jackson - storytelling events

Storytelling Events, Violence, and the Appearance of the Past1

Jackson, Michael, 1940-

Anthropological Quarterly, Volume 78, Number 2, Spring 2005,pp. 355-375 (Article)

Published by George Washington University Institute for Ethnographic Research

DOI: 10.1353/anq.2005.0020

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WEST-AFRICAN WARSCAPES

Storytelling Events, Violence, and the Appearance of the Past1

Michael JacksonUniversity of Copenhagen

AbstractAlluding to Sierra Leone’s recent violent history, this paper argues that storytellingevents offer insights into the ways that people evaluate, discuss, and negotiatesocial and ethical strategies for making communal life viable in war as well as inpeace. At the same time, it explores some of the theoretical implications of MichaelOakeshott’s assertion that “there are not two worlds—the world of past happen-ings and the world of our present knowledge of those past events—there is only oneworld, and it is the world of present experience” (Oakeshott 1933:108). [ethics,events, history, Sierra Leone, storytelling, violence]

In summoning the past to reach an understanding of the present, it is all tootempting to see history as a series of defining moments and critical

events—the Atlantic slave trade, the Holocaust, the colonization of the NewWorld, the crucifixion of Christ, the killing of Imam Hussein, or, for that mat-ter, 9/11—whose force continues to be felt in the here and now, shaping theway we live and our worldview. The same is true of war, which so utterlytransforms maps, polities, and worldviews that we often declare in its after-

Angelia Fell

new muse

Storytelling Events, Violence, and the Appearance of the Past

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math that nothing will ever be the same again. But this view of history andwar often downplays the ways in which past events are continually beingtransmuted into myth and the ways in which the present, replete with its ownpreoccupations, struggles, and interests appropriates the past, and in doingso, revises the way the past appears to us. Although, from an objectivist stand-point, the past has a causal effect on the present simply because it is prior,from a phenomenological standpoint, effects may precede causes and, to allintents and purposes, “bring about the past” (Dummett 1978:319-350). Thus,when a resentful younger brother in Sierra Leone complains about being “aslave” to his elder brother’s will, or an unhappy wife refers to herself as “aslave” in her husband’s house, or a sixteen year old schoolgirl expresses theopinion that “anyone who does not try to be educated will be just like aslave,” we glimpse not only how “the” historical past (in this case “domesticslavery”) is strategically and rhetorically deployed to explain quite differentsocial and biographical circumstances, but how these contemporary allusionsto slavery effectively bring the phenomenon into being.2 This may be com-pared with the way we in the urban-industrial West still deploy metaphorsfrom our agrarian past—of herding, shepherding, sowing, reaping, and culti-vating—to express experiences that have nothing to do with farming ordeploy the imagery of war to describe domestic altercations, academic argu-ments, sports competitions, and corporate takeovers (Lakhoff and Johnson1980:4-5). The past, we might say, is thus never one thing, but many; and it ischaracterized less by necessity than potentiality.

This point of view echoes D.W. Winnicott’s understanding of cultural expe-rience as neither inner nor outer, but as an emergent property of the inter-play between the two—something occurring “in the potential space betweenthe individual and the environment” (1974:118). The “potential space” is theplace of play and of art, in which every individual negotiates, albeit unwitting-ly, his or her own particular compromise between what is given and what heor she effectively brings into being. The historian who overlooks this perenni-al interplay between what has been and what is in the making tends to com-mit the same epistemological error as many of those whose “past” he or sheis studying, i.e. privileging antecedent events over present-day praxis, reduc-ing what is now possible to what happened long ago, and attributing to thespectral appearance of the past in the present an abiding ontological presenceand identity. Moreover, by explaining the present solely in terms of the past,such an historian not only risks attributing to the ancestors greater powerthan the living possess; he or she comes dangerously close to bad faith, for by

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invoking the determinative power of an allegedly pristine past, he or she runsthe risk of absolving people from their responsibility for ensuring that theworst of the past never happens again and that the best of it is salvaged andretained. To put it more theoretically, we need to explore how the deadweight of past generations—Sartre’s “practico-inert”—is transformed by thehuman faculty for initiating something new —the faculty that Hannah Arendtcalls “natality.” At the same time, a phenomenological critique of objectivismis suggested here—for when Marx speaks of the “tradition of all the dead gen-erations [weighing] like a nightmare on the brain of the living” (Marx 1934:10)or Arendt writes that the new is that “which cannot be expected from whatev-er may have happened before” (1958:178), we should construe these state-ments, not as referring primarily to some external reality, but rather to ourexperience of reality. It is for this reason that Lévi-Strauss’s well-known distinc-tion between cold and hot societies—the first which deny or countermandthe future, the second which admit and celebrate it—is spurious, for humanbeings everywhere participate actively, though not always equally, in the cre-ation of the future whether that future appears to repeat the past or not.

There are also methodological pitfalls in our appeal to the past, such as theimplicitly Lamarkian notion that “traumatic” experiences in previous genera-tions, or during wartime, leave permanent psychic scars whose repercussionscontinue to be felt, like original sin, unto the seventh generation. Perhaps weshould explore more carefully and empirically the questions of what it is thatwe call “the past” and what uses this “past” is put to by the living. My workinghypothesis is that the “past” has a similarly symbolic status as “ancestors,”“God,” “tradition,” or “the war.” Such terms tend to be reified and treated astranscendent. And in so far as they are seen as “objective”—which is to say,outside the field of our immediate comprehension and control—people alltoo readily declare that they can neither govern nor change them. Causativeforces and transcendent entities thus acquire the power to explain and legiti-mate social practices and worldviews, but at the expense of absolving peopleof responsibility for their present situation. To treat people as victims of cir-cumstance, without showing how they actively work on these circumstances,is to share in this bad faith.

Since the historical past is not transmitted genetically, it must be transmit-ted exogenetically, i.e. culturally. But in what form? This question is especial-ly imperative in preliterate societies. One obvious answer is in anecdote,myth, and folktale. But I hope to show that, as stories, the past is not imposedupon the present, but offers itself up, so to speak, to the living as a basis for


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creatively comprehending their present situation and making informed choic-es about how it is to be addressed and lived. In what follows, I will be mainlyconcerned with choices between retaliation and reconciliation. For thoughthe past contains the germ of antipathy, defensiveness, and violence, it alsocontains the possibilities of trust, openness, and reconciliation. Using aKuranko narrative, collected in the course of fieldwork in Koinadugu district,northeast Sierra Leone, in 1970, I will show that both options are presentedby the past and that it is for those in the present to decide which option willbe preferred and how the past will be interpreted.

A Storytelling SessionWhen we speak of oral traditions, we must not assume that the “tradition”comprises a finite repertoire of stories, circulated ad infinitum and affirmingentrenched moral values, for as an experienced and performed event, any storyis like Heraclitus’ river, differently realized each time it is told and differentlysignified in the minds of individual listeners—hence, Bakhtin’s argument thatany narrative participates in the “open event-ness of Being” (1993:1) and simul-taneously refers back to “the objective unity of a domain of culture” and for-ward “at the never-repeatable uniqueness of actually lived and experiencedlife” (1993:2). That present events are always characterized by a degree ofhermeneutic openness is immediately evident in any Kuranko storytelling ses-sion. Let me therefore review briefly a night session in Kondembaia inFebruary 1970 at which three gifted narrators were present—Keti FerenkeKoroma, Kenya Fina Mara,3 and Sulimani Koroma—together with a sizeableaudience of men, women, and children. Since I have described this session indetail elsewhere (1982:64-66), I recall it now only to re-emphasize the signifi-cance of the theatrical or performative dimension of Kuranko storytelling, par-ticularly the dialogical interplay of different storytellers. Not only did the threestorytellers take turns to tell their stories, but each elected to tell stories thatironically counterpointed the story that had preceded their own. At the sametime, each gave enthusiastic support to the stories that the others told, inter-jecting stock exclamations, such as ha, heh, eh, oho, or fiu, or murmuringapproval, astonishment, and emphasis. Indeed, in two stories about beguilingwomen, Keti Ferenke and Kenya Fina actually shared the narration and playedthe male and female roles. And when stories included songs, Kenya Finaencouraged and enhanced the singing with her mellifluous voice and taughtthe audience the words of the songs before each story began.

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This subtle alternation of voices and of various points of view means thatKuranko storytelling events play with, rather than slavishly assert, social dog-mas. Moreover, this play maximizes audience participation, both in thetelling and singing of the story and in the elucidation of its ethical implica-tions. For in counterpointing different standpoints, stories place in abeyancepredetermined, conventional attitudes based on gender, age, and estate, andopen up the possibility of dialogue and reflection on decisive questions ofjudgment and action. But, as I say, Kuranko tileinu not only critique the rigidworldviews associated with established centers of chiefly power and maleauthority; they play and comment ironically upon each other. Thus, whileindividual stories, such as Keti Ferenke’s “The Two Momoris,” which I haveanalyzed elsewhere (2002:142-152), may take a dim view of women, suchbias will seldom go unchallenged, either by other storytellers or by the audi-ence. A pluralistic spirit prevails, encompassing both stories and persons, foras Kuranko see it, stories are no more the same than people are. It is theadjustment and reconciliation of differences that storytelling attempts,rather than the strict imposition of unitary identifications. In this sense, astorytelling event epitomizes the ideal of social intelligence (hankili) and con-forms to a model of civility and conversability that is recognized in all cul-tures. Crucial to this ideal is the notion of a complementary relationshipbetween different voices and different points of view—a complementarity,moreover, that implies that anyone may, in the event of an unjust use of priv-ilege or power, take action to realign and reaffirm the social order. This is notto say that storytelling works toward unanimity or consensus, still less that itdenies intrinsic and inherited differences in rank, gender, estate, and ethnic-ity; rather, it is to emphasize the ways in which storytelling, simply by virtueof its being a shared action of speaking, singing, sitting together, and voicingvarious viewpoints, makes possible the momentary semblance of a fusion ofdisparate and often undisclosed private experiences. It is, therefore, not somuch the substance of what is said or suggested in a story that affirms theethic of openness and “whiteness” that Kuranko encapsulate in the notion ofmorgoye (personhood), but the very act of participating in a shared event andreferring separate experiences to a common source. Keti Ferenke Koromaonce spelled this out to me by saying that dogmatic declarations about whatis right and wrong will have less effect on a young listener than the telling ofa story which enables her to see for herself the implications of certain actionsand thus come to her own conclusions as to what behaviors are most con-ducive to the viability of a community.


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On the night in question, the room into which we were crowded was shut-tered against the tropical night. I was barely able to find a niche for my micro-phone. Children clambered over one another, trying to get nearer the story-teller. Babies slept, oblivious, on their mothers’ backs. Old men, chewing kola,unmoved by the commotion, sat in the shadows of hurricane lamps. Youngmen’s faces lost their brashness. And women smiled without inhibition, antic-ipating another of Keti Ferenke’s irreverent and hilarious performances.Having boasted to me more than once that he could tell more stories than Iwould ever have patience to record, he began apace, partly to impress me, Ithink, and rattled off ten stories that immediately had everyone in stitches.Though all touched on familiar themes—the vaunting of self, looking downon others, taking unfair advantage of others, putting oneself before others,failing to keep promises, not heeding the advice of elders—they exploitedludicrous situations and played for laughs. Even when he broached his ownobsessions—the wiles and wickedness of women—he used burlesque andgrotesque to avoid too much gravity.

Then Kenya Fina signalled that she wanted to tell a story. Though it pickedup on Keti Ferenke’s themes of not lording it over others and not using one’ssuperior position to take advantage of those under one’s care and protection,Kenya Fina’s story focussed on the relationship between junior and senior co-wives and the unjust ways in which older women sometimes use their privi-leged position to abuse and exploit younger co-wives. “If you are the seniorwife (baramusu), you should not look down on the ones under you, blamingthem for whatever goes wrong in the house.”

Now it was Keti Ferenke’s turn again. Taking his cue from Kenya Fina, he alsotold a story about co-wives, but turned it into an indictment of the fickleness ofwomen. Tricked and cuckolded by his wife, the chief in the story ends up rue-fully observing that men should try to endure the wanton ways of women, justas the hardy leaf of the kuron tree endures high winds and driving rain.

It was at this point that Kenya Fina told what would become, for me, one ofthe most compelling stories I ever heard in Sierra Leone. But before relating it,I want to quickly comment on the six stories that followed and brought theevening to a close, for this will help make clear the extent to which stories mustbe understood, not separately, as a disconnected set of entertainments, but asa strategic series that plays off points of view, one against the other, creating apolyphony of voices and enlarging one’s understanding of how the recurringdilemmas of everyday life are experienced by different individuals. As we shallsee, Kenya Fina’s story of Na Nyale is a plea for compassion and reconciliation,

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rather than harsh judgement. It was immediately followed by a story in a sim-ilar vein by Tina Kuyate, concerning the origins of ingratitude. A male ances-tor, given great gifts by a magical bird, fails to give anything back to the birdwhen it is in need and, as a consequence, loses the bounty he had earliergained. Keti Ferenke then told a story that pressed his point that women can-not be trusted. In a lighter vein now, Kenya Fina told a comic story about aseductress, showing that men can be as readily swayed by their emotions aswomen. The session ended with Keti Ferenke telling three more stories, the lastof which affirmed the value of friendship. By reiterating the point of “The TwoMomoris,” though this time without any reference to women, it seemed to sumup all that he and Kenya Fina shared, a poignant demonstration that friend-ship may transcend lines of age and gender, not only in art but in life.

The Story of Na NyaleThere was once a very jealous chief. He allowed no man to see his wives. Sothe wives decided on a ruse. They wove several large raffia baskets that couldbe hung from the walls of the house. Whenever the women made ready to gofrom the town to the farm, each hid her lover in one of the baskets. Thewomen also prepared food and put it in the baskets. Then they would set offto the farm to do the weeding and in the evening return to the town, carryingtheir lovers in the baskets on their backs.

This went on for some time. Then one day, one of the wives, whose namewas Na Nyale, decided to leave her lover in the farmhouse when she went outweeding, because he was too heavy to carry. What none of the wives knew wasthat the chief was going to visit them that day. Na Nyale had killed a chicken,prepared it well, and left it for her lover. But while all the other wives tooktheir lovers with them to the place where they were weeding that day, NaNyale left her lover in the farmhouse.

No sooner had the women left the farmhouse than the chief arrived. As heentered the house, he saw that big basket hanging there. He touched it andsaid, “Eh, these women are amazing. What have they got in this big basket? Iam going to have a look inside.” When the chief said that he was going to lookinside the basket, it started shaking, shaking, shaking. The chief said, “Eh, thebasket is shaking! I must look into this.” The basket shook twice. Then thechief took his machete and cut the rope. With the rope cut, the basket fellfrom the wall—din. The basket said, “Mm hmm.” The basket hummed. Thechief said, “Ah! So the basket can speak. I am going to open it this very day


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and see what is inside.” He took a knife and cut the rope that held the mouthof the basket closed. And what did he see? Fara Mara. Then the chief said,“Who is in this basket?” The man said, “I am.” The chief said, “Who are you?”“I am Fara Mara,” said the man. Then the chief said, “What did you come herefor?” The man said, “Allah has destined that this should happen.” The chiefsaid, “Well, Allah has indeed destined that something should happen betweenus today. Now get out so that I may kill you.” The man begged, “Oh chief, whydon’t you simply fine me? Whatever the amount is, I will pay it.” The chiefsaid, “No, I must kill you.” Fara Mara got out of the basket, and the chiefseized him. He put one foot on Fara Mara’s legs, the other foot on Fara Mara’shands, then he took out his knife and cut Fara Mara’s throat. When his throatwas slit, Fara Mara’s blood splashed onto a cassava plant. The blood splashedover the leaves. The cassava leaf then changed into a little Senegalese firefinch.4 The fire finch flew to the part of the farm where the women wereweeding, to tell them what had happened. The bird found that the womenhad partitioned the area. Standing a little way in front of Na Nyale, whoselover had been killed, it sang:

Na Nyale, oh Na Nyale, Na Nyale, oh Na NyaleNi i wara sole to mansa, ni i wara sole to mansaWara kemine ye m’bi yo, oh Na Nyale(Na Nyale, oh Na Nyale…If you have left the basket,then the chief has seen a man today, oh Na Nyale)

Na Nyale said to her companions, “Nnn, the bird is crying. I am not goingto finish weeding my piece of ground. I am gone, I am gone, oh. The bird issaying something to us.” The others said, “All right, go. We will see you later.”She hurried quickly down the hill and arrived at the farmhouse. But what didshe see? She saw the basket on the floor, all the ropes cut from its mouth.Then she saw the chief. She said, “Chief, what happened here?” The chief said,“Are you the owner of this?” She said, “Yes. But there is no need to be afraid.What did you do with it?” The chief said, “Well, I have not left any man in myfarmhouse. If I found a man in the basket with the bones of a chicken and apan with traces of palm oil on it, then it means that the food he eats is sweet-er than the food I eat,5 and I killed him.” The woman said, “After you killedhim, what did you do with him?” The chief said, “After I killed him, I burnt hisbody and threw the ashes in the river.” The woman said, “Into what river?”The chief said, “The Seli.”6

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The woman went to the town and got some money. She said, “If I do notsee this man today, then no matter what happens, I will not rest. I must findhim.” The woman then set off, following the river downstream. For two yearsshe followed the river. She said she had to find her lover. Wherever shestopped she would find palmbirds in their nests. She would tell the birds tobe quiet, that love was in the air and on the ground and under the water. Shewould say, “I am searching for my lover.”

I ya l moina, Fara Mara, i ya l moina? DondoI ya l moi dondo? I ya saya soron n’de le feDondooooo. Don(Do you hear me, Fara Mara, do you hear me? All is quietDo you hear quietness? You died because of meAll is quiettttt. Quiet)

She heard nothing but the sound of her own voice. She would continue onher way. Wherever she stopped by the riverside, she sang the same song. Fortwo years, she followed the river, searching for her lover.

Then all the living things of the river met together and said, “That man whowas killed and burnt, and whose ashes were thrown in the river….whoeverate some should bring it forth now. There is someone searching for him, sodesperate she cannot rest. All those who ate the bones should spit them out.All those who ate the flesh should regurgitate it. Those who ate the eyesshould give them up. We should put all these parts back together again andmake the man as he was.” So everyone brought forth the different parts. Allthose who were able to reassemble the skeleton did so. All those who wereable to put flesh on the bones did so. They put all the parts together again.Then they asked who had taken the life. The one who had taken it said, “I tookthe life.” They said, “Well, go and get it.” He went for the life. They told himto put the life back in the body. He did so.

Then they told the man that someone was looking for him, someone des-perate to find him. At that moment, Na Nyale arrived at that spot. It was aplace so fear-inspiring that no one ever ventured there. But so desperate wasthis woman that she cared nothing for her own safety. She stood there. Therewas dense forest all around. She heard the palmbirds chattering. She scat-tered some coins in the forest and said, “All you djinn who live here, this is mygift to you. I am looking for someone, for the man who was killed on accountof me. If I do not find him I prefer to die by this river. I cannot live without


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him.” Then she scattered some coins along the riverbank and said, “All livingthings in the water and on the land, listen to me.” But silence surrounded her.She stood and sang (as before). Then the man sang in reply:

Ah, n’de Fara Mara; n’ya saya keni i le l le fe dondo(Ah, I am Fara Mara; I preferred death because of you…all is quiet)

The woman leapt into the river—gbogbon. She said, “He is here. No oneknows my song, except Fara Mara. He must be here.” Then she saw him.

The creatures who dwell under the water took care of them for two years.They were well fed and provided for. In the third year they were given a xylo-phonist.7 A horse was given to the lover, and the woman was given two boxesof dresses. Then they were carried to the surface. The water creatures said,“Well, we have to tell you that when you return you should immediately findthe man who killed you and take your revenge. If you don’t do this, we willkill you. Here is what to do: when you return, ask for him and spend a nightlodged in his house. Next morning, tell him you want to dance. Invite him todance with you. Sit on your horse, and let him sit on his. Then, as you dance,take your sword and cut off his head, thus paying him back in his own kind.8

By cutting off his head, you will satisfy us.” The man and the woman said, “Allright,” and set off.

In every town they came to, they asked: ”Is that chief still there?” Peoplesaid, “What chief?” “That chief who killed a man that year, the man who washidden in a raffia basket on the farm.” Then people said, “He is there.” Finally,the couple reached the town where that chief lived. But they did not recog-nise the luiye. They asked, “Is that chief still here?” People said, “What chief?”“The chief that killed a man on his farm on account of his wife.” They said,“Yes, he is here.” Then the man said, “Well, he raised me, so I have come tothank him.” People said, “He is here.” The man said, “Well, can you show methe way to his luiye?” They led him right into the chief’s house. Everyone waslooking at the two strangers. Then one of the chief’s wives said, “Eh! Thisman’s wife resembles Na Nyale, the one whose lover was killed by the chief.She looks like her.” The woman went and greeted Na Nyale. But Na Nyalesaid, “I am not Na Nyale.” The other woman said, “Well, people really can lookalike!” She went away. But then she said, “But the man looks like Fara Mara.”The talk went on, but the strangers said nothing.

Then the man took £15 and gave it to the chief. He said, “You raised me.You have forgotten, but you did.” (The chief had no idea that a plot was being

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hatched against him, to make him do what the strangers wanted.) The womanthen gave two lapas and two head ties to each of the chief’s wives. Then theyretired for the night.

In the morning the man told the chief that he was going to offer a sacri-fice, because it was a long time since he had done so. He said, “I did not knowthat I would find my big man here.” Then the chief mounted his horse. Theman mounted his. The old women crowded around them, clapping, and thejelebas played their xylophones, singing the praises of the chief. The man scat-tered coins on the ground. People scrambled to get them. Even Fara Mara’smother did not recognize him. But he did not go to her place. The jelebaswere playing. Everyone was happy. But Fara Mara had a sword hidden underhis gown. He put his hand under his gown and grasped the sword. He said,“Oh God, I did not start this. This man killed me. My body was burnt and myashes strewn in the river. If this all happened, oh God, help me take myrevenge.” As the chief passed him, he drew his sword and with one blow, cutoff the chief’s head. His head fell there. His body fell there. There was a greatcommotion among the people. Everyone was crying. Fara Mara said, “Heh,heh, heh, heh, everybody be quiet. Everyone can tell me soon why he or sheis crying.” (A killer’s word is always feared.)9 Then everyone fell silent.

Next day he sacrificed two cows, one for himself and the other for the deadchief. He became chief in that town. All the chief’s wives became his wives.Therefore, be you a chief or a nobody,10 if you should find your wife withanother man, fine him but do not kill him. To kill is not our custom. That isnot what we have met.”

Since these events occured, a stop was put to killing. No one does it now.

The Social Logic of Violence To understand violence intersubjectively, it is necessary to stress that the prin-ciple of reciprocity operates both at the level of being and of having, for Beingis in all societies cathected onto and distributed among the things which peo-ple call their own and with which they identify. What one has objectifies whoone is. The Kuranko notion of miran helps make this clear. Mirannu (pl.) referboth to material possessions—particularly those that contain and protect,such as a house, clothing, water vessels, and cooking pots—as well as to per-sonal attributes that give one a sense of self-possession, presence, and sub-stantiality of being—such as forceful speech, physical skill, and social adroit-ness. But miran, in both senses of the term—material possession and


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personal disposition—is never a fixed property or attribute. In practice, a per-son’s miran may be bolstered by fetishes that symbolically enclose, contain,and protect (ka kandan) the vital spaces that define his or her being—body,house, village, chiefdom—in exactly the same way that in a consumer socie-ty, material possessions bolster and define a person’s sense of well-being, sub-stantiality, and standing. But self-possession may be undermined, sapped, orlost. Just as a person’s property can be stolen, a pot broken, and a house fallinto disrepair, so a person can lose self-possession and confidence. Moreover,a person’s miran can be “taken away” by more powerful others (such as auto-cratic parents, forceful public speakers, and powerful bush spirits) whosevoice and power “press down” with great weight, diminishing the miran ofthose in their presence. Ideally, a balance is struck in which everyone’s voice,presence, and property is accorded due recognition in relation to his or herrole, age, and gender. But some people assert themselves beyond their duestation—as in the case of a chief who exploits his position to take advantageof people, a senior co-wife who abuses her junior partners, a man whose jeal-ousy overrules his better judgement, or a woman whose emotions are notheld in check. A kind of intersubjective logic then comes into play, based onthe principle of reciprocity, according to which one has the right to counter inkind any action that has the effect of directly nullifying, diminishing, belit-tling, or erasing one’s own being, or indirectly doing so by taking away prop-erties that one regards as essential to and as extensions of one’s being. Thephrase ke manni a nyorgo manni reveals the kinship between the social logicof partnership and the abstract calculus of retaliation. But in the case of lextalionis, when the party that feels that its being has been violated takes iden-tical counteraction against the violator, can we call such action violent?

According to Kuranko reasoning, no.If one is innocent, one has every right to avenge oneself against anyone who

seeks to do one harm. This is why, before avenging himself, Fara Mara declaresbefore God that since he had done nothing to justify the violence of the chief,he now has every right to do to the chief what had been done to him. Not onlyis this not, in the Kuranko view, a violent act; it is a necessary and honorableone, rewarded by Fara Mara inheriting all that the chief had once possessed.Violating the being of someone who is believed to be responsible for violatingone’s own is not violence but retributive justice. Which is, on the evidence,what the RUF rebels believed, who severed the hands of several people inKondembaia in April 1998, for were they not part and parcel of the being offerensola—of the party and people that had robbed them of their power?

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However, Kenya Fina’s story juxtaposes this retaliative attitude (associatedwith the djinn, the beings of the wild) with another, based on the notion ofpersonhood as magnanimity. These two ethics are also co-present in the pre-vious story where Gbeyekan Momori’s goodwill and generosity of spirit breaksthe cycle of vendetta and payback by focusing not on the immediate situationthat has caused such grief and pain, but invoking a more abstract point ofview. In this same vein, Kenya Fina makes a case for indemnification withoutdeath—a form of redemption in which something of comparable value isgiven to replace what was taken, but without the taking of a life. “Fine himbut do not kill him.” And it is in a similar vein that an elder at a court hear-ing will sometimes show empathy (hinantei), and plead on behalf of aremorseful wrong-doer: “A sa seria tinyan, koni ma kinikini a ma”—he hasspoiled the law, but let us take pity on him. For, in the Kuranko view, certainpeople are innately incorrigible and therefore unable to stop themselvesbreaking the law; hence the comments one sometimes hears in a court hear-ing: “a ka tala, a soron ta la bolo” (he is blameless, he was born with it), or adanye le wo la (that is how he is made).

I have argued that Kuranko stories open up discussion of varying points ofview and help restore faith in common sense and conciliation in a worldplagued by division. Folktales and historical memory both preserve, I suspect,traces of two quite different strategies of coping with violence—vengeance andforgiveness—and so leave open, at all times, the possibility of choosing howone will react to evil. But at the same time, they reveal the irreconciliable dif-ferences and contradictory potentialities that inhere in every being and inevery human situation—as when the spirits of the wild demonstrate morgoye(‘humanity’) in empathizing with Na Nyale and assisting her on her quest, onlyto later demand the death of the chief as the price of their goodwill. In dram-atizing extreme possibilities, stories may all too easily deceive us into thinkingthat the world is quintessentially and categorically divided into good and evil,the deserving and the undeserving, the human and the nonhuman, and thatwe—exemplars of the good and the just—will win out in the end. But inexchanging one standpoint for another and testifying to the way life is actual-ly lived rather than merely thought, stories also cross and blur such boundarylines, revealing—as in the story of Na Nyale—the potentiality of amity andenmity, love and hate, selfishness and generosity, vengefulness and forgivenessinherent in all relationships, an ambiguity that Primo Levi, writing of the par-adigmatically most black and white situation of our times, calls “the grayzone”—“indecipherable because it did not conform to any model; the enemy


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was all around but also inside, the ‘we’ lost its limits, the contenders were nottwo, one could not discern a single frontier but rather many confused, perhapsinnumerable frontiers, which stretched between each of us” (1989:38).

Avenging and ForgivingWhat we call “choices” are often habitual, unpremeditated actions that weonly retrospectively dignify with the notion of freewill. But there are momentswhen we are faced with a dilemma, and hesitate and reflect, weighing ouroptions, considering our position, and reckoning what we stand to gain orlose. In my recent writing, I have explored the ways in which ordinary SierraLeoneans, having suffered grievous losses during the war, addressed thepeace (Jackson 2003, 2004). For many people, vengeance was not an option.Reconciliation was the only reasonable choice. But it was less a choicegrounded in moral or intellectual belief, than a pragmatic assessment of whatwas most expedient if one was to salvage one’s life and livelihood —a matterof what one could and could not do. A matter of whether one had the powerto see that justice was done and whether one could endure replaying the hor-rors one had endured, raking over the coals, stirring up old hatreds and hurts.

My friend Noah Marah and I often talked about the phrase I heard often inthe refugee camps of Freetown, m’bara hake11 to an ye12—“I can forgive, butI cannot forget.” Was forgetting possible, and how deep down did the forgiv-ing go? Noah emphasized the powerless of those who had lost limbs, lovedones, and livelihoods in the war. “Say a hawk came out of the blue and seizedone of your chickens. What can you do? You can’t get it back. The hawk hasflown away. You have no means of hunting it down, or killing it. All you cando is accept, and go on with your life. But you don’t really forgive, you don’treally forget. You simply accept that there’s nothing you can do to changewhat has happened. Look at me. I have no way of taking revenge on the rebelswho took away my livelihood, but at least I can rid myself of them. I can shutthem out of my mind. I can expel them from my life.”

Noah’s words reminded me of a passage in Hannah Arendt’s The HumanCondition (1958:237). Forgiveness implies neither loving those that hate you,nor absolving them from their crime, nor even understanding them (“theyknow not what they do”); rather, it is a form of redemption, in which onereclaims one’s own life, tearing it free from the oppressor’s grasp and releas-ing oneself from those thoughts of revenge and those memories of one’s lossthat might otherwise keep one in thrall to one’s persecutor forever.

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“If I say i hake a to nye,” Noah continued, “I am freeing myself of theeffects of your hatred. I am refusing to hate back. But this doesn’t meanthat justice will not be done. Most of us here feel that God sees every-thing, and that God will mete out punishment in His own good time.That’s why we say, God will take out my anger on him. So I might say, Ihave left it up to God. Same as they say in Krio, I don lef mi yon to God.No one forgives the RUF; they are simply leaving it up to God to see thatjustice is done. Because how can you ever be reconciled to someonewho has killed your father or cut off your hand? Reconciliation, forgive-ness, forgetting…these are all relative terms. In Sierra Leone right now,we are letting sleeping dogs lie. You understand? We are fed up with thewar. Fed up with atrocities. If we talk about the war, it is not becausewe are plotting revenge or want to prolong the suffering. We simply donot want it to happen again.”

Grievance Mode and Acceptance ModeNoah’s observations make it clear that espoused attitudes do not always ornecessarily go all the way down. They are performative in character, ratherthan mirror the way a person “actually” thinks or feels. They are stratagemsfor making things happen that are in one’s own best interests or are conso-nant with what a person’s significant others deem to be imperative. Althoughmany Sierra Leoneans are critical of the work of the Western-funded and fos-tered Truth and Reconciliation Commission—seeing it as a foreign impositionthat will revive bad memories, open up old wounds, and perhaps entail fur-ther acts of violence and revenge—this does not exclude the possibility thatsome will see the Western emphasis on talking through one’s grievances, ofpublically confronting one’s oppressor, and of punishing those who perpetrat-ed human rights abuses, as a more effective way of securing benefits thansilence and resignation. It is not a question of giving voice to one’s personalexperience, but of securing the means to improve one’s everyday lot. Thus,when women who were sexually abused in the course of the war march in thestreets of Freetown demanding justice and reparations rather than hide their“shame,” or when refugees adopt the language of human rights and speak oftheir suffering as post traumatic stress disorder in order to gain sympathy andassistance from NGOs, we are witness not to imperatives of “belief” or “cul-ture” but to imperatives of survival.


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This does not mean that, as anthropologists, we are brought to the vulgar-ly pragmatist conclusion that beliefs are little more than mundane strategies,and culture merely a set of masks, assumed or discarded as circumstancedemands, for the strategies to which people have recourse, and the views theyespouse, have repercussions that they do not, and cannot, always control.

Let me draw a distinction between two strategic or performative modesthat I will call grievance mode and acceptance mode. My argument is thateach mode has positive and negative extremes. For example, while grievancemode is practically synonymous with bereavement behavior, in which anger,protest, withdrawal, and grieving are all psychologically positive ways of work-ing through the trauma of separation and loss, these behaviors can, undercertain circumstances, become habitual ways of addressing the world, and assuch, feed fantasies of revenge, encourage the idealization of the lost object,and, by holding a person in thrall to the past, prevent creative reengagementwith the world. Similarly, while acceptance may imply a sober assessment ofthe limits of one’s freedom, it may just as readily lead to fatalism, inertia, anddepression, in which external action is supplanted by libidinal “work” on one’sown emotions and fantasies of occult power—a kind of “fatalistic submissionto the forces of the world” (Bourdieu 2000:223).

One does not have to look far to find examples of grievance mode. InAotearoa-New Zealand and Aboriginal Australia this is a common performa-tive mode, in which colonialism is fetishized and racialized as an explanationfor every disadvantage and misfortune indigenous people have suffered andare suffering. Key images recur—oppression, persecution, theft, and contam-ination—and claims for redress are made on the strength of historical injus-tices. In the recent history of Sierra Leone, perhaps no one better exemplifiesthis grievance mode than Foday Saybana Sankoh—an army corporal,cashiered and sentenced to seven years in Pademba Road prison for hisalleged role in the 1971 conspiracy to overthrow President Siaka Stevens. Foryears, Sankoh nursed an abiding hatred for Joseph Saidu Momoh, the succes-sor to Siaka Stevens, and in his embitterment and resolve to see the APCdestroyed, enthusiastically led the armed wing of the RUF during the civil war.Here was a man who reminds one of Dostoevsky’s abject hero in Notes fromUnderground—someone who feels himself so downtrodden, thwarted, andhumiliated that he becomes consumed by a cold, poisonous craving forrevenge. Indeed, he is so in thrall to his ressentiment that nothing can curehim of it. More imperative even than power was this self-defeating need tokeep his hatred alive, which was why, when Foday Sankoh had an opportuni-

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ty to realize his revolutionary ideals in government, he argued that the RUFhad not fought a war to secure posts; its sole objective had been a kind ofcleansing or purging—to remove a corrupt regime from power.

As for acceptance mode, one wonders whether a new fatalism has beenborn of the Sierra Leonean war. I have spoken to Sierra Leoneans who doubtthat “Africans” have the capacity to govern themselves and who see no localanswer to the problem of endemic corruption and croneyism among rulingelites. Some have embraced Islam and “new” religions, hoping to find inoccult experience the new dispensation they have been unable to find ineveryday life. And all the while the influx of foreign aid and foreign goods, theWestern agendas for Truth and Reconciliation, and the presence of NGOs cre-ate new forms of dependency and recreate the stigmatized and marginalizedsituation in which people lived under colonial rule.

But all manner of potentialities, some born of the past, some to be con-jured out the volatile circumstances of a globalized world, combine and per-mute constantly in the creation of what we call history, and it is the interplaybetween past and future at the level of events that should be the focus of ourethnographic labor. I have suggested that storytelling events exemplify thehermeneutic openness and indeterminacy of culture as “potential space,”while confirming Winnicott’s great insight that this is also the space of play.And it is because this cultural space contains many voices, many points ofview, and many symbolic possibilities, that storytelling events may constitute,for us, a model of how we should approach an understanding of the present.

To emphasize the indeterminate relation between past and future is toemphasize the ethical ambiguity of the present. Thus, arguments to the effectthat violence in Sierra Leone is an expression of primitive irrationality, the cir-cumstances of colonial history, or gerontocratic forms of social organization allcarry the risk of assigning such causal weight to enduring primeval, historical, orstructural essences that both the power and responsibility of the living to choosetheir future are downplayed. As a result, the living are regarded as victims oftheir own history, or of their own African essence, and Europe made, inevitably,the source not only of Africa’s salvation but of the meaning of Africa itself.

Ethical Ambiguity and the Anthropology of EventsThe course of history, like the course of any human life, comprises a succes-sion of turbulent events interrupted by periods of comparative calm. It is inthese lulls that we take stock of our situation, come to terms with what has


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occurred, and begin anew. Accordingly, these are also the moments when weforeshadow—in the ways we speak, think, and act—the shape of things tocome, which is why ethics is perhaps more urgently a matter of how we reactto circumstances than the circumstances themselves.

Sartre defines human freedom as our capacity to make ourselves out ofwhat we are made (1969:45). Hannah Arendt refers to this generative or ini-tiatory aspect of human action as “natality:” “Since action acts upon beingswho are capable of their own actions, reaction, apart from being a response,is always a new action that strikes out on its own and affects others”(1958:190). It is this capacity for rebirth—occurring ”against the overwhelm-ing odds of statistical laws and their probability” and appearing “in the guiseof a miracle”—that redeems us, not simply by freeing us from our thralldomto the past, but by connecting us with others as co-creators of a viable socialworld (Arendt 1958:178). In a recent book (Jackson 2004a), I bear witness tothe extraordinary capacity of Sierra Leoneans to remake their lives in the wakeof the decade-long civil war, and in a second work (Jackson 2004b), I arguethat Arendt’s notion of natality is needed to complement Bourdieu’s notion ofhabitus (with its emphasis on engrained habits of thought and action thateffectively bind us to the past, even as the meanings we give to past events inour imaginings, rationalizations, and narratives eclipse and compromise ourmemory of those events). Important ethical, social, and political issues arisehere, for in so far as we are slaves to the past, we are not entirely responsiblefor our own actions, yet in so far as our responses to the events in which wefind ourselves embroiled influence events as yet unborn, then we are, to somedegree, responsible for the world in which we live. This is the ethical burdenof Akira Kurasawa’s great film, Roshomon—not just that the truth of any eventis relative to our vantage point and interests, but that the outcome of anyevent hinges on how successfully we claim final truth for our own view andhow we relate our own interests to others. In the wake of a violent act, doesone decide on revenge or reconciliation? To what extent can parents justifi-ably plead that they are so shaped by the circumstances of their own child-hoods that they are powerless not to repeat past patterns in their relationshipwith their own children? Can history absolve us? Can new technologies relieveus of the burden of choosing our own fate? Can culture be invoked to explainor excuse our actions? My argument echoes Sartre’s point—that the onus isalways on us to accept responsibility for what we are made, even if it is onlyto assume this responsibility. As Sartre puts it, freedom may be understoodtherefore as the “small movement which makes a totally conditioned social

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being someone who does not render back completely what his conditioninghas given him” (1969:45). To understand the situations in which this dramaplays out we need not only an ethnography of events, but analytical strategiesthat explore the interplay of history and biography.

ENDNOTES1This paper contains several excerpts from previously published work (Jackson 2002, 2004a,2000b)2Rosalind Shaw’s superb ethnographic work among the Temne shows how the present andpast “mutually configure” each other, and how the habitus of the slave trade produced“oblique” effects and “practical memories” in contemporary cultural preoccupations withsecrecy, suspicion, danger, theft, and witchcraft (1997, 2002, 2003), while Mariane Fermeargues, in a similarly non-reductive vein, that we should be alert to “the importance ofunderstanding history not only as a site of causal explanations but also as a source of par-ticular forms—symbolic, linguistic, practical—that social actors deploy to rework the socialfabric in response to contingent events. These new social and cultural forms are the effectof a dialogical mediation between the present historical situation and a past repertoire ofideas with which social actors critically engage” (2001:227).3Kenya Fina Mara and Tina Kuyate were both married to the late Diang chief, Magba KoromaI—Tina being baramusu (senior wife) and Kenya Fina gberinya (second-married, junior wife).4The Senegalese fire finch (tintingburuwe) habitually flits and nests around houses, and it isthis association with domestic space that may explain why the souls of dead infants are saidto inhabit the fire finch while awaiting possible reincarnation, for a small child does notenter the public domain for some time after its birth. 5This circumlocution conveys the idea that women prepare the best food for their lovers.6The Seli is the largest river draining the southern area of Kuranko country. In referring toa local river, the locus of the story ceases to be mythical and is suddenly brought closer tohome. 7bal’fole, lit. balanje (xylophone)-hitter, by implication a praise-singer, a jeleba.8The Kuranko phrase ko manni a nyorgo manni means literally “something happened, itspartner [i.e. the same thing, its counterpart] also happened.”9Throughout the telling of this story, Keti Ferenke acted as a kind of second to Kenya Fina,and at this point—responding to Kenya Fina’s own aside—he interrupted the story toremind everyone of an incident that had taken place in Kondembaia a few days before. Aman had quarrelled with another man and inflicted a minor wound with a knife. Uncertainand afraid of the offender, people had kept their distance from him. 10kemine gbana—an unmarried young man, an idler, a drifter. Here the term is used as asynonym for a commoner, someone of inconsequential status.11Hake is sometimes translated as “sin,” though the word covers a multitude of motives—hatred, ill-will, malice, envy—and distracts from the principle of retributive justice that liesbehind it. In Kuranko thought, intersubjective relationships are governed by reciprocity, sothat if a person offends, wrongs, or injures another person without justification, the offensecalls for payback (tasare). This compensatory action may be effected through several means.It may follow a court hearing, in which case the offender must indemnify the person towhom injury has been caused. It may follow a verbal apology, in which the offender begs


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forgiveness. It may, if recourse to legal means or the workings of individual conscience areunavailing, lead the injured party to take matters into his own hand and seek sorcery as aform of revenge. Alternatively, if the injured party feels that no worldy agency can secureredress, he may be inclined to leave matters in the hands of God. In a previous discussionof hake (Jackson 1982:29-30) I speak of automatic redress, in which an unprovoked andunjustified offense will boomerang back against the offender, particularly if the victim isprotected by magical medicines. In conversations with Kuranko informants in January-February 2002, however, such redress was thought to require divine agency. As Noah put it,”People feel that God is just and omnipotent. One way or another He’ll avenge the crime orwrong-doing.” 12It is perhaps necessary to point out that choice is never a matter of individual will, for asmy earlier discussion of hake makes clear, freedom is always exercised within limits—acybernetic search for a balance between what can and cannot be done under given circum-stances. At the same time, every human being seeks to act as if she decided her situation,no matter how forcefully circumstance has obliged or compelled her to act in one wayrather than another, and it is this ethical latitude that makes every intersubjective momentto some extent.

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Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Bakhtin, M.M. 1993. Toward a Philosophy of the Act. Translated by Vadim Liapunov. Austin:University of Texas Press.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 2000. Pascalian Meditations. Translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge:Polity Press.

Dummett, Michael. 1978. Truth and Other Enigmas. London: Duckworth.

Ferme, Mariane. 2001. The Underneath of Things: Violence, History, and the Everyday inSierra Leone. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Jackson, Michael. 1982. Allegories of the Wilderness: Ethics and Ambiguity in KurankoNarratives. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Jackson, Michael. 2002. The Politics of Storytelling: Violence, Transgression andIntersubjectivity. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press.

Jackson, Michael. 2003. “The Politics of Reconciliation: Reflections on the Postwar in SierraLeone.” In Being There: New Perspectives on Phenomenology and the Analysis of Culture,eds. Jonas Frykman and Nils Gilje (eds.), 95-105. Lund: Nordic Academic Press.

Jackson, Michael. 2004a. In Sierra Leone. Durham: Duke University Press.

Jackson, Michael. 2004b. Existential Anthropology: Events, Exigencies, and Effects. Oxford:Berghahn Books.

Lakhoff, George, and Johnson, Mark. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University ofChicago Press.

Levi, Primo. 1989. The Drowned and the Saved, (trans. Raymond Rosenthal). New York: Vintage.

Marx. Karl. 1934. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louise Bonaparte. Moscow: ProgressPublishers.

Oakeshott, Michael. 1933. Experience and its Modes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Shaw, Rosalind. 1997. “The Production of Witchcraft/Witchcraft as Production: Memory,Modernity, and the Slave Trade in Sierra Leone. American Ethnologist 24(4):856-876.

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Shaw, Rosalind. 2002. Memories of the Slave Trade: Ritual and the Historical Imagination inSierra Leone. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Shaw, Rosalind. 2003. “Robert Kaplan and ‘Juju Journalism’ in Sierra Leone’s Rebel War: ThePrimitivizing of an African Conflict.” In Magic And Modernity: Interfaces Of Revelationand Concealment, Birgit Meyer and Peter Pels (eds.), 81-102. Stanford: StanfordUniversity Press.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1969. “Itinerary of a Thought.” New Left Review 58:43-66.

Winnicott, D.W. 1974. Playing and Reality. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

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