Morfotipo ‘Roja’

While that very evening, Nanumba refugees started to return home, news of a potential new conflict between Konkomba and Nanumba spread like wildfire, making headlines in national media.45 The three weeks after Christmas were marked by a lot of meetings and activities, mostly outside of Chamba town.

Immediately after Christmas, on 27 December, Regional Minister Alhaji Mustapha Ali Idris (a Dagomba) and the Regional Security Council of top military and police executives came to Bimbilla for an emergency meeting at the District Assembly hall. The tensions invoked such an active role of government representatives, because the national government did not want the upcoming ‘Golden Jubilee’ or Ghana’s 50th Independence Day overshadowed by ethnic conflict. Although the meeting was held in the District Assembly hall, there were very few local government representatives among the more than one hundred ‘chiefs and opinion leaders’. More than two hundred Nanumba, and some Kon- komba from Chamba too, followed the meeting through loudspeakers outside the hall, and they clamped to the windows when electricity broke down.

The meeting was opened by the two Nanumba District Chief Executives. While Saeed (the Nanumba North DCE and a Nanumba) said that the District Security Council was still investigating the rumours, Ogajah (the Nanumba South DCE and a Konkomba) stated that, after a ‘fact-finding mission’, he knew that the rumours were simply not true. Whereas the latter implicitly found rumouring Nanumba in Bimbilla a source of insecurity, Saeed seemed to take the rumours at

44

Although many Nanumba expected a new Bimbilla Naa to stretch his authority to this area again, Konkomba leaders in Kpasa and Damanko towns said that they would not accept such Nanumba authorities. But when in 1997, Akyodé again tried to gain control over the Kpasa area, the Volta Region based Konkomba lawyer Jejeti petitioned the Permanent Peace Negotiation Team, which had extended its arbitration to this part of the country, and stated on behalf of the Konkomba leadership in Kpasa land that ‘the person who has jurisdiction over the land […] is the Paramount Chief of Bimbilla’ (‘Lawyer Jacob Jejeti on behalf of Konkomba Chiefs in Nkwanta District to The Perma- nent Peace Negotiation Team’ (06-01-1998)).

face value, assuming that there is no smoke without fire, and described Chamba as the source of danger.

The Regional Minister then spoke for over half an hour, the first ten minutes in English and the rest in Dagbanli (similar to Nanunli). He made no effort to speak Likpakpaln and his speech was not translated into that language either. It may be noted that most Konkomba understand Nanunli, which is also the most common language of communication between them. However, the majority of Nanumba also understand basic Likpakpaln.

In the speech of the Minister, the Dagbanli part of his speech was of similar content as the English part, albeit in a much more proverbial form. He hardly spoke about Chamba but he made two related points about his indiscriminate determination to development and security. First, he said that ‘This government is your government’ because ‘you voted for President Kufuor’ and that this government had an interest in the development of Nanun, and therefore Kufuor had nominated a Konkomba and a Nanumba DCE. However, government budgets ‘wasted’ on peace-keeping could be spent on development, so therefore the opinion leaders should advise their communities to abstain from violence. He prayed that he would never have to use military force on the district but he would hesitate to do so if people took the law in their own hands. The Minister did not specify this warning.

In the ensuing open forum, the latent disagreement between both DCEs – the Nanumba Saeed found Chamba insecure while the Konkomba Ogajah considered rumour mongering Bimbilla unsafe – was continued in former MP George Mpanbe (a Konkomba) who asked the chiefs to send all rumourmongers to the security agencies, and in two NAYA peers who said that they had witnessed, during the funeral of the chief, that Chamba was ‘a very unsafe town’. Outside the hall, there were similar thoughts about the origins of insecurity. However, Konkomba suspicions that Nanumba rumourmongers wanted to provoke them and Nanumba thoughts that Konkomba wanted to seize the land of Chamba were eclipsed by a mutual fear for a supernatural force of violence. Those good at counting saw that Nanun was bedevilled by a thirteen year cycle of violence, after 1981 and 1994.

To my interlocutors, rumour was the main expression of this evil spell. Al- though rumour is a very strong public expression in any case (Ellis 1989), in conflict situations it is often the only source of information (Robben & Nord- strom 1995: 15). De Boeck (2008) argued that rumours straddle publicity and privacy as the ‘awkward intimacy of a public secrecy’ (cf. Das 2007: 105, 111, 130), hence triggering the need to validate or falsify them.46 As news spread

46 _{The uncertain truthfulness in rumours is evident from the Konkomba and Nanumba concepts of}

around Bimbilla or Chamba, my interlocutors always first asked the messenger: ‘Who told you?’ It struck me that during the tensions, few to no Nanumba went to Chamba to see if the Konkomba there were indeed preparing for war, and those who did mistrusted the town’s normality; few Konkomba went to Bimbilla to say that they were not. I elaborate on this insight in the next chapter.

Students on Christmas break tried to stop the cycle of rumours and mistrust and replace it with dialogue. Many people I spoke to were disappointed in the Regional Minister who had only tried to empower the heavily divided chiefs and elders, without addressing the Chamba issue. There was however one group of people who felt responsible for averting further tensions: Students. Because it was Christmas break, most Konkomba and Nanumba college students were with their families. During college breaks, students usually engage in voluntary clean up exercises and health education programmes. While the Konkomba-Bassari Students Union (KOBASU) holds its annual congress during Summer break, the Nanumba Students Union has its congress (‘the homecoming week’) during Christmas break. During this week, students organise sports matches, quizzes, movie shows and a durbar for educated opinion leaders.

Responding to the tensions, NASU leaders contacted KOBASU students from Chamba to play a soccer match with them in Chamba to give a message of peace, but the Police Superintendent forbade the match from being played, because he feared it would exacerbate tensions. Despite this disappointment, NASU and KOBASU leaders agreed to meet each other on 29 December in Bimbilla to discuss their possible role in reducing the tensions. At a closed door meeting (to which I was allowed), the students openly spoke (in English) about their fears of another conflict (‘If I hear a gunshot I will shit in my pants’) and their doubts about the position they were in. They felt a great responsibility to unite NASU and KOBASU in a Nanun Students Union. In fact, these students came under serious stress and many of them were to arrive back on campus two weeks late. This activism of students was a clear sign of the declining moral authority of the Youth Associations, of which students were junior members. NASU stimulated the KOBASU leaders to organise a conference in Chamba to convince everyone that this town was safe.

But before this meeting on 3 January, Nanumba students held their annual homecoming durbar on 30 December, which had the surprisingly topical theme ‘Peaceful coexistence: A tool for quality education’. The meeting was more informal than the Regional Security Council (REGSEC) meeting and the whole programme was in English. Whereas REGSEC had addressed the chiefs, this

they do not know whether they are true; Nanumba usually called the rumours lahibaya, or ‘the masses have said’. These words differed from what may be called gossip, information which lack authority but of which the truth is not doubted (LIK mbornyun; NAN tiŋmarlim).

meeting mainly linked politicians to students. After several Nanumba dancing performances, there were speeches of the DCEs, MPs a Minister of State and the national coordinator of the Ghana Network for Peace-Building (GHANEP), which was founded in 2002 as an umbrella platform organisation for over fifty NGOs working on peace-building.

Thomas Ogajah (Nanumba South DCE) opened the programme by repeating that the rumours that Konkomba in Chamba were preparing to take up arms against Nanumba were untrue and by saying that peace must be a priority to students as future leaders of Nanun. After that, Salifu Saeed (the Nanumba North DCE) and Mohammed ibn Abass (Bimbilla MP) both briefly called for restraint and for student brokerage in the tensions after which they rallied applause for their development achievements. Many participants found the act of the DCE and MP, both Nanumba, of scoring off each other’s development successes during such tensions in Nanun embarrassing.

In that sense, the speeches of Konkomba state executives were received much better. This was best exemplified in the speech of Charles Bintin, the Saboba MP and Minister of State. Like Ogajah, Bintin said that security personnel had to work harder to bring rumourmongers in Bimbilla to book. But while he held DISEC responsible for peace-keeping, Bintin said that Nanumba, or better put NAYA, as landowners should take the lead in organising a forum to peacefully resolve the tensions in Nanun. This statement earned him an ovation.

But the speech which had the largest impact on the audience was that of the charismatic national coordinator of the NGO consortium GHANEP. Amidu Ibrahim Zakaria, himself a Nanumba, stood on behalf of Emmanuel Bombande, the Ghanaian chairman of the umbrella West African Network for Peace-Build- ing (WANEP) and former assistant of Hizkias Assefa during the Kumasi peace workshops. Amidu forwarded a message from Bombande that ‘During the Kumasi 5 series we had a pledge and we should keep it’. This pledge was a vow of non-violence, which, as seen in chapter one, comprised one half of the Kumasi Accord. In his speech of around thirty minutes Amidu continuously coupled the pledge of non-violence to the need for dialogue about the contents of the peace deal.

He called security a responsibility of the people themselves. He said that although conflict is unavoidable, because no-one is the same, it matters how you go about conflict in a non-violent way. He called rumours and ‘songs which make you want to vomit’ the worst type of violence because it set up ‘genera- tions against generations’. He therefore called for tolerance and dialogue. While obviously a very different phenomenon from dialogue, Amidu left the theme of tolerance more or less unaddressed, the consequences of which I show below. On the need for dialogue he however said:

‘My brothers and sisters, any time in a society we find needs insecure, than what we do is we begin to build walls […] around ourselves, because that is the only way to get security. But the real nature of humankind is that my security lies in the society and I have a responsibility to ensure the security of the other person. Where have we left the beautiful norms and customs of our beloved country? We either have to go back for it or we are a lost people.’

Assefa’s legacy came through in Amidu’s statement that although silence is a technique of security (‘we build walls’), it rather caused an insecure situation in which people rather talk about each other than to each other. Rather than tracing the roots of insecurity, he challenged the audience, students in particular, to engage in a dialogue about the issues at stake.

Inspired by this speech, the chairman of the durbar, the secondary school headman and a NAYA peer, obviously remembered the Kumasi workshops in which he participated and he asked all those present to rise and repeat a Kumasi workshop ritual. He asked them to take each others hand and sing ‘All we are saying is give peace a chance’! The invocation of such a globalised incantation (of John Lennon and Yoko Ono) was a striking form to take the sting out of the tensions. The song, which many participants sung at the top of their voices, was a direct reference to the Kumasi peace process. Immediately after the song, there was however another significant event in the spirit of that peace process.

Salifu Saeed, the Nanumba North DCE, namely, invited the Nanumba student leader to him and gave him a cup under the explanation that Nanumba and Konkomba students from Bimbilla and Chamba would have to play a soccer match every year during Christmas break to celebrate peace in Nanun. So, while police had forbidden a soccer match a week earlier, the head of DISEC now encouraged such a match. And here we are back at page one of this book, where I introduced the case of a soccer match between the Bimbilla and Chamba teams as a metaphor for peace in Nanun. The repercussions of this initiative therefore exceed this chapter and I will carry them over to the general conclusion in the next chapter.

While NASU had organised this durbar, they did not have a public voice. This changed on 3 January, when KOBASU organised a peace meeting in Chamba, where both Konkomba and Nanumba students gave speeches. In this meeting, chaired by former KOYA president Kenneth Wujangi, most executives who had delivered a speech in the Bimbilla durbar were present, except the Bimbilla MP, while there was also a KOYA representation from Saboba. But while these actors spoke to the people, KOBASU claimed to speak on behalf of these people.

So far, the speeches had revolved around the message to keep the peace in the interest of development. The KOBASU president however delivered a speech in which he said that Konkomba had been misrepresented in the REGSEC meeting: The depictions of Chamba as an unsafe town eclipsed the profound injustices in

this place: Chamba farmers were cheated in their market; Konkomba butchers were illegally denied access to the abattoir and Nanumba chiefs had their hands in Konkomba leadership. Saying that ‘Konkombas are fighting for their rights in accordance with the constitution of Ghana which is the supreme law of our Nation’, the spokesman called for an end to all these injustices.

After this speech, both the NASU president and the KOYA secretary spoke briefly to preach dialogue and student cooperation. The significance of this was that neither NASU nor KOYA directly reacted to the KOBASU speech; while the NASU president seemed to postpone his reaction to the KOBASU speech to a press conference half a week later (see below), the KOYA secretary rather seemed to have given the lead to the students.

It was significant that while the Nanumba North DCE Saeed, a Nanumba, was very gentle on his largely Konkomba audience, (in vain) promising them development projects, both the Nanumba South DCE (Ogajah) and the Minister of State (Bintin) spoke with more persuasion to the Konkomba audience than they had done to the Nanumba audience in Bimbilla. Charles Bintin first called for one minute silence for the memory of the Chamba Naa and then he told the audience that he found the Chamba tensions ‘a disgrace’. In other words, only Nanumba spokesmen dared to provoke their Nanumba audience; similarly, only Konkomba spokesmen were hard on Konkomba audiences.

But what united both DCEs and Bintin was their reaction to the issues raised by KOBASU. All three of them drew a sharp distinction between development cases (the abattoir and market controversies), which had to be solved by the District Assembly and DISEC, and the Konkomba leadership dispute in town, which the people themselves had to solve with reference to the Kumasi Accord. With this position, they withdrew their support to the late Chamba chief’s market boycott.

A similar distinction was made in a NASU reaction to the KOBASU paper at a 7 January press conference in Bimbilla. The president of NASU asked for a District Assembly resolution of the market and abattoir issues, but he also lined up behind the sovereignty of Nanumba chiefs, whom some Konkomba ‘have failed to give […] the due recognition’. So while KOBASU had presented the abattoir, market and leadership cases as an interrelated set of injustices, emerging from the central role of the Chamba Naa in all these cases, NASU disentangled the development issues from the chieftaincy dispute. KOBASU were not present at the Bimbilla press conference, but their leaders received the NASU position quite well, even though they were reluctant to put their confidence in the district administration and particularly in the District Chief Executive, who had openly supported the Chamba chief two months earlier.

For some days, tensions seemed to subside, until on 9 January, police at a Bimbilla roadblock intercepted guns and ammunition in a Konkomba truck. When the Nanumba North District Chief Executive told the national press that the war had already started, the small Konkomba community in Bimbilla took to their heels and fled. But nothing happened and after three days, the refugees returned, most with a smile on their faces as a combination of shame (for their fear) and relief. As sudden as tensions had started in Nanun, they subsided alto- gether to give way to a normalcy which I have found so difficult to assess.

It was in this context that NAYA and KOYA executives finally came down to Nanun, to show their faces in a public conference in Lungni town south of Wulensi on 14 January. However, as I later learned, in a subsequent closed door meeting in a Bimbilla restaurant, the actual reason of the Youth visit to Nanun became clear, as they received a budget and vehicle from the two DCEs in order to organise the joint peace education tour. This tour took place two weeks later, after I had just left the field, and telephone reports suggested that the communi- ties they visited, including Chamba, endured this mission with resignation. The students were surprised how quickly they earned the moral authority from both the people on the streets and from government executives, and how quickly Youth Association executives, who were described as ‘big men in Accra’, lost theirs. The apparent loss of the Youth Associations’ authority was demonstrated a few months later.

The ‘renewed commitments’, 2007

The following events took place after I left Nanun in mid-January 2007 and I