On the nature of reconciliation (guest essay)

Editor's note: The following is an email sent to me in response to my essay on the nature of reconciliation. It is published here with the permission of the author.

by Rufus Arthur Wilderson

Your post on the views of Africans towards reconciliation struck a chord with me. As much as the diverse views of an entire continent can be generalized, I think yes, Africans do have a greater propensity to live and let live than is seen in Eurasia.

My first anecdote comes from my brief time in college, I want to say 2005-2006 time frame. For some reason Somalia was in the news; maybe the piracy was starting to get bad. At the time I was attending an African Studies course, and the professor was a somewhat world-weary type who had been an ambassador and was able to add a lot of color to the discussion of the Horn of Africa, including all the nuances and shifting alliances during the Cold War and Ogaden conflict (someone should make an opera out of it). His conclusion looking at Somalia? "It is better to have a bad government than no government at all". That was it, verbatim. Of course, this was about the same time that Zimbabwe had been making the news for bulldozing slums, so this struck me as a somewhat odd outlook on matters. Considering the state of life in Somalia though; perhaps it is not entirely unjustified.

The second anecdote comes from the excellent book In Search of Zarathustra, and dates to about the seventies or so when the author was having adventures in Afghanistan and Iran.

He had come to explore the ruins of an old Zoroastrian fire temple and met a community elder just before mid-day prayers. He asked about the temple. The elder said the temple was haunted, and the site of a great battle between Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan and the local tyrant. The lesson from that is that while centuries-long or even millennia-old grudges and events are remembered in much of the world, they are not necessarily remembered accurately! Perhaps there was some ancient battle at that site, but the story had become hopelessly distorted over time as it was told and retold for whatever didactic or political reasons were expedient at the time.

To me, as an American, both views seem strange. I have been taught, ultimately via the Enlightenment tradition, that it is not only justified to fight injustice, but that it is a moral imperative to do so. The American emphasis on the individual leaves me feeling a bit odd with the idea of punishing someone because our ancestors five generations ago were in a battle. Why should that matter to us, now?

It is tempting to think that the American outlook has the best balance of emphasis on social justice tempered with the mercy of easy forgiveness and individual, rather than group accountability. This is probably provincial though, and I suspect such a world view works best and flourishes only in a prosperous and stable environment. In an environment where even basic necessities like clean water or food could be hard to come by and life could be beset by all manner of natural and man made privations, fighting overmuch for social justice would seem like foolish idealism. Better to live and let live and get on to more important basic necessities. In an environment with a greater degree of prosperity and wealth, but with shifting alliances and organized national militaries all around like Eurasia has had for most of the past three thousand years, too much forgiveness and too much forbearance with tyrants might be the complacency that gets one's entire tribe destroyed in the next war.

Or at least that's what comes to mind for me. I could be making up just-so stories based on vague generalizations about people and places; always a risk in sociology.

The nature of reconciliation

Al-Jazeera's Barnaby Phillips (a former BBC journalist) has an interesting blog on reconciliation in Africa. In it, he suggests that one of the things Africans do better than people in other parts of the world is to figure out how to live with each other after conflict. He cites the tension and difficulties in places like Bosnia and Northern Ireland following prolonged civil conflict. He notes that people in Africa would find it absurd to be fixated by the outcome of a 14th or 17th century battle.

He adds that in African countries from Mozambique, to Angola, to Sierra Leone, rebel and government forces that fought on opposite sides in brutal civil wars, marred by atrocities and massacres, are now united in national armies, and apparently oblivious to recent divisions.

He also cites post-conflict stability in places like Biafra/Nigeria, Rwanda and South Africa. Philips concludes that the lessons Africans take from conflicts is that the price of disunity is too high to pay.

Yet that approach has its own flaws. Countless dictators, from Mobutu to Meles Zenawi, have exploited this very sentiment. The Rwandan dictatorship itself, praised by Phillips, uses the pretext of unity to crush all opposition... as the newly formed Rwandan Democratic Greens were the latest to learn first hand.

In the mid-90s, both Sierra Leone and Liberia were embroiled in savage civil wars, which sent hundreds of thousands of refugees into neighboring countries, including Guinea where I lived. Countless Guineans complained about the sclerotic, corrupt rule of Gen. Lansana Conté and his cabal. But few were willing to rise and challenge the dictatorship. When I asked why, I was told that Conté's regime was bad but at least the repressive stability was better than the alternatives they saw on the southern border, with women and children having their limbs chopped off by drugged boy soldiers.

But that forced unity has a price of its own. The forced unity didn't solve any of Guinea's myriad of problems; it simply delayed their explosion for a decade or so. When the problems finally did erupt, beginning with the general strike of 2007, it was not pretty. There were riots, at least one major massacre, mass rapes, reports of small scale ethnic cleansing and very real fears (expectations in some quarters) of a Liberia/Sierra Leone-style full scale civil war.

Thanks to the intervention and strong will of a sane military man, Gen. Sékouba Konaté, and to mobilization of the international community and especially of Guinean civil society, the country appears to have gotten past the worst of it. If not for a fortunate sequence of events (including an unmitigated disaster with an unexpected silver lining), things could have been much, much worse.

Phillips makes the valid point that honest dialogue is essential to move forward in post-conflict situations. But true reconciliation involves a voluntary partnership of equals not fake 'unity' imposed at the barrel of a gun.

Reconciliation in Sierra Leone

The English version of Le monde diplomatique has a really interesting article on the dynamics of post-conflict reconciliation as it relates to Sierra Leone. Not at the macro/national level but community by community

Reconciliation in Rwanda

The Anglican Bishop of Rwanda John Rucyahana says that 'wonderful things' are happening in his country

Rucyahana, who fled the country during the 1994 genocide, says the aftermath of the horror has united the different ethnic groups in Rwanda, and there’s a new spirit of hope and reconciliation in the country.

VOA has a long story on Rucyahana and his new book Bishop of Rwanda: Finding Forgiveness Amidst a Pile of Bones.