Antecedentes de la investigación

How to create non-violent security? This question lands us right us right at the centre of the problem of ‘transitional justice’ which dominates current peace studies and which roughly divides their scholarship. Adherents to the retributive justice approach hold that there can be no security, let alone peace, if perpetrators are at large (Borneman 2002; Cottingham 1979; Duvenage 1999; Widner 2001), while proponents of distributive justice, or more precisely restorative justice, believe that certainty and security cannot be imposed but only fostered in proc- esses of reconciliation, forgiveness and healing (Abu Nimer et al. 2001; Amadi- ume & An-Na’im 2000; Amstutz 2005; Bloomfield et al. 2003; Galtung 2001; Lederach 1997, 2005; Zehr 2002). The Nanun peace agreements emanated from the latter.

This central dilemma of peace-building – a term with wide currency since UN Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali’s 1992 Agenda for Peace – was fed by the

of south-eastern Burkina Faso, married an earth priest’s daughter, who born Gbewaa (cf. Benzing 1971: 44-45).

violence in Rwanda and Yugoslavia and the fall of the apartheid regime in South Africa. The first two events regenerated the field of international criminal justice which had been dormant since the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials. The United Nations set up International Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda and former Yugosla- via and the International Criminal Court in The Hague to prosecute the leaders of war. Probably the main complicating factor for retribution is the difficulty of defining perpetrators, which in many conflicts includes tens or even hundreds of thousands of civilians (Broch-Due 2005: 3; Hutchinson 1996; Yanacopulos & Hanlon 2006: 19; Kaldor 1999). In such contexts, promising criminal justice may unleash witch-hunts on presumed perpetrators, as happened in Rwanda following the establishment of village-level gacaca tribunals (Mamdani 2001a, 2001b: 44; Widner 2001: 67-68).

The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), which was installed in 1995 to deal with the atrocities under the Apartheid regime, is rather representative of ‘restorative justice’. The Commission’s mandate to trade am- nesty for testimonies spared the country a potential civil war, but critics called the Commission’s ‘reconciliation’ a political compromise with culprits (Bonner & Nieftagodien 2002; Duvenage 1999: 14; Mamdani 2002). Despite this criti- cism, the TRC became an example for similar commissions around the continent, including Ghana (Hayner 2001).9

In Ghana, government reactions to the 1981, 1994 and 1995 violence did not focus on restorative justice but were constitutionally backed peace-keeping through predictable interventions; the declaration of a state of emergency, a military intervention and the inauguration of a commission of inquiry. Assefa’s mediation of the Konkomba/Nanumba conflict defied that of the government but it was no less saturated with the dilemma of transitional justice. Assefa acknowl- edged that ‘reconciliation without addressing the injustice in the situation is indeed a mockery and belittling the suffering of the victim’, but he also feared that accusations and counteraccusations would hinder post-conflict coexistence (1999, respectively 2001: 182). He therefore emphasised the forging of unity and trust (see chapter three).

Assefa called his brokerage ‘consultations on development’ and he considered peace and development to be intertwined. This approach has to be understood in the context of a then new development paradigm for Africa, following the end of the Cold War. A 1989 World Bank report blamed the insufficiency of economic

9 _{The National Reconciliation Commission (NRC), which between 2002 and 2004 investigated the}

atrocities during Ghana’s military regimes, and recommended apologies and reparations to victims, excluded all episodes of Nanun violence, despite a petition of the Saboba paramount chief that Konkomba had been aggrieved by the 1978 Lands Commission (Ucha Bobor Borwan Kwadin IV to The Chairman, National Reconciliation Commission (10-01-2004) ‘Petition of the Konkomba of Northern Region’.

liberalisation (its focus since 1981) to counter the continent’s underdevelopment on a crisis of governance (The World Bank 2008). The report made it clear that many African governments were obstacles for development and hence these should adapt to ‘good governance’ standards, while development initiatives would by-pass the state apparatus and focus on the beneficiaries themselves. The insistence of Bretton Woods institutions on what Bayart (2000: 228) cynically called the ‘Holy Trinity of Reform’ (structural adjustment, democratisation and good governance) propelled a wave of democratisation through Sub Saharan Africa, including Ghana in 1992. Simultaneously, NGOs claiming to have a link with, or represent, the beneficiaries, massively stepped in the space left by state institutions to advocate community development (see chapter four).

Assefa was not so much interested in governance as in empowering commu- nities to develop themselves. He found modernisation ‘a constant source of disruption, conflict and disillusionment’ and therefore advocated an economic model which ‘integrates material development with social cohesion and psycho- logical and spiritual growth’ (Assefa 1996: 65, 67). He was very interested in traditions, especially chieftaincy, which he found to be ‘still intact and powerful’ and ‘already accessible to citizens’ in Ghana (1996: 58-59; 2001: 182). This approach differed substantially from that of Lederach, another influential peace mediator and scholar who worked in Northern Ghana. Rather than looking back- wards to authentic traditions, Lederach, and his adherent Kirby, stressed the need for a new peace culture (see chapters six and seven).

Assefa argued that a handful of ethnic leaders abused chieftaincy for political and economic games, a process exacerbated by competitive multiparty democ- racy (2001: 169; cf. 1996: 53-54). Assefa aimed at the purification and empow- erment of both traditional rule, followed by ‘slowly infusing [traditions] with modern values of citizenship, participation, and equity’ (2001: 183; cf. Voor- hoeve 2007: 20; see chapters four, five and six). Assefa’s approach was to recruit the unspoilt ‘voices of reason’ from the villages and to influence the elites through these empowered voices. However, he mistook Nanun customary law, which was the product of colonial and post-colonial political processes, for tradi- tion. While Assefa and his team placed such traditions outside Ghana’s legal order, customary law was part and parcel of the national constitution, with a sovereignty delegated by the national modern government.

In that sense, Assefa wanted to purify or depoliticize traditions. Assefa’s distinction between traditional forms of administration and modern politics is at odds with the wider anthropological definitions of politics discussed above. However, in a prominent contribution to counter the threat of a conceptual im- passe in political anthropology, due to the dissolution of politics in the wider notion of power, Spencer called for more attention to what people themselves

understand by politics (Spencer 1997: 13). This proposition has been reproduced in a number of fascinating ways and it brought ‘modern’ government back in research focus (Spencer 2007; cf. De Boeck 2008; Ferme 1999; Mbembe 1992, 1997; Pels 2004). I adhere to this approach because Konkomba and Nanumba notions of polatisi imply modern government but not traditional rule such as chieftaincy. However, in order to describe the interplay of politicization and depoliticization, especially in the context of earth rituals in chapter five, I will also resort to a wider anthropological definition of politics.

In his famous study of depoliticization, The Anti-Politics Machine (1990), James Ferguson aptly showed that because they were depoliticized, technocratic development projects in Lesotho had unintentional political side-effects, such as bureaucratic expansion. In other words, depoliticization can disguise political influence. But while Ferguson described these influences as unintentional side- effects of depoliticization, this study shows that tradition, which the NGO Con- sortium regarded as apolitical, can disguise politics. Assefa and his team did not account for the fact that although chieftaincy is a very strong symbol of tradition and social cohesion in Ghana, this country has also been associated with count- less chieftaincy disputes from time immemorial (Sakyi 2003: 135; see chapter six). When Assefa claimed that traditions in northern Ghana were still strong and intact, he overlooked the hand of the state, both colonial and post-colonial, in bolstering such traditions into a bundle of contradictions, and looked for an in- trinsic sovereignty.