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- Convenors:
-
Dan Hodgkinson
(University of Oxford)
Jocelyn Alexander (University of Oxford)
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Short Abstract:
This panel will consider how the study of storytelling can expand our understanding of how people navigate and contest social orders in Africa, in both historical and contemporary contexts.
Long Abstract:
This panel will consider how the study of storytelling can expand our understanding of how people navigate and contest social orders in Africa. In recent years, the study of political narratives in electoral campaigns, commemorative events, print media and satirical cartoons has enriched our understanding of how politicians and other powerful actors seek to maintain and contest state power. Yet the stories people tell offer much more than just a lens on elite politics. As Hannah Arendt and Michael Jackson have argued, storytelling is a universal practice that can invoke moral frameworks and constitute agency for those who face oppression and persecution. Storytelling - as either a speech act or in writing - has powerful political effects both in the intersubjective realms where community is made, and in public fora where truth claims and demands for recognition are asserted. These contexts interact in potentially creative and disruptive ways. Papers may consider storytellers across a broad spectrum - soldiers, economic migrants, student activists, artists, and others. We are particularly interested in papers that analyse the sites and circumstances in which storytelling takes place and gains efficacy; the discourses and conventions that storytellers draw upon and which delineate claims and communities; and the politics of reception and retelling over time.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 14 June, 2019, -Kira Erwin (Durban University of Technology)
Paper short abstract:
In South Africa negative stories about migrants and refugees exist in popular and political discourse. This paper explores how a piece of theatre, developed from the oral histories of women migrants, used storytelling as a political strategy for counter-hegemonic narratives on migration in the city.
Paper long abstract:
In South Africa negative stories about African migrants and refugees are common. Exclusionary narratives in the media, popular and political rhetoric portray people perceived as 'foreign' as doing crime, and taking jobs. That these stories contradict each other, and are refuted by research, has done little to lessen migrants' experiences of discrimination. The popularist story about migrants and refugees is that they should "go home". But storytelling can also be a powerful political strategy to counter hegemonic narratives that serve unequal relations in the contemporary social order. This paper discusses how a piece of documentary theatre in the city of Durban, titled The Last Country, performed alternative migration stories for a broader public around the city. The theatre script was developed from 30 oral histories of migrant women, these included women from other African countries who arrived in Durban on different visas and refugee status, as well as South African women who are internal migrants to the city from rural areas. Purposefully blurring the essentialising lines of equating migrants with the idea of foreignness. The Last Country tells the everyday stories of women arriving and living in the city, and attempting to make it a place something like home. The play was performed for a broad, as well as a targeted audience, and was followed by an audience discussion. This paper explores how interdisciplinary collaborations use storytelling as an empathetic and a political strategy to create counter-hegemonic stories on what it means to live together in this South African city.
Danielle Del Vicario (University of Oxford)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the sites, conventions and voices of written biographical and conspiratorial stories produced since the death of South Sudanese liberation leader John Garang, focusing on two intersectional themes central to Garang's own life: transnationalism and education.
Paper long abstract:
On 30 July 2005, a Ugandan presidential helicopter carrying John Garang, then newly appointed First Vice President of Sudan and leader of the Sudan People's Liberation Army which had waged a twenty-two-year war against the Sudanese government, crashed in suspicious circumstances on the Sudanese-Ugandan border. This paper explores the sites, conventions and voices of written biographical and conspiratorial stories since produced about Garang, from children's books and political treatises to internet threads and self-published investigative accounts. In setting, authorship and transmission, these stories claim relevance through two intersectional themes central to Garang's own life: transnationalism and education. For South Sudanese scattered by the war, Garang's global connections offer a didactic lens through which to naturalize the diasporic experience, comment on contemporary conflict and (re)tell the story of South Sudanese liberation. Since 2013, South Sudan has faced chronic unrest and Garang frequently figures as the exemplary educated peacemaker. His idea of the 'New Sudan', previously a non-secessionist politics based on reform in a united Sudan, is being reconstituted to call for peace, development and cooperation in the face of South Sudan's post-independence conflicts. These stories are both nostalgic and political, and Garang's legacy has been mobilized on all sides of the current political divide. Indeed, these stories form their own literary corpus, one which converses across borders and media to participate in a social order characterized, this paper argues, not only by an absence of official history but by profound information uncertainty.
Jocelyn Alexander (University of Oxford)
Paper short abstract:
This paper uses oral histories of ZAPU soldiers imprisoned during Zimbabwe's armed struggle to explore the 'broken journey' as a mode of storytelling. It shows how the conditions of prison created an extraordinary, distinctive martial narrative, but one lacking in public currency.
Paper long abstract:
This paper uses oral histories of ZAPU soldiers imprisoned in the early years of Zimbabwe's armed struggle to explore the 'broken journey' as a mode of storytelling. It compares these narratives to those of ZAPU soldiers generally and to nationalist prisoners, both of whom find purpose and efficacy in journeys. Stories of transformative passages leading to a powerful martial identity characterise soldiers' accounts. In nationalists' stories, prison was given value as a (temporary) place of self-improvement and institution building in which future citizens and leaders were usefully moulded. The narratives of soldiers in prison were marked by disarmament and stasis, both offering profound threats to soldiers' purpose and progress. Their stories told of fighting a war within the 'enemy territory' of the prison by defending specifically military bodies and minds against existential threats, and thus preserving the possibility of a resumed journey. Soldiers also told escape stories, through which an efficacious life beyond the prison could be imagined even amidst the harsh realities of a loss of freedom akin to a defeat. The meanings of these narratives were not, however, 'consummated in return' (Jackson, 2013: 50): these men found their stories lacked 'currency' not only at the moment of their release from prison in 1980 but also in the context in which they told them decades later.
Sandrine Perrot (SciencesPo) Gerald Owachi
Paper short abstract:
We focus on the documentation produced by the maragoli community to obtain the Ugandan ID card and citizenship. The art of telling their story represents a set of attempts to negotiate and (re)validate their "indigenousness" through multiple and sometimes contradictory bureaucratic self-writing.
Paper long abstract:
The art of self-writing: the negotiation of indigenousness of the maragoli community in Uganda
In Uganda, 15,000 people defined or self-defined as Maragoli have been unable to acquire identity cards through the mandatory national citizen registration process that has been implemented since 2014. Originally from Kenya, most Ugandan maragoli settled in Western Uganda in the second half of the 1950s, years before independence. Their ethnic group however is not listed among the "indigenous" groups recognized under the 1995 constitution that modifies the eligibility criterion for citizenship (it now includes only ethnic groups settled in Uganda prior to 1926). This article addresses the process of negotiating indigenousness to be granted citizenship. We will see that the Maragoli claims to citizenship come with the ongoing construction of a narrative account of their origins and contribution to Ugandan development. We will see that the documentation produced by the Association of the maragoli community in Kigumba highlights the development of an art of telling their story (Noiriel) that represents a set of attempts to negotiate and (re) validate their "indigenousness" through multiple and sometimes contradictory bureaucratic self-(re) writing (Mbembe; Awenego-Dalberto, Banégas)
Myfanwy James (LSE)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores story-telling among Congolese war veterans-turned-humanitarian fixers in the DRC. It explores the functions of story-telling, the narratives they form to describe their transition to humanitarianism, and how story-telling to a researcher becomes a means of demanding recognition.
Paper long abstract:
In order to operate in North Kivu, in the eastern DRC, international NGOs must negotiate with local armed groups. During these negotiations, Congolese humanitarian staff act as "fixers": they collect information, analyse the context, and form and maintain contacts among local armed groups. Many are former rebels themselves.
This paper explores story-telling among Congolese war veterans-turned-humanitarian fixers.
First, it describes how story-telling is both a risk, and a resource, in their humanitarian careers. On the one hand, story-telling is a resource: recounting their military past can help forge connections with armed groups. On the other hand, many combatants-turned-humanitarians must purposefully hide their past from their colleagues in order to gain employment and avoid distrust.
Second, this paper explores the stories former combatants tell to explain their transition. Some describe humanitarianism as redemption: a way of making amends, and coming to terms with feelings of abandonment and hopelessness after failed disarmament, demobilization and reintegration processes. Others highlight pragmatism: with limited job opportunities, de-mobilised rebels with contacts and an understanding of local political dynamics became ideal candidates for humanitarian organisations.
Finally, this paper explores story-telling to an external researcher as a process of cathartic sense-making for veterans-turned-humanitarians. By narrating their story, Congolese humanitarians demand recognition and reclaim agency over the trajectories of their lives.
Dan Hodgkinson (University of Oxford)
Paper short abstract:
The paper explores the politics of telling war stories about the Second Congo War in Zimbabwe. In a 2004 court case, soldiers' widows forced details of the war into the public domain. I show how, why and to what effect these stories had on the widows as well as on public attitudes to the war.
Paper long abstract:
In 2004, the widows of Zimbabwean soldiers, whose bodies had not returned from the Second Congo War, won a court case to have their husbands 'presumed dead' and thereby allowing their estates to be passed on. The case provided the first and only official account of the gruesome nature of the war to date. Details of the conflict were and are silenced by military and political leaders who illicitly gained from the intervention through the mining and sale of DRC diamond minerals and timber. Yet in this court case, soldiers testified to how their comrades had been 'caught by rebels and dismembered with machetes or explosives'. The paper explores the different layers of politics involved in telling these war stories in 2004. Specifically, I show how, why and to what effect the stories told during this court case had on the widows who brought the case as well as Zimbabwean public attitudes to the war more broadly.
Omolayo Ojo (School of Oriental & African Studies )
Paper short abstract:
This research analyzes how narratives shared within transnational spaces shape and are shaped by the social construction of migrants and migration and reveals the importance of archetypal and counter narratives as they highlight how people navigate idealized and realized expectations of migration.
Paper long abstract:
As an active sending nation, many people in Dakar, Senegal have family or friends that reside in another country. This research contributes to the understanding of how narratives are shared within transnational spaces and how these narratives shape and are shaped by the social construction of migrants and migration. Using ethnographic methods, this research is a comparative analysis of the migration narratives shared in Dakar and New York City, one of the primary destinations for Senegalese migrants. The focus on narratives shared within this space is particularly salient when considering how migrants and non-migrants utilize them in various contexts and how information about migration is selectively shared with different audiences, including immediate family, acquaintances and possible emigrants. The analysis thereby opens up for consideration how conflicting themes and narratives are created and reconciled across and within the sending and receiving nations and even by the same storyteller. Emergent themes include efforts to achieve "The Senegalese Dream"—material wealth, public display and sharing of that wealth, marriage, and respect within the community. The narrative describing going to "El Dorado"—referencing any Western nation—as a particularly effective means of achieving this dream remains dominant, but is more often used within a phantom narrative tradition in which naïve individuals still buy into the myth or juxtaposed with a challenge narrative that highlights the realities of migration. Accordingly, this research reveals the importance of archetypal and counter narratives about migration as they highlight how people navigate idealized and realized expectations for migration.
Susanne Verheul (Oxford University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper interrogates the dynamics of storytelling within testimonies given to Zimbabwe's Commission of Inquiry into Post-Election Violence. I aim to explore how both the public and political dimensions of the Commission shaped its credibility, its impact, and its ability to ensure 'justice'.
Paper long abstract:
This paper examines statements made to the seven-member Commission of Inquiry into Zimbabwe's Post-Election Violence, and the public reactions to these statements, to ask how politics and the search for 'justice' interacted on this stage. To do so, I will in part contrast the form and functions of the Commission to those of a court of law. Sworn in on 19 September 2018 by President Mnangagwa, the Commission led by former South African president Kgalema Motlanthe was charged with scrutinising the events of 1 August, when six people were killed, allegedly by members of the Zimbabwe National Army. Further tasked to make 'suitable recommendations' in line with their findings, the impartiality and credibility of the Commission were quickly called into question. Human rights groups challenged the legality of the Commission within the High Court, while the independent media drew attention to the political affiliation of witnesses appearing before the Commission, and to their 'interesting and dramatic testimonies', many of with were responded to directly by the public present at the hearings, and were live-streamed on social media sites. The public reactions, alongside the content of the testimonies, gave the Commission an air of political rallies. With this paper, I thus aim to explore how both the public and political dimensions of the Commission shaped its credibility, its impact, and its ability to ensure justice was not only done, but was 'seen to be done', with an eye to the events unfolding in Zimbabwe in January 2019 as well.