Performance theory infers that acts of violence are like a theatre production: a symbolic and public expression of deep-seated need and a drive to make a statement for
164 Ibid: 15.
165 Winslade, J. & Monk, G. 2001. Narrative Mediation – A New Approach to Conflict Resolution. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers.
166 Ibid: 57-94.
167 Schirch, L. 2005. Ritual and Symbol in Peacebuilding. Bloomfield, Connecticut: Kumarian Press Inc.
168 Ibid: Back cover.
66
‘real-time’ recognition from those who are watching (the audience). Performance theory has its foundations in the science of stage management for large scale dramatic events or significant popular happenings (acts). When applying performance theory to conflict, the primary concern revolves around the production of power through the careful
orchestration of violence as an expressive and generative resource.169 Belinda Bozzoli in her in her work around theatricality and social conflict phenomena in the South African township of Alexandra, describes this phenomena as follows:
“The rebels in Alexandra used the spaces available to them by treating them as social and political ‘theatres’, places within which the varying dramas they sought to mount could be enacted and thus become the means to claiming greater power.
This was a vital ingredient of the revolt, which involved not one ‘drama’ but several. These dramas acted as devices to magnify the revolt and thus to enlarge its claims upon the polity.”170
According to Bozzoli, applying the conceptions of dramaturgical theatre to large social movements allows the social scientist the freedom and flexibility to move beyond the mechanics of political movements, their formations, ideologies and structural resources to the issue of power; its growth, development and influence over social transformation.171 In this section, three primary frames of conflict theory will be explored in relation to narrative discourse: conceptions of conflict memory; intersections of temporal and spatial dimensions of conflict; and conflict as political theatre of struggle.
2.4.1. Narrative and Conceptions of Conflict Memory
Central to history and the analysis of narrative discourse from a dramatic angle is the dynamic of conflict memory. John Paul Lederach,172 one of the founding voices in the peace-building field, describes at least four layers of ‘nested’ conflict memory that
constitute what it means to recall the past. All accounts of history carry with them deep pulses of narrative discourse, which he defines as the unspoken, value-laden meaning (world-view) that is ascribed to the social text (either written or spoken) by each different author, reader or actor often even sub-consciously. The next thread woven into memory
169 Richards, 1996: xxii.
170 Bozzoli, B. 2004. Theatres of Struggle and the End of Apartheid. Johannesburg, South Africa: Wits University Press, 10.
171 Ibid: 11.
172 Lederach, J.P. 2005. The Moral Imagination – The Art and Soul of Building Peace. Oxford / New York:
Oxford University Press; 141.
67 is that part of the ancient story that is passed on orally from generation to generation, this is called remembered history. From the repository of remembered history people overlay their rational and emotional memory of conflict with the reality of lived experience.
Finally, all of these nuanced memories function as the bedrock for human interpretations of current conflict events.
To better comprehend the illusive notion of a sub-terrain narrative discourse that can socially or culturally guide the values and actions of whole nations and people groups, social psychologist Vamik Volkan extrapolates on what he terms “chosen traumas and chosen glories”173. The word ‘chosen’ is deliberately employed in this instance to refer to the guise of corporate ‘selective memory’ whereby nations remember all that is valiant and heroic (historical glorification) and forget all that is despised and cowardly (selective amnesia) about their own past. Likewise, a glorified nation will position itself as victim by magnifying the most extreme traumas committed by other peoples or nations (enemy formation) in its history. According to Volkan, it is in the administration of this glorification of self and denigration of other that a nation is able to fabricate a patriotic state and hold their citizens together in unity. Dominick LaCapra refers to the “founding trauma” which, not unlike Volkan’s chosen trauma, evolves into the organizing principle around which personal and corporate identity is constructed.174
On a similar trajectory, Dan Bar-On175, a Jewish social psychologist applies theories of ‘displaced aggression’ (an example of a certain type of narrative discourse) to the national security agenda and defence policies of Israel in relation to the Palestinian peoples. Bar-On was preoccupied with the socio-reconciliation dynamics between
children of Nazi SS Officers and children of Holocaust survivors. Later in his career, Bar- On facilitated rapprochement between Germans, Israelis and Palestinians by arranging for joint sustained dialogues among them. When containing these three groups in one space, Bar-On uncovered an uncanny tendency of the Israeli participants to associate with the German participants and continually disassociate from the Palestinians. At a surface
173 Volkan, V. 1994. The Need to have Enemies & Allies – From Clinical Practice to International Relations. New Jersey and London: Jason Aronson Inc.
174 LaCapra, D. 2001. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore & London: The John Hopkins University Press, 23.
175 Bar-On, D. 1999. The Indescribable and the Undiscussable – Reconstructing Human Discourse after Trauma. Budapest, Hungary: Central European University Press.
68 level, this is explainable as Israel and Palestine remain embroiled in a modern day
conflict and many Israelis have their roots in Europe. However, from a historical account this loses its rationality as the magnitude of the current violence perpetrated by
Palestinians against Israelis pales in the face of the genocide violence inflicted by the German Holocaust against the Jews. Coupled with this, from a psycho-social perspective the commonalities between Israelis and Palestinians in terms of land, culture, religious heritage, temperament and original DNA would seem to be far stronger than that shared between Israeli and German experiences. To Bar-On it appeared as if the Israelis were doing to the Palestinians what they could not or would not do to the Germans. In this case, the power of the immediate ‘enemy’ script (narrative discourse) seemed to trump the generational grip of deep historical identity divides, thus confirming Bar-On’s premise of ‘displaced aggression’ when applied to Israeli – Palestinian relations.176
Michael Ignatieff names “honouring the dead” as the most potent motivation (another form of narrative discourse) for violent revenge: “But revenge – morally considered - is a desire to keep faith with the dead, to honour the memory by taking up their cause where they left off”177. This script, which dictates that people must account for the blood of their beloved (especially in death due to the unnatural causes), is a potent instinct; a culturally universal response residing in the mental and emotional architecture of the human soul. In poignant prose, African-American novelist Toni Morrison
articulates this intimate but distressing link between victim and victimizer: “If you take a life, then you own it. You responsible for it. You can’t get rid of nobody by killing them.
They are still there, and they yours now”178. According to Ignatieff, it is possible to satisfy the ‘honouring of the dead’ script: “Reconciliation can stop the cycle of
vengeance only if it can equal vengeance as a form of respect for the dead”179. German theologian Geiko Muller-Fahrenholz saliently describes this kind of undertaking: “Evil acts create chains that lock perpetrators and victims together, usually in unconscious ways, producing a double history of effects which must be taken into account in
176 This is a summary (albeit cursory) of an informal interview conducted with the late Professor Dan Bar- On in July 1999 in Jerusalem, Israel.
177 Ignatieff, 1998: 188.
178 Morrison, T. 2004. Song of Solomon. New York: Vintage Books.
179 Ignatieff, 1998: 189.
69 reflecting on the nature of forgiveness”180. These prominent narrative discourses
(discussed above) of ‘chosen traumas and chosen glories’, ‘displaced aggression’ and the guttural call to ‘honour the dead’ will be rehearsed, applied and analysed in this
unfolding study of Matabeleland violence.
In approaching the stratum of remembered history, Mahmood Mamdani assists the reader by skilfully deconstructing the Hutu-Tutsi ethnic identities and carefully placing them within the context of colonial historical-political manipulations. Mamdani traces the roots of the ethnic meaning of ‘Hutu’, a Kinyarwandan word historically used to categorise someone who did not own cattle (so that a Tutsi who did not own cattle was referred to as a Hutu). It was a class label utilised by the wealthy elite (rulers) to identify the agrarian peasantry; the majority of whom were poor and functioning as indentured servants in a serfdom structure. As these oppressed masses became more aware and empowered they began to shed their different Bantu tribal delineations and took on the unifying label of ‘Hutu’ so that today generations of Rwandese know themselves to be
‘born’ as ethnic Hutu.181 This form of identity conversion will be explored in more detail in the Matabeleland conflict, especially as it relates to the entrenched monolithic labels of
‘Shona’ and ‘Ndebele’.
Similarly, Rene Lemarchand maintains that Hutu-Tutsi ethnic identities are primarily moulded by a long history of genocide memory that has calcified into certain myths that are now held as objective truths about each other as ethnic groups. In this way, Lemarchand argues that ethnic identities in Burundi have been deeply shaped by (if not constructed from) the memories of genocide that played themselves out in vicious generational cycles of violence-shaping-narrative and narrative-shaping-violence.182 Again, there is an analogous comparison between the establishment of Burundian identities surfacing through the recounting of historical genocide and the identity formations of Shona and Ndebele being twined together with a history of violent interactions; more specifically the continual recollection of Ndebele raids on Shona
180 Muller-Fahrenholz, G. 1996. The Art of Forgiveness. Geneva, Switzerland: WCC Publications, 25.
181 Mamdani, M. 2001. When Victims Become Killers – Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
182 Lemarchand, R. 1994. Burundi – Ethnic Conflict and Genocide. Cambridge: Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Cambridge University Press.
70 peoples in the 1800s reinforced by the internal liberation movements faction-fighting along supposedly tribal lines.
The fields of narratology and trauma healing meet at the crux of the apex of lived experience. Dr. Judith Herman183, in her benchmark work on trauma, speaks of the traumatic event as a life-shattering experience; a literal fragmenting of body, mind and spirit.184 For Herman, trauma recovery is situated in the concept of life-story; that is healing can only come when the victim of trauma has been able to sequentially piece together the emotional memory (recall) as well as its meaning (interpretation) and then successfully re-integrate (action) the newly formed story into their own life narrative.
However, Dominick LaCapra sounds a cautionary note when working with trauma and the past: “But the indiscriminate generalization of the category of survivor and the overall conflation of history or culture with trauma, as well as the near fixation on enacting or acting out post-traumatic symptoms, have the effect of obscuring crucial historical distinctions…”185 LaCapra problematises this drive to perform (act out) trauma in the present which is actually historical in nature, as a “compulsive repetition of
traumatic scenes…scenes in which the past returns and the future is blocked or fatalistically caught up in a melancholic feedback loop”186. LaCapra expresses his concern around the dilemma of “fidelity to trauma…one’s bond to the dead, especially with dead intimates may invest trauma with value and makes its reliving a painful but necessary commemoration or memorial to which one remains dedicated or at least bound”187. This trauma bonding becomes an obstacle that can potentially invalidate the symbolic and therapeutic narrative processes of trauma debriefing, healing and closure.188
This study maintains that the Matabeleland violence is closely tied to the
‘unfinished business’ of multiple and protracted trauma. Trauma is nurtured in the bowels
183 Herman, J. 1997. Trauma and Recovery – The aftermath of violence from domestic abuse to political terror. New York: Basic Books-a Division of HarperCollins Publishers.
184 See other essential works on trauma healing such as: Van der Kolk, A., McFarlane, A., and Weisaeth, L (Eds.). 1996. Traumatic Stress – The Effects of Overwhelming Experience on Mind, Body and Society, New York: The Guilford Press; Levine, P. 1997. Walking the Tiger – Healing Trauma, Berkeley, California:
North Atlantic Books; and Hart, B. 2008. Peacebuilding in Traumitised Societies. Maryland: University Press of America, Inc.
185 LaCapra, 2001: preface, xi.
186 Ibid: 21.
187 Ibid: 22.
188 Ibid: 23.
71 of the violence system, in its machinations and structures. This research challenges the revolutionary paradigm that refuses to acknowledge the trauma (both individual and collective) that is birthed in violence, even when violence is employed in the service of a just cause – the struggle for liberation from oppression. The liberation movements of ZAPU and ZANU and their leaders suffered severe trauma at the hands of their white Rhodesian oppressors. Progressively, this traumatic transmission from the oppressors began to violently manifest internally in the liberation movements as they struggled to keep order, loyalty and consistency within their own ranks.
After independence in 1980, the division that had long existed in the liberation movements was cemented into categories of victor (ruling majority) and vanquished (minority opposition). Now locked in a bitter contestation for political power, the revenge cycle of victimisation-aggression189 (victim becoming killer) between the past colonial oppressor and the oppressed masses was re-enacted on the stage of Matabeleland, the base of the only African opposition. Former victims (ZANU) became perpetrators of new forms of violence and the supposed liberated (ZAPU and the Matabeleland civilians) once again were enveloped in the dark cloud of traumatic violence of which they were the focus. Likewise, it is not difficult to make application of this regenerative cycle of mimetic violence to the destructive conflict that Zimbabwe currently finds itself embroiled in.
2.4.2. The Intersection of Temporal and Spatial Dimensions of Conflict
New historiography and narratology have identified the importance of taking into consideration the spatial location; the actual geographical landscape of the setting in which historical and current agency takes place. The idea being that the natural environment in which conflict is played out is not neutral; a sterile, non-descript back- drop in the unfolding drama of historical reality. The habitat has an intimate connection to the human performance. Belinda Bozzoli190 speaks to the critical ingredient of
189 Helmick, R. & Peterson, R. 2001. (Eds.) Forgiveness and Reconciliation – Religion, Public Policy, and Conflict Transformation. Philadelphia & London: Templeton Foundation Press. This model of mimetic violence was formulated by Russian social-psychologist Olga Botchavora from her work with refugee populations in the former Yugoslavia. Botchavora contrasts this Revenge Cycle to a Cycle of
Reconciliation with the decisive juncture being whether the traumatised victim suppresses their grief and loss which leads to a sense of justified revenge, or expresses their grief and loss in a healthy way thereby leading to reconciliation.
190 Bozzoli, 2004: 7-12.
72 township enclosures (which in most cases were small areas of land in which large groups of people lived in over crowded and cramped conditions). Bozzoli makes the link
between enclosure and rebellion motivating the notion that physical space actually engenders rebellion (an historical example being the city of Paris at the time of the French Revolution). Congruently, on a more opportunistic note, a tightly bounded space also provides a highly focused stage on which the acting cast can aim the ‘spot-light’ of violent performance for those who are watching from the outside. As Paul Richards so poetically depicts the wanton, destructive performance of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebels of Sierra Leone: “Their violence trashes a rotten set, flapping in the breeze, of a film epic in which they no longer believe”191.
Richards places his spatial analysis of the Sierra Leonean civil war in the context of the rain forests of that country. Richards carefully weaves together the primacy of the rain forests where the mineral wealth (diamonds) were located and as a place where the RUF rebel movement could hide and train for the rigours of natural and human induced violence, forge out a new sub-system and create a sub-culture of values and norms that could justify their actual and ideological existence.
Likewise, Alexander, McGregor and Ranger192, the authors of one of the most detailed accounts of the Matabeleland history, shape their spatial landscape around the
‘dark forests’ (translated as “Amagusu Amnyama” in Ndebele) of Shangani Game Reserve; more specifically, the two districts of Nkayi and Lupane. The ‘dark forests’ of Matabeleland have become a symbol of resistance, the place of struggle against
oppression. The Shangani Forests are rich with symbolisms of being hidden and
unknown; chaotic places of fear and violence for those on the outside. However, for the inhabitants who reside there it engenders a place of refuge and protection. These ‘dark forests’ represent the marginal places (the backstage or the stage wings concealed by curtains) of the drama of conflict in Matabeleland. This articulated description of an isolated, alienating location runs parallel to how the people of Matabeleland position
191 Richards. 1996:
192 Alexander, J., McGregor, J., & Ranger, T. 2000. Violence & Memory – One Hundred Years in the ‘Dark Forests’ of Matabeleland. Oxford: James Curry. See also pioneering work on narrative history by: Ranger, T. 1999. Voices from the Rocks: Nature, Culture & History in the Matapos Hills of Zimbabwe. South Africa: Baobab Books.
73 themselves in the official political narrative that has been given undivided credence in Zimbabwe for many years.193
Interrogating the intersection of spatial and temporal dimensions of conflict, John Paul Lederach espouses three overarching peace-building principles: ‘one must go backward, in order to go forward’ referring to the horizontal need to deal with the history of conflict in order to build a viable peace in the future; ‘one must go down, in order to build up’ referring to the vertical need to dig deep into the roots of the conflict in order to lay a solid foundation for peace to endure; and ‘one must create more in order to have less’ referring to the process of forming many conflict-containing structures in order to minimize violence.194 In this precarious movement on a horizontal level (between the past, the present and the future), on vertical level (identifying the conflict at all strata of society, and on a process level (designing innovative systems to diminish violence), Lederach proposes utilising an analysis grid-system that lodges social conflict in a series of interlocking spheres consisting of symptoms, influenced by structures, which in turn are under-girded by processes of power (both informal and formal) which are motivated and propelled by visceral patterns of behaviour & identity formation.195 The key to this encompassing framework of conflict diagnosis is that it is simultaneously cyclical and linear in nature and progression.
Robert Mandel dissects inter-group conflicts at the cross-section of the temporal dimensions (incorporating tensions between the past and present) and the spatial
dimensions (incorporating tensions between self and others in relational proximity).196 The mismanagement of these inherent conflict tensions can result in what Mandel delineates as the crucial elements of conflict: “distorted perceptions, inappropriate decisions, and severe conflicts.” The following chart summarises Mandel’s thesis exemplifying the dynamics of psycho-social forces at play in this conflictive time-space matrix:197
193 Ibid: 19.
194 Taken from the course materials of “The Fundamentals of Peacebuilding”, by Professor JP Lederach.
The Summer Peacebuilding Institute (SPI) of the Eastern Mennonite University, Virginia, USA. 1998.
195 Ibid.
196 Mandel, R. 1979. Perception, Decision-making and Conflict. Washington DC: University Press of America, Inc., 11.
197 Ibid: 15-48.