences’ (p. 192), and simply to keep busy and distracted. She also specifies that some women expressed an appreciation for the chance to spend time with other women who had gone through the same things they had. This desire for sympathetic co-presence, like the hours they spent recounting their experiences to Coulter, suggests that the psychic lives of Kuranko women may not be quite so inscrutable to cultural others as Coulter sometimes argues. At the least, we see a situation where the law of unintended consequences prevails: jobs training programmes fail to equip women to make a living, while they provide some social and psychological succour. Meanwhile, TRC testimonies that claim to advance psychological healing do nothing of the kind, though they may model a certain form of bankable performance of suffering that Mats Utas has described as an exercise of ‘victimcy’, and thus contribute to Sierra Leoneans’ post-war economic survival strategies (Utas Reference Utas2005).

This does, however, raise a larger issue that is partly addressed by both Finnstrom and Coulter. Both authors make convincing cases for a ‘cultural’ critique of the international human rights regime. The underlying assumptions on which the logic of transitional justice is constructed are ethnocentric, and do not seem to fit easily with local notions of justice. If we can agree that the international (really Euro-American) judicial common sense is ‘wrong’ in these settings, is it simply given that the local common sense is ‘right’? It is clear that the international human rights and transitional justice institutions have vastly greater sums supporting and legitimating their activities than poor Africans have. Still, one reading of this material might suggest that a productive cultural friction could issue from the lack of fit in notions of personhood, culpability, and reconciliation.

The excellence of Coulter's study reminds us that in many ways the greatest challenges in writing about conflict are methodological ones. Because of the deeply troubling nature of much of the material, it is impossible to escape thinking hard about theory, ethics and the politics of representation. Still, none of these can compensate for a failure to enter the lives of one's interlocutors to the extent that terms like ‘structural violence’, ‘choiceless decisions’, and ‘neo-colonial legacies’ take on more than clichéd meaning.

As with Coulter's book, Atreyee Sen's chapter (Pratten and Sen 2007) on the women's Aghadi squads within Bombay's Hindu nationalist Shiv Sena is a testament to the results that dogged participant observation can yield. Here again, gender is a complicating factor, but in many instances these women's xenophobic violence is not radically different from men's. As Sen argues, it is clear that leaders within the women's Aghadi organization use their reputations for rough justice to bring abusive husbands and male co-workers into line. Sen herself puts a harasser to flight by invoking the name of the group.

However, these women's energies are often devoted to planning and executing various forms of violence. In Sen's account, these range from one instance she witnessed in which Aghadi women threw their shoes at a group of women in burqas in order to claim a spot to sit at the beach, to another in which these women are active, stone-throwing participants in an attack on a bus that resulted in a Muslim man being doused with kerosene and burned to death. Coulter's book, too, documents the ways in which female rebels committed all of the kinds of atrocity for which the Sierra Leonean war became infamous (notably the amputation of hands and arms). In these cases, there is considerable discussion among the actors themselves and the larger community about the relations between gender and essence. For Kuranko and other people in Sierra Leone, both women and men presume women to be wild and potentially dangerous until they have been ‘domesticated’ by such practices as clitoridectomy and initiation into the women's Sande/Bundu society. In this regard, life as a rebel in the bush stands as a kind of inversion of the female initiation societies, which also cloister initiates in the bush while they undergo the process of transformation and enculturation. In the rebel bush, women's ‘inherent’ wildness was cultivated and amplified, as was men's capacity for violent, immoral acts. Both Sen and Coulter make it clear that for some women, as for some of their male counterparts, this was an exciting and enjoyable process. They were indeed eager to use their violent skills and reputations to achieve instrumental ends within an unequal gender dispensation. However, they also relish the same jouissance as the men in suddenly finding themselves empowered and entitled to exercise the (at least theoretical) power of life and death over others. Sen herself describes how she ‘could identify with the Sena women in the childlike glee at having handled a toy that usually boys played with’ (p. 83) when she held an automatic rifle for the first time. Thus women involved in extralegal violence face different structural challenges from men, especially in their attempts to reintegrate into civilian society. However, the motivations and processes that brought them to participate in wars and vigilantism exhibit some striking similarities to those that apply to their male counterparts.

NARRATIVE AND EXPERIENCE

The books by Coulter and Finnstrom have been deeply affected by the influence of Michael Jackson's sensitive and philosophical anthropology, much of which focuses on the same Kurankokan-speaking area of Sierra Leone where Coulter did her fieldwork. As both authors state with grace and empathy, living in war zones accentuates a tendency present in all social life, namely the attempt to balance and control the dynamics shaping one's environment (Finnstrom 2008: 14; Jackson Reference Jackson2002; Reference Jackson2004).Footnote ⁴

If a central problem for these authors is that of ontological insecurity, then a vital question becomes how the people with whom they conduct research manage, control, order and bind the people, things and relations that surround them. This has implications for relations between self and other, but it also raises questions about how individuals and societies make sense of war. In this regard, war might be defined by the extent to which it surpasses a threshold of ontological disruption for both the civilians and combatants involved. Neither the number of casualties nor the level of media coverage can help us evaluate this disruption. Part of the answer to this question lies in the level of ambient or ‘structural’ violence prevailing before the increase in density and severity of threats to ontological security. Another determinant is how people have narrativized these events so that they make sense. In doing so, they assert a degree of (authorial) control over them, and thus domesticate them. The authors give the impression that in Acholiland and Sierra Leone people have great difficulty imposing this kind of narrative order. One possible explanation for this is the ambivalence they feel for the rebel groups, whose tactics often contradict their rhetoric. Though they may be inclined to consider the enemy of their enemy (the predatory state) as their friend, the fact that this would-be friend is visiting rape, murder and theft upon them makes this difficult indeed. Another possible reason is that the toll of various forms of dispossession and prejudice that preceded and contributed to these wars left them with fewer tactics for imposing order on their unruly worlds.

Meanwhile, the vigilante cases seem rather well ordered in narrative, even where the political, economic and personal situations of those involved in vigilante activities are unpredictable and precarious. All three books suggest that the threshold for imposing narrative order is lower than that for imposing order over household budgets or strategies of kinship, marriage and seeking education/expertise in order to maximize life chances. The inability even to tell a coherent story about situations and experiences of conflict thus alerts us to the fact that these situations have been incredibly dire and disruptive. One needn't fall back on European psychological notions of trauma to assert that many of the women and men in the two monographs have had their lives disrupted to a degree that they struggle almost daily to squeeze them into even the most rudimentary narrative frames. After all, Cosentino's work on Musa Wo narratives (Reference Cosentino1982) points us to ways that Mende people had for narrating morality tales under conditions of structural inequity and suffering little different from those that applied before Sierra Leone's war.

Still, few of the people whose voices come through in the monographs express anything like despair, nor do their tones indicate underlying rage. Are these emotions culturally specific? Are they the luxury of petit-bourgeois experience? Is it possible that they are buried, possibly to resurface later – even generations later? Rosalind Shaw (2002) and Chauveau and Richards (Reference Chauveau and Richards2008) have suggested that the legacies of slavery in the region are far from gone, even if they've been officially ‘forgotten’. While the dominant anthropological critique of transitional justice is that its conceptions of person, self and psyche are ethnocentric, one might be permitted to ask the question in a different way – have local techniques for dealing with the experience of violence and dispossession over the past five centuries been effective?

The difficulty in narrating these events throws scholarly observers into a delicate conundrum: if local people have difficulty narrating an explanation for a conflict, does the outside observer have the right to impose one? If Ugandan or Sierra Leonean villagers don't know what the Washington Consensus is, should we ‘connect the dots’ for them? For it is clear that none of these interlocutors have blamed the wars in Sierra Leone or Uganda on the World Bank. When we give them a ‘helping hand’, is it for their benefit or our own?

ALL PROTOCOL OBSERVED?

Violence tends to exceed language's ability to describe and objectify it. However, certain types of violence, including those offered by anti-colonial, separatist, Marxist and religiously oriented movements, can present a legible surface. Other types of violent actors – from social bandits to vigilantes, racketeers/Mafiosi, carnival revellers and mobs – have all found their academic proponents, and we now have at least ideal typical descriptions and analyses of them. The three books under review here carve out differing challenges within this academic landscape. While Global Vigilantes sets out to complicate, expand and build upon Abrahams's watershed work on vigilantes, the other two books aim to understand far more inscrutable and illegible actors. The rebel fighters in Sierra Leone and Uganda were not fighting for an easily recognizable cause, and even when their aims were sometimes articulated, their actions seemed to contradict their talk. Like peasant insurrections, their uses of violence have been largely illegible both to local people and to outside analysts. The conflicts they wage(d) are mosaics of micropolitical struggles ranging from interfamilial feuds to land disputes, banditry and intercommunal tensions. These motivations may become amalgamated under a single banner, sometimes through observers’ misrecognition and at other times through the actors’ attempts to justify themselves. Coulter's book faces the double inscrutability of women's experiences in this context, where many of her informants were both victims and perpetrators, and where their experiences both as abductees and as fighters/looters had no legitimate place in local categories for understanding and incorporating experiences of war and violence.

This illegibility poses a particular problem in the context of the politics of representation of Africa, and especially of African conflicts, noted at the beginning of this essay. Veering too far in the direction of trying to make illegible wars make sense is likely to drain them of much of their real complexity and contradiction, even if it does serve the polemical objective of showing that they are not irrational. On the other hand, leaving them inscrutable would allow them to retain their particularity, but would play into stereotypical portrayals of Africa as a Heart of Darkness, while failing to challenge Euro-American readers’ complacency about their own implication in these conflicts through their governments’ policies, their insatiable consumer appetites, and their indifference to politics in out-of-the-way places.

Each of the three books reviewed here proposes a thoughtful and nuanced approach to this challenge. They collectively underline the fact that treating global political economy and local moral economies as being linked in a zero sum equation is as unproductive as the ‘greed vs grievance’ thesis that preceded it (Paddon Reference Paddon2010). Studies of the modes and meanings of violence in Africa must nevertheless decide which elements to place in the foreground and which in the background.

At times, one might wish for a scholarly equivalent to the brilliant Nigerian solution to interminable protocol acknowledgments at the beginning of a speech –‘All protocol observed!’ Thereby, an author could acknowledge the destructive nature of many outside interventions on Africa.Footnote ⁵ Then, if any of these factors were of lesser relevance to the subject at hand, they could be tabled, having been duly acknowledged and cited, and if of greater importance they could be further explored.

In reality, all of these factors tend to exert simultaneous influences on practices of extra-legal violence, and so such a solution would work better in imagination than in practice. It might nonetheless be worth bearing in mind as a provocation. The great strength of anthropology and history as disciplinary approaches to understanding human activity is that they build theory from the ground up, from the minutiae of observed actions and speech, of court or hospital documents, of interviews, newspaper articles and whispered confidences. For this reason, when confronted with such material, we tend to find ourselves surprised and confused, unable to progress easily towards large-scale theory. Conversely, when starting with a strong theoretical frame, it is quite easy for anthropologists to select apt illustrations from their material in order to support their initial argument.

If there is a criticism to be made of an essay like the one on Bolivian lynchings, it is not that it is wrong – indeed, it might well be perfectly correct. The criticism is that if a grand theorist of neo-liberalism like David Harvey were handed a folder of clippings from the Bolivian press but never visited the country, we would expect an article almost identical to the one included in the Pratten and Sen volume. It is a testament to Finnstrom's and Coulter's books and most of the essays in the volume on vigilantism that their authors worked in the other, far more difficult direction, building their analyses from the ground up and surprising, even confounding us in the process.