Religion and the limits of making sense of violence as it happens

The NYTimes "Room for Debate" forum featured a short piece by me as part of their discussion on the possibility of a broader Central African religious war. As I'm starting to learn is the norm when working with daily journalists, the first I heard that they were going forward with the feature was when someone tweeted it this morning. (I had submitted an entry last week, but received no reply other than a "thanks". The piece they eventually published was edited and had a title that was not my own.)

They had asked for 300 words, but I couldn't quite manage to distill it to that extent. Even at 600 words, I could barely scratch the surface of these complicated issues.

The journalistic interest in religion as a driver of fighting in CAR has been among the reasons I have been reflecting lately about the (im?)possibility of fully accounting for violence as it plays out. The anthropological stock-in-trade is to make sense of social phenomena that at first appear senseless, and yet I have lately been reflecting on whether there might be limits to that approach when it comes to violence as it happens. Let me explain.

After the Cold War ended, a number of violent conflicts broke out across the African continent. Rwanda, Liberia, Sierra Leone, the Democratic Republic of the Congo: from the perspective of “The Coming Anarchy”-reading global public, these places all became synonymous with violence at once senseless and barbaric, as well as greedy and self-interested. A number of anthropologists who had long worked in these locales and knew them differently took up a charge to make sense of the so-called new wars and show their sociocultural foundations and meaning. Led by Paul Richards, longtime scholar of Sierra Leone, these scholars sought to counter the “new barbarism” thesis that emerged from accounts like Robert Kaplan’s Coming Anarchy. Excellent ethnographies have resulted from this impetus. To continue just with the case of Sierra Leone, I think of work by Chris Coulter, Mariane Ferme, Danny Hoffman, and Michael Jackson.

There is, however, a time-disconnect between war and ethnography. Ethnography takes time, and it is difficult to do during war. I know of one intrepid PhD student currently doing ethnographic research in CAR. During my own research there I stayed far from conflict, even as I tried to understand it, because I was concerned for my own safety. I managed to miss the two major attacks on Ndele that occurred during my time in CAR, in both cases by just days. There tends therefore to be an element of hindsight, or an element of pre-sight (in the case of ethnographic projects interrupted by war), to ethnographic accounts of war and violence. This has struck me repeatedly as I struggle to come to terms with what has been going on in CAR and to explain it for the journalists and others whose queries have been filling my inbox. I can point to historical and ethnographic dynamics A, B, C, D, and E that have helped bring people in CAR to their current predicament. And I can cite grievances X, Y, and Z that likely motivate the fighters. But the addition of all those factors does not somehow “add up” to the violence over the past year and a half. There remains an excess, beyond that which is explainable through reasons -- even reasons related to symbolism and performance. So while I agree with Richards that the new barbarism ideas are erroneous and damaging, I nevertheless wonder if it might be necessary to step back slightly, or at least step a bit to the side, from the project of making sense of violence.

In listening to interviews with anti-Balaka fighters, I have been struck by the disconnects between why they say they are fighting and what they are actually doing, as well as by the ways they contradict themselves. They claim not to be targeting all Muslims, but only “enemies” from Chad and Sudan who continue to target them. But then they scrawl graffiti declaring “No more mosques in CAR.” And mob violence acts first and asks questions later when it comes to assessing the provenance of “Muslims” who have been identified and targeted. The danger of referring to the situation in the CAR as motivated by, or playing out through, religious differences is that it hardens and fixes what are actually fluid -- or at least ill-defined -- categories and grievances that have other referents (such as foreignness) as well.

So as violence is ongoing, I wonder if we should be open to the idea that violence might exceed our attempts to make sense of it. That is not exactly a research agenda, nor does it offer a solution for the journalists tasked with reporting on what is going on. It is, rather, a reminder that when it comes to violence, not everything has a reason. I think frequently of a comment Ed van der Elsken made in his text accompanying his photo-book Bagara. To preface his description of a particularly chilling hunting expedition that he was part of, he wrote, “The next story is not meant to illustrate the barbarity of hunting, for this was not hunting. Nor was it an incident. Such things happen, I saw them” (1958: 23). In other words, the violence unleashed on a heavily-pregnant female elephant was not a scandalous event that set in motion a range of accountability initiatives (legal sanction, self-questioning, the end of the safari, or anything else). It was just the kind of thing that can happen sometimes when people have empowered themselves with violence, whether through guns or other means.

Two faces of CAR social relations: Openness and mistrust

I have an op-ed up at Al Jazeera America with a short account of some of the factors contributing to the violence in CAR over the past year+. Plenty of reports have detailed the political maneuvering and military entrepreneurship that have helped organize the current fighting. (Some of the best are Roland Marchal's pieces for Global Observatory and Africa Confidential's coverage.) I wanted to draw out another factor: the simultaneous openness/flexibility that I've observed in Central Africans, and how fraught people find it to trust each other. There are a whole host of reasons for the high level of mistrust, and I could only gesture toward a few in the piece. This is something that will have to be dealt with, one way or another, when the fighting stops. Post-conflict programming usually frames its tasks as "rebuilding" trust or helping the state "regain" its monopoly on the legitimate use of force. When it comes to CAR, that's the wrong way to think about it. The state never effectively had that monopoly in the first place, and for as long as CAR has existed as a polity, trust has been strained. So instead, these processes should be seen as new constructions -- building trust, building a state -- that will play out on a far-from-clean slate. That's an enormous task, of course. But maybe it can also be an opportunity.

The Bulletproof Project comes to CAR

Inspired by a story about what Jeffrey Goldberg would call "security theater" (performances of control that lack an empirical basis in actually making us safer) in Iraq, Brendan Koerner launched the Bulletproof Project, an effort to catalog instances when people have believed that any manner of "magic" will make them impervious to bullets. CAR contributes much to the project, as I'll explain.

Nearly every article about the recent crisis in CAR includes photos of fighters decked out in gris-gris that will, their wearers say, keep bullets from hitting them. One of the origin stories about the name of one of the main agglomerations of fighters, the Anti-Balaka, has it that it stems from the initiations members go through, which render them impervious even to "balles-AK," or "Balaka" (Kalashnikov bullets). When I was interviewing CAR rebels in 2009 and 2010, they said their gris-gris knowledge had swelled as a result of collaborations with Chadian men-in-arms, who are "très forts" in that kind of thing.

Today, while revising a chapter on French colonial administration in Oubangui-Chari, as the CAR was then known, I was reminded of another origin for these bulletproofing practices. The French, always short on cash, figured they could impose a head tax on their subjects in order to raise revenue. Colonial subjects generally had no colonial monies, though, so the tax would be collected in labor -- literally backbreaking (or head-breaking) labor, such as carrying 65kg for days, with no provision for food or shelter along the way. Oubangui-Chari was the poorest of all the French colonies, and so it had the highest head tax. How else would administrators get anything done? This policy proved disastrous. It caused tens of thousands of deaths due to overwork, illness, disruption of agricultural production, and the brutal violence that was necessary to coerce people to do their bidding, and so further de-populated an area that already had a very low human population thanks to decades of slave raiding. People resisted however they could. Many fled to less repressive places like the Belgian Congo (yes, even the notorious Belgians were seen as more lenient, at least in certain respects). Many others revolted. And those who rebelled made sure to take medicine given to them by a "sorcerer" that made them impervious to bullets. Some of those rebels were quite successful. One group managed to hold Europeans at bay for a full six months.

To my knowledge, no one has mapped, though time, the gris-gris/medicine phenomenon across Central Africa (kind of like what Julien Bonhomme did for the penis-snatching rumor), but it would be a fascinating project.

P.S. Anyone interested in learning more about the history of revolts, repression, and general colonial blunders/malfeasance must read Cathérine Coquéry-Vidrovitch's masterful Le Congo au temps des grandes compagnies concessionnaires.  And of course my book, when it eventually sees the light of day.