When I visited Bujumbura, the capital of Burundi, two years ago, I met a parliamentarian to talk about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the governmental way of dealing with the brutal civil war that had shaken the country in the 1990s. It was quite early on a Tuesday morning in December; my driver had to wait in front of the bungalow in which the parliament was situated. After we were allowed to enter the grounds, we had to wait again in the parking lot, until finally I was guided by an employee to an office with thick leather sofas and a couch-table with bottled water on it.
‘My’ parliamentarian, let’s call him ‘A.’, entered the room, a well-dressed and very polite man in his mid-thirties. He was a member of the CNDD-FDD, the leading party in Burundi. The CNDD-FDD dominates the parliament, the country, and it controls most of the little money that circulates in the seventh poorest country in the world. A. told me how glad he was that I was willing to talk to him. Others, I learned, refused to talk to his party, preferring to make up their mind about the country by talking only to the NGOs, the ‘other side.’
Sitting in his office with the leather sofas and bottled water, A., referring to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, told me that people in his country had finally plucked up the courage to reappraise the events of the civil war. But due to bureaucratic procedures the commission had still not been finally approved, yet. The greatest shortcoming, which A. of course didn’t mention, was that it was all in the hands of the authoritarian CNDD-FDD party which ruled the country without a whisper of parliamentarian opposition.
The commission had a famous predecessor: the Truth and Reconciliation Commission established by Nelson Mandela in South Africa after the apartheid regime. This model for a commission that deals with the grave mistakes made by the government during its dictatorship and/or civil wars had been tried and tested successfully in other post-conflict countries. Now the time had come for Burundi to establish such a commission. The kind of amnesty for war crimes which was still within the scope of the law in South Africa in the nineties, however, is no longer possible in accordance with international law. The Burundi government (of which many members were actively involved in the civil war) is trying to replace amnesty with temporary immunity – and strategies of delay. Plans for a penal tribunal – a fundamental element of the Arusha Peace and Reconciliation Agreement for Burundi (2000) – were also put on hold.
Most people I talked to didn’t really believe in the project, although some said that it would be necessary nevertheless. After such mass murder there is a need for truth and for justice; or at least for an attempt at justice. My cousin, who had lived in Burundi for three years when I came to visit him, explained to me how he saw (or read) the country: across the country, mourning was suppressed. The people, the economy, social processes could not be lost to lethargy and despondency. Conciliation was as difficult as it was indispensable.
For how long should one mourn in view of murder, which cannot be called genocide only because of a legal technicality despite the numerous victims. How should one mourn when there is not a single adult who has not witnessed a murder or lost a relative; when some, and not just a few, have themselves murdered?
The country would be depopulated for a second time if all those who were in one way or another involved were to be sent to prison. Our sense of civil justice cannot be applied to a situation like this. It is a moment that calls for the seemingly impossible search for truth in the incomprehensible, the unutterable, and the indigestible.
The attempt to find an official truth is per se questionable. And although concern for reconciliation is necessary, it should not be enforced. Because, if forgiveness is enforced by an elitist party characterized by corruption and nepotism, it remains dubious and unreasonable, perhaps even dangerous.
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When a small group holds sway, dictating what is considered to be ‘the truth’, counternarratives become the only possible way to prevent the disappearance of alternative versions of the truth. It is important for the civil society to oppose the official narrative by telling their own stories and thereby undermine the dominant power.
The question then is how to tell these stories and who may do so? The victims? The offenders? The mediators? The witnesses? All of us? Speaking out for the silenced is a common poetic ethos in 20th-century literature: the stories of the Holocaust victims had to be told by the survivors, which is the most shattering, but not the only example. The living must lend their voice to the dead, but who is entitled to do so? Must it be the survivors who, to some degree, shared their unspeakable fate? If the offenders spoke out for the victims, this would clearly contradict our instinctive sense of justice; it would seem shameless or even perverse.
But how far do we go with the genealogy of the offenders? Looking to the civil war in Burundi, would we describe every person who physically killed someone as an offender? Or any person who could have, but did not prevent a murder? Or would we go so far in searching for the source of the conflict as to take into account the colonial imbalances of power structures to seek out who is to blame?
This conflict has captivated me ever I since came in contact with it. Why? Certainly because it exhibits dramatic, even epic human conflicts in its most devouring and insolvable form. But for me, as a visiting European, this conflict has also raised the question of the limits of European intervention and the questions of how global our thinking and forms of narration have become or can become. To speak for someone else and to tell his or her story is a form of arrogance and, seen from a European perspective, possibly also an attempt to perpetuate dominance.
Ronald’s short story about a young European woman sitting in a café in Kampala seems to me to be an appropriate response. I feel comfortable or perhaps justified in writing an inverted Madame Bovary, in taking on the role of a European male. For centuries, men have imagined women’s ways of thinking and used it as material for their novels; Flaubert basically entered into Emma’s way of thinking.
It seems to me to be only fair to turn the tables – an important reversal of previous power relations between the sexes. Would it not be narrow-minded to only look for literary subjects that are similar to us, instead of looking for topics that may be foreign but that we are interested in? Must authors not simply accept the fact that they will always speak for those who have not asked to be spoken for?
Antonio Gramsci wrote that “everyone is an intellectual” but that “not everyone takes on the role of an intellectual in society.” Let’s call them professional intellectuals – those whom society permits to spend their time critically reflecting on social issues in public, in newspapers, TV interviews, as members of an expert committee, or as professors in front of a hundred students. This group also includes economists and philosophers,, maybe especially employees of rating agencies, profilers and consultants, as well as authors. In Germany authors’ voices are seldom heard and the attention they receive declines with the rising level of complexity and idiosyncrasy they employ to mediate their contents.
It is a double quandary: we are being ignored while at the same time running risk of supporting injustices and power imbalances as part of the establishment, rather than causing (the possibly intended) irritation and questioning of these kind of circumstances.
We think we are infiltrating the powers, but we are serving them instead. Often we cover up painful topics instead of laying them bare. I sometimes ask myself if we are not in many ways, and without noticing it, similar to ‘my’ parliamentarian A. Are we not, maybe in a more subtle and indirect way, also part of a dominating power elite that (despite sincere intentions) claims authority and righteousness of beliefs in a way that we are not entitled to? Whether these misgivings are well-founded or not, I think that we should always be aware of the fact that without asking we impose our truth on those for whom and about whom we write.
Hi Norah, these excellent observations of yours resonate with us in Uganda too. The war in Northern Uganda only ended in 2006, after spanning over 25 years of active hostilities. And yet the scars of war are still fresh and communities remain unhealed of trauma. (Un)like Burundi or South Africa, we’ve never had any significant Truth and Reconciliation processes to give closure to survivors of violent conflict. For me, the question of witnessing is very important. How do we bear witness? How do we bear the burden of memory when there is no political will to accommodate multiple truths?
When Adong Lucy Judith produced a ground breaking theatre play tilted Silent Voices, the house was full to capacity every time it played. (National Theatre 2012) What made it so refreshing was her intimate and brutal account of the conflict, which most people in the South were privileged not to experience directly. It was clear from civil society that there was a hunger for knowledge of these unspeakable truths. And as far as truth was concerned, it validated stories of those whose voices remained silent. Or were not captured in mainstream media.
The media tends to project only narratives that the dominant group deems correct. And in the absence of a free media, censorship stifles creativity. It imposes a culture of silence, and a veil of fear makes it extremely challenging for people to tell their stories, due to a fear of retribution.
In post conflict situations, media is heavily monitored and tightly controlled. This probably makes sense because experience has shown that it can be abused with devastating consequences. Unfortunately this control also enables only the views of the dominant group to filter through. As we saw in Adong’s play , it took courageous endeavour to produce a counter narrative. The challenge here was how to produce the counter narrative responsibly, honestly, and sensitively without causing gratuitous harm.
In the history of human civilization, one might argue that it’s the intellectuals who shape our sense of who we are, who interpret the zeitgeist and contribute to our national memory. It could be through writing, art, music or any creative undertaking.
Gramsci also said that, “One of the most important characteristics of any group that is developing towards dominance is its struggle to assimilate and to conquer ideologically the traditional intellectuals, but this assimilation and conquest is made quicker and more efficacious the more the group in question succeeds in simultaneously elaborating its own organic intellectuals.”
Perhaps Parliamentarian A, and the ruling party espouse the ideals of a government seeking dominance? Which means that in the national narrative, which is also the official narrative, certain truths may have more significance than others.
Thank you for this profound comment. Just on Gramsci: I think that he is a very illustrative philosopher, whose thoughts, especially the “cultural hegemony” help to understand the mechanism of power – gaining and preserving it.
Thank you for setting the tone (and I would also say: the light in the room for certain discussions entail full darkness and a scream to cut it). I will have to repeat myself (but one cannot repeat this enough) in hinting once again to Hartman’s ‘Venus in Two Acts’. I could quote the entire essay here but instead will cite Hartman’s comment in another interview (‘Memoirs of Return’ in ‘Rites of Return, Diaspora Poetics and the Politics of Memory): ‘In “the Lives of Infamous Men” Foucault notes that the dead, and specifically the infamous, the subaltern, and the exploited, return to us in the very form in which they were driven out of the world. So the dead returned to me as numbers, as ciphers, or with names tossed off as crass insults and jokes. My challenge was how to tell a story about this incredible effacement and disfiguration of personhood.’ At this juncture NourbeSe Philip’s powerful ‘There is no telling this story’ bursts into fire and fire, and silence, too. At this juncture, too, she notes: ‘I want poetry to disassemble the ordered, to create disorder and mayhem so as to release the story that cannot be told, but which, through not-telling, will tell itself’. Here, again: ‘There is no telling this story; it must be told’. And because you touched on ethics, politics and all the Kafkaesque conflicts that fall in-between: I would recommend once again NourbeSe Philip (‘Zong!’ in particular) to read, to listen, and be quiet with her quietness.
I just looked it up: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3009984-zong?ac=1 Thank you for this great recommendation, Mariya.
you are so very welcome; it is a masterpiece both in its urgency and its utter destruction of the world
I just ordered it at my favourite book dealer – two weeks waiting!! looking forward to it!
I will, thanks for the reading-suggestion. I found the reference to Foucault also very interesting. “Foucault notes that the dead, and specifically the infamous, the subaltern, and the exploited, return to us in the very form in which they were driven out of the world.” That is a point, that is a stroke.
Nora, thank you so much for this profound input. You are writing that it is “important for the civil society to oppose the official narrative by telling their own stories and thereby undermine the dominant power”. I had to think about these guys from Kenya who are making a lot of money by telling western journalists they are somalia pirates: http://www.channel4.com/news/somali-pirates-journalists-jamal-osman-time-magazine-kenya
Even though they do not tell “their own story” they are still turning the table by reproducing or “pirating” the official (western) narrative and unmasking the way (western) media constitutes official truths.
But my question to the Kampala writers: Do you feel the need to turn narrative tables at all? Or particularly: Is turning western narrative tables on everything “african” still your own story? This question reminds me of african artists who sometimes feel to be forced to serve certain narrative expectations inside and outside african countries. Here is a quote of the Kenyan director NG’ENDO MUKII: “I do sometimes feel that there is an expectation that, as an African director, I must focus on certain social issues deemed as ‘African’, and that other content beyond this scope is seen as not ‘African enough’. I can understand why this pressure would exist, but I feel it limits our creativity and even our own understanding of ourselves as citizens in this urbanizing and multifaceted context we call Africa.” http://www.afri-love.com/2013/07/interview-with-animator-editor-and-director-ngendo-mukii.html
What are your thoughts on this?
Thanks for this note on the money-telling and turning the journalist table in a, well, “special” way. And I’m keen to hear the answers to your question.
Hellos!
Nikolas, you are right about the long standing narratives from the West that have come to be the image of “Africa” for generations. I guess I would be curious to hear your definition of “african”. But, to answer your question, as a writer, I want to tell a complete, complex, human story as I see it, and as my brain imagines it. I want to tell a story in a way that touches my reader, or the one who has come to see my play, emotionally, spiritually and intellectually. I believe that my story is essential to the world’s story. As a storyteller, my quest is to tell stories. The story I am telling will show the way I view myself and the society I inhabit.
I think by using the quotation marks I mean the same Ng’endo Muki maybe means by writing ‘African’. The ‘African’ narative that is not distinguishing between different contries, that is either telling the very positive or the very negative stories of the continent. When I go to a german bookstore searching for the shelf ‘Africa’ I (mainly) find war stories or the beautiful red and orange covers, where the sun goes down behind an acacia tree. The market does not offer very much in between. I wanted to ask if Ng’endo Muki observation feels true for Kampala writers. That there is a change to feel a certain kind of pressure that intervenes in searching and telling your own stories.
I once wrote a very private and calm family play and when it came to the question of staging some theaters told me: You play is too small, too private, we are looking for relevant, political stuff. I wonder how experiences like that can subconsciously influence a writer, no matter how often he claims to do his or her very own thing.
Nikolas, these are the pre-ordained narratives. These narratives have existed for hundreds of years. They are not going to be deconstructed that easily. Of course, a creator/storyteller who seeks to create or tell stories in a more complex way, and to move away from these narratives is unlikely to be easily accepted or her/his narrative to be included in the mainstream. But the perceptions are changing. The change may not be faster enough, but it is happening. Also, the great thing is that there are publishing houses in some African countries that are committed to publishing the kinds of books that do not feed into this narrative. At the end of the day, it will be up to the storyteller/creator to make a decision. Do they want to continue feeding into these pre-ordined narratives or to just say their truths. For me as a storyteller, I don’t feel any pressure to tell a certain kind of story and or to tell it in a certain way. I tell stories that I feel compelled to tell, in a way that I feel compelled to tell them, being mindful that they are also accessible by a reader/a theatre goer who may not necessarily be familiar with the world I am creating. I can imagine the pressure Ng’endo is referring to, and it is challenging for any writer/creator to be told that their work does not capture the world they are talking about. That can be challenging, but I don’t think that needs to put anyone under pressure to do something that does not represent their truth.