Memory/History, Violence, and Reconciliation: Introduction

A number of African nations have been born out of, or find themselves emerging from, a history of violent conflict. In their attempt to redefine the interactions of national, regional, and local communities, these nations—South Africa, Rwanda, and Sierra Leone are outstanding examples in this regard—have worked towards achieving significant cultural and political self-transformations through institutional mediations that range from nationally televised Truth and Reconciliation Commissions to local negotiations of restorative justice (as in Rwanda's gacaca tribunals).

Yet the reconciliation of highly stratified societies appears impossible without examining fundamental questions of identity, history, and power and the institutional contexts in which they are enacted. All too often, colonial fictions of race and ethnicity left Africans with troubling and problematic categories of identification that have proven opportune vehicles for political manipulation. And if the African postcolonial era ushers in intranational struggles over access to and allocation of resources, we see these struggles acquiring a new intensity and ferocity in not a few places on the continent as new corporate or privatized forms of sovereignty and violence have emerged. These new developments—as the agents behind them have fostered a reinvention of African identities by deft "manipulation of 'indigenousness' and ancestral descent" (Mbembe 86)—have been responsible for the dissolution of existing territorial, institutional, and moral frameworks. In this complex cultural and historical landscape, we ask how African writers have engaged with processes of restorative justice, imagined new discourses on rights and responsibilities and, in general, acknowledged the humanity of the other.

This collection of essays for Research in African Literatures emerged from a panel organized and chaired by Maureen N. Eke at the African Studies Association Meeting in Chicago in 2008. We three editors of this cluster of papers first presented papers at the panel and subsequently decided to propose them to RAL as a study of the themes of memory, history, violence, and reconciliation. We invited submissions that explore African writers' engagement with the historical, political, and institutional contexts that enable and/or disable attempts at reconciliation. We called for articles that address the following questions: To what extent do institutions of national and colonial modernity, and in particular discourses of race and ethnicity, impact contemporary political relations? How are public spaces and legal institutions, such as TRCs and local tribunals, involved in the investigation of individual and collective responsibilities? As territorial borders and institutional structures shift towards new configurations, what are the new relations of servitude and coercion, but also of collaboration and support, in postcolonial African societies? What is the role of memory and history, individual and collective, in the construction of "new" national communities? To what extent does the discovery of the "truth" about the past reveal hidden and forgotten histories? How do the dynamics of gender intersect with efforts at social restoration and collaboration?

In spite of national, cultural, and geopolitical differences among the nations (real and fictitious) portrayed in the works our essays address, the experiences of genocidal violence have a commonality—the obliteration of human life and dignity. If, as Martha Minow suggests, "[a] most appalling goal of the genocides, the massacres, systematic rapes, and tortures has been the destruction of the remembrance of individuals as well as of their lives and dignity . . ." (1), the works our essays explore resist such annihilation by giving voice to memory, thus, recuperating the dignity of those who have been wounded. The articles that follow focus on the search for and negotiation of truth through the process of reconciliation in a variety of African nations—from Algeria and Liberia in northern and western Africa to South Africa and the eastern African countries of Kenya and Tanzania. These articles include studies of prominent African writers and directors such as Assia Djebar, Euphrase Kezilahabi, and Ramadan Suleman, as well as those of emerging voices: Leonora Miano, Gilbert Gatore, Boima Fahnbulleh.

The works we examine in this collection of essays suggest that the process of reconciliation serves as a conduit for gaining access to experiences of trauma, past wounds, (un)recovered histories, memories, and truths. The essays in...