Abstract
This chapter attends to the role of communal voices—both living and ancestral—in enabling or restraining violence and agency during war. How do the practices and identities of communities shape their understanding and acceptance of violence? What within the networks of communities and their relationship to the world around them facilitates war? How do interactions with the mystical shape the morality of persons and the choices they make in wartime and peacetime? Using the Mai-Mai rebel movement of the Democratic Republic of Congo as a case study, this chapter explores the moral objective of the Congolese Five-Year War (1997–2002), as well the interplay of war and mystical practice in the moral formation of local communities.
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Notes
- 1.
Names have been changed to maintain anonymity.
- 2.
In a last-ditch effort to prevent a five-year conflict that international journalists were calling “the deadliest war since World War II,” national and international mediators negotiated a peace agreement to end the Congolese Five-Year War in 2002 (Jeffrey Gettleman, “Africa’s Worst War,” The New York Times Sunday Review, December 12, 2012, https://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/16/sunday-review/congos-never-ending-war.html; Séverine Autesserre, The Trouble with the Congo: Local Violence and the Failure of International Peacebuilding, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
- 3.
The Congolese transition government of 2003–2006 was the first to have an executive branch comprising one president from the majority party, Joseph Kabila, and four vice presidents, each representing the largest rebel factions during the war. The brainchild of a compromise designed to end further war at all costs, the 1+4 government (as it was commonly called) consolidated all armed factions in the Congolese Five-Year War into one national army, and saw to the organization of the first set of elections in Congo since its independence in 1960 (United States Institute of Peace, “Truth Commission: Democratic Republic of Congo,” 2003) (see Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja, The Congo From Leopold to Kabila: A People’s History [Chicago: Zed Books, 2002]).
- 4.
The abacost was a deeply political fashion statement of Congolese (then Zairean) men—political elite or otherwise—that had its genesis in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The shortened form of the French phrase abats le costume (literally, “down with the suit”), the abacost rejected the attire and conformity of colonial rule, and became one of the key symbols of the Zaireanization initiatives of the regime of Mobutu Sésé Séko (Eyamba G. Bokamba, “D.R. Congo: Language and ‘Authentic Nationalism,’” in Language and National Identity in Africa, ed. Andrew Simpson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 228.
- 5.
Manuel Barcia’s research on African warfare and the ethics of war in Africa remains one of the notable exceptions in the field of wartime ethics, in its analysis of West African warfare in the Americas in the nineteenth century. See Manuel Barcia, West African Warfare in Bahia and Cuba: Soldier Slaves in the Atlantic World, 1807–1844, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press (2014).
- 6.
In lieu of employing the term worldview to indicate Western conceptions of and apprehension of the world, I am using Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí’s concept of world-sense. She critiques the Western prioritization of sight as the primary sense operating in social interaction that creates a subject that gazes upon an object (Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí, The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997]), 3.
- 7.
Pamela Creed, Ethics, Norms and the Narratives of War: Creating and Encountering the Enemy Other (London: Routledge, 2013), 2.
- 8.
Creed, Ethics, Norms and the Narratives of War, 2.
- 9.
Torkel Brekke, “The Ethics of War and the Concept of War in India and Europe,” Numen: International Review for the History of Religions, 52, 1 (2005), 60.
- 10.
Manuel Barcia, “‘To Kill all Whites’: The Ethics of African Warfare in Bahia and Cuba, 1807–1844,” The Journal of African Military History, 1 (2017): 75.
- 11.
The closest English translation of Leza from Chatty’s native language of Kiluba is Deity or God. Chatty was careful to differentiate between Leza, the Luba Deity or God, and the ancestors. She defined the latter as the departed living (Chatty Masangu wa Nkulu, interview with author, Lubumbashi, Democratic Republic of Congo, September 29, 2017).
- 12.
Chatty Masangu wa Nkulu, interview by author, Lubumbashi, Democratic Republic of Congo, September 29, 2017.
- 13.
Dianne M. Stewart, Three Eyes for the Journey: African Dimensions of the Jamaican Religious Experience (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 24.
- 14.
Laurenti Magesa, African Religion: The Moral Traditions of Abundant Life (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1997), 25.
- 15.
Steve Wembi and Kimiko de Freytas-Tamura, “An Unfortunate Record for Congo: Thousands Flee Cells in Biggest Jailbreak,” New York Times, May 19, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/19/world/africa/congo-prison-break-kabila.html
- 16.
Ibid.
- 17.
Bundu dia Kongo, “About Us: What is Bundu dia Kongo?” Bundu dia Kongo, August 10, 2017, http://bundu-dia-kongo.org/about/index.html.
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Ledgister, G.M. (2020). When the Ancestors Wage War: Mystical Movements and the Ethics of War and Warfare. In: Wariboko, N., Falola, T. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of African Social Ethics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36490-8_13
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