Good afternoon, everyone, welcome to our afternoon session of hegemonic narratives.
A conference that we've been running today since 9:30,
looking at different levels of where hegemonic narratives in the memory of politics are being used and abused and misused.
The third panel we have prepared for you this afternoon is looking at the local level at the grassroots level.
And let me first introduce the moderator of this panel will then introduce the speakers
and after which we're going to have our keynote speaker and then we will wrap up.
So the conference is pretty much at the end. Not yet, though, and we only have about an hour and a half to go.
So I hope you're still with us and you're still able to follow us.
Please don't forget to ask questions and the Q&A, and at the end of the conference, we will again enable the chat function.
So let me introduce Dr. Katherine Buckleitner, who's an IKEA research fellow at an international relations of Lady Margaret Hall,
and her research mainly focuses on collective identity, memory and values within international relations.
She's just submitted a book manuscript, so what you have, the space age should be coming out very soon.
It's with Oxford University Press or Cambridge University Press.
Now, I'm not entirely sure. But anyway, Catherine, the floor is yours.
Good luck with the panel. OK, so hello, everyone, and welcome to panel three from the morning sessions.
The question remained as to when and how hegemonic narratives actually become hegemonic.
Several presenters already hinted at the fact that an elitist political construction of memory is not enough.
Instead, commemorated become truly hegemonic. It must somehow begin to resonate more broadly with the people in this last panel.
We are therefore moving our attention to the grassroots and local level and ask
how societal actors can shape and challenge national narratives from below.
Now we have three speakers lined up who will cover three different regions.
First, Latin America, then we move to Europe and last but not least to Africa.
Each of the presentations will take 12 minutes, and afterwards they'll be 20 minutes reserved for questions and answers.
If you have any queries, please write them in the Q&A box and I will do my best to bring them to the attention of the speakers.
We are starting with André so de Souza Santos,
who is lecturer and director of the Brazilian Studies Programme at Oxford University's Latin American Centre.
And Reza is a political anthropologist in her research.
She specifically looks at heritage, policymaking and grassroots activism in cities.
In 2019, she published a monograph on the politics of memory, urban cultural heritage in Brazil and today.
And Reza, we'll talk about how narratives of slavery are recounted in Brazil's former gold mines.
Thank you very much for the invitation. I'm very pleased to be here, I will share my screen with you to show my my PowerPoint.
Please let me know if you already can see my screen. Can you see it?
Yep. Very good. So, yes, I'm going to be talking about some inconvenience narratives such as how slavery is remembered in in Brazil,
how it's how narratives about slavery appear.
And I'm going to be reading my paper. So if I'm slightly looking to the side, please don't worry.
Silence and infamy is most concerning race prevail in Brazil, and the same silence exists in historic depictions of slavery and slavery in Brazil.
Is this mainly represented through a recollection of torture objects and very rarely we have any biographical accounts or monuments of former slaves?
And here in the in the picture of my first lines, you can see some of these torture objects, which are usually portrayed when you go to museums.
However, there is, of course, the idea that there are different forms of remembering,
and this paper will look at the ways in which slavery is remembered through spiritual
narratives in former gold mines in the former gold mines offer to pray to Brazil,
and I'm going to explain a little bit about this seeding the descendants of slaves.
They usually work as tour guides, and they tell the history of slavery by emphasise the presence of slaves is spirits.
Slaves spirits manifest themselves physically when visitors or guides describe physical pain or accidents in mines,
memories of slavery enacted in narratives about spirits.
This constitutes a sort of power shift where former oppressed groups actually active control after death, which they did not have when a life.
So one of the questions I try to answer if this paper is,
can this power of the excluded who now controls the mind setting go beyond the mine territories?
Do people actually visit mines? And what is the potential and the limits of this off the record historical narratives?
So I know this is one of the mines.
In many countries around the world, the success of cultural heritage narratives and create a sense of national identity
is viewed in the construction of a common enemy in post-colonial suicides.
The sentiment, again suppressed or colonised, was particularly strong in forging a national identity in post-colonial Brazil.
There were many former slaves European mixed race, sorry Europeans, Brazilian mixed race and indigenous groups, and the focus of on a common enemy.
The colonisers had much to offer in the search of a Brazilian identity.
So there is this construction of a Brazilian myths that play down ethnic complexities and
generally to the simplification of history and a polarisation between US Brazilians,
which was a very heterogeneous groups.
And they the colonisers this doilies was very much based and and created monuments on independence and struggles,
and the set appropriate is particularly important on that. So here you have one of the heroes of Brazil's independence movement.
His name is shredding sheets, and there are statues to celebrate today in cheese and miniaturised conspiracy,
which was one of the plots against the Portuguese all over this city.
The cities are UNESCO's World Heritage Site since the 1980s and is seeing monuments and street names and everywhere in this city.
This celebration of independence movements. This independence movement, of course, creates a sense of of Brazilians,
which doesn't really go into the complexities of these slaves who made up 80 percent of the population.
But of course, they challenge this national identity because they they used form a very heterogeneous group in culture, language and place of birth.
So how is Lavery's remembering historic sites such as Warpaint, which are so important for a Brazilian national identity?
So in a place like Prezzo, as Labour is mainly remembered through this recollection of torture objects that are very,
as I said, there are no monuments for foreign slaves.
And because of this, this gap in the representation of slavery than does the spiritual accounts in former gold mines, they try to fill this gap.
So let's go and see how the people are telling this story.
There is very little represent in the city.
So when you go to former gold mines, the guides will tell the history of slavery by presents you to these live spirits,
and I'm just going to narrate how some of these encounters take place.
This is freezing here. November 25, 2013.
A receipts president warning before we arrived at the first gold mine Big Day guided me through the dark, cold and wet mine,
greeted my tour guides and before we started the tour, he was already telling me that I need to crouch in the narrow and low corridors.
He would say imagining that time went back by 200 years and you were a 20 year old man black man working mines in very poor.
Big day was the guide's insistence that I should imagine I was a slave to release all my fears.
As we walk through the mine. My God stopped walking and I had to go through the mine, which was this very narrow small space.
Alan. As I kept walking, it was dark and humid, and I could still hear the voices of of the guides,
though they were more distance and they would say that I need to understand what slaves went through back in those days.
The ceiling was getting lower and lower as I walked and I had to squat in a very uncomfortable and claustrophobic position.
And I wondered if it was still possible to move forwards or how I would move backwards when my tour guides yelled.
Can you imagine if I would leave and you'd have to stay in the mine for three days?
Of course, I could not imagine that. So I tried to move back, but they started to hammer against the wall.
But it does seem very sharp and repetitive sounds.
And they said men died from this noise and they go blind was when the particles would reach their eyes,
whether others would have their lungs turned into stone when breathing the powder day after day.
And the noise continued for a short while when it became very irritating.
And each time I tried to return and I failed because it was very slippery.
So the history of slavery in the mines is represented through the recreation of earlier working conditions,
including sound, sights and sensations, experience humidity,
darkness, noise in the claustrophobic feeling the low and they recorded the words in the
mines hopes to illustrate how these slaves lived back in the 18th century.
While stories of violence against slaves that are told in mines written points out that there
are also paradoxical colonial attributions of power and the same people who are enslaved,
raped and chained would also believed to have the power of sorcery incorporated.
The power of slaves and sorcerers is also very common in local stories.
But this power did do not end with the sorcery in the past, because nowadays these spirits of slaves rather than those of mine honours,
they dominate mining territories and they may allow the entrance to mines or they may not.
As some other guides explain to me, you need to be approved by the spirits of the people there, otherwise you do not answer the mine.
There are people who arrive here and they ask me to and through the mines.
But when I arrive at the entrance, I fall down. They beat me up, throw me on the floor with that person.
You do not answer. But when the person has a clear soul, the mysticism and sensibility that makes their and mine.
Then we came in through the mind. The people there are the spirits of these slaves sort of be lost here.
And when they do, no one to side search went through the mine. They beat the person up making the visit or the guides fall down or heat their
heads against the ceiling and the walls and inflict headaches after visits.
Those are seen as typical signs that these spirits had not granted permission to through
local historians involved in spiritual infliction of pain in minds that are so common.
The guides report offering tours for people across the world and Brazil,
while the local population is usually afraid of mines and do not always visit them.
Kindles are a visual expression of reports about physical pain caused by spirits.
And there are many candles sometimes in the minds to avoid seeing figures and and being haunted by some of these spirits.
And in mines, you can also see and hear the revealing, OK, I'm about to finish some of the revealing dreams that some guides have.
I was going to narrate here one of these dreams, but I'm running out of time, but I usually through through this encounter.
Resolve is Labour's spirit to inflict pain on people who try to run through the mines as well as dreams.
They are usually feeling gaps in the history, for example, why in a population that are worth 80 percent of slaves, there were no rebellion.
And then usually this disaster that everybody asks comes with stories of Oh,
maybe these slaves groups were enough, were not cohesive, and they talk about conflicts in the past.
And these conflicts are very manifest and very vivid in the dreams that people revealed to have had, as well as the spiritual encounters.
However, these stories, they try to. To give this idea of how slavery happens in Brazil is things that are very few
biographical accounts and very few information on the geological knowledge these spirits,
these slaves had and in how their activities were on an everyday lives.
These these narratives they sued don't move beyond the mining territories.
There are very few people visiting mines and away from the mines.
These stories remain very much of the records. Thank you.
Thank you very much, and gentlemen, for a fascinating snapshot into how inconvenient narratives emerge as counter-narratives on the grassroots level.
And now we are moving to a different region, Europe, and we're going to hear from Graeme Dawson,
who is professor of historical cultural studies at the School of Humanities Centre for Memory, Narrative and Histories at the University of Brighton.
Graham investigates the interrelations between memory narratives and lived experience with a particular interest in personal memories.
His main focus is on the politics of memory in the Irish peace process and on legacies of the Northern Irish conflict in Ireland and Britain.
He is the author of many seminal works, amongst them Making Peace with the Past Memory, Trauma and the Irish Troubles.
Today, Graham is going to talk about grassroots oral history and the politics of hegemonic memory in West Belfast.
Thank you, Katherine, thank you to Jesse and Yohanna for inviting me to speak at this conference and for
organising all the hard work you've put into organising this inspirational online gathering.
This paper draws from my current research with an on the Dukas Oral History Archive at Falls Community Council in West Belfast.
Dukas was established in 1999 to collect oral history interviews on local experiences of the conflicts
to develop experiential storytelling as a tool of reconciliation and of conflict resolution,
and to promote cross-community dialogue and grassroots agency in addressing legacies of the past.
This stemmed from a shared but deeply contested local history.
The paper aims to situate Dukakis's grass works and grass roots memory work what I call its praxis of reference of remembering
in relation to the hegemonic narratives of the Northern Ireland and the British UK states during and after the war.
As these play out in the context of ongoing memory wars and conflicts about the unresolved legacies of the war in Northern Ireland,
these conflicts central questions of legitimacy,
responsibility and atonement for the armed violence committed by state process, state and state folk forces.
And I should just say that I've just realised that my focus this paper has ended up being on how hydroponic narratives work,
rather than how they challenge how they challenge. So apologies for that.
The The is organised in three parts.
I wanted to begin with a very brief conceptualisation of the archive in relation to the the West Belfast interfaces discuss
works across the interface between the loyalist British Shankill area and the Irish nationalist areas of the falls,
which you can see here on this sketch map west of the city centre of Belfast.
And this relationship between the Shankill and the Falls appears in this British Army map from 1972, the Shankill Road,
the Falls Road and here between the orange and the green, we can see the interface between these two areas.
These and other interfaces were the location for the start of the war in Belfast on the 14th and 15th of August 1969,
when police and loyalists invaded the nationalist areas down.
These linking streets between the Shankill and the falls in West Belfast has remained a central zone in the war thereafter,
with one of the highest numbers of casualties and death rates from the conflict.
The red line on this early 70s map shows the roots of the Cooper Way, Peace Lie War, Iraq sojourn in the war,
along with other barriers that continue to materialise and reproduce the social and geographical divisions of the area.
Now Do Castles projects its original aim,
and the first project since 2001 focussed on the collective experience of the nationalist communities of the Falls in August 1969,
and this widened out to a broader historical enquiry. But since 2010, Duke has a storeyed history work across the interfaces through Connexions,
with loyalist community groups in the Shankill and elsewhere in the city,
leading to several oral history collections, all of which are deposited in the archives through this this cross community work.
Do his work is based on principles of informed consent, plurality acknowledgement and respect of differences.
And it aims to create conversations both public and private about history and memory between local actors who can pardon me,
who are differently placed historically in relation to the British state.
Now, saying to my second section the question of hegemonic narratives I wanted to start,
I mean, there's a whole set of caveats which could be on pitch at this point.
But Northern Ireland is going on history of a successful hegemonic project bringing consent to state power or bringing social cohesion.
The reformation of the UK state through the partition of Ireland in 1921,
an Irish nationalist minority giving allegiance to the governments of the Irish Free State in Dublin
was forced into the six counts a unionist state of Northern Ireland within the UK from its inception.
The Northern Ireland state treats it its nationalist minority as an enemy within
requiring exceptional but permanent repressive containment by an armed police force,
including the Feared B Special Police Militia, on the basis of the 1922 Special Powers Act.
And this supports the devolved governments in what was effectively a one party state ruled by the Ulster Unionist Party up until 1972,
when devolution was suspended and direct rule of Northern Ireland from London was imposed by the British state.
The breakdown of Union has state control in 1968 69 led to the Northern Ireland war,
in which from 1971 unionists in British power came to be challenged by the emergence of a new resurgent Irish Republican Army, the IRA.
The Provisional IRA, supported by a revolutionary Republican movement, but refused to acknowledge the authority of the UK state.
Now, if we understand hegemonic narratives,
then as those that work to secure public legitimacy for the purposes and the actions of state institutions and operatives, a legitimising narrative,
a narrative justifying the measures used in repressive containment of Northern Irish nationalist communities in terms of law and order versus
the Republican terrorist threat to the state can be traced throughout its history and well into the peace process beginning in 1993 94.
So my focus here is on the deployment of this hegemonic narrative at the very start of the
conflict and one particular moment in 1969 and its effects on the formations of conflict memory.
And I'm only going to be able really to explore the loyalist dimension of that memory rather than, as I'd hoped, the Nationalist Council memory.
So please bear that in mind. Now, the war in West Belfast began on the 14th 15th of August 1969 with a pogrom against Irish nationalist communities,
which was led by state forces an armed invasion.
The words of the official government enquiry of the nationalist falls from the Shankill was
fronted by the Royal Ulster Constabulary using armoured vehicles armed with machine guns.
Police and members of the B Specials militia, heavily armed, including with submachine guns and high velocity rifles,
worked with loyalist mobs organised by the paramilitary Shankill Defence Association,
who were also heavily armed with guns and hundreds of petrol bombs.
This overwhelming and deadly force was deployed against an unarmed civilian population.
Shooting nationalists in the street and in their own homes. Burning hundreds of nationalist houses and properties,
expelling thousands of people from their homes, injuring hundreds and causing terror and mayhem.
State discourse from unionist politicians and the police responded to this crisis as a threat to
law and order by Republicans at the official public enquiry into the events of the Lord Garman,
the police testified all RUC ranks testified.
Testifying Roscommon maintained that they faced an IRA uprising.
This justification was echoed by Belfast police commissioner,
who also admitted under testimony that loyalist violence quote was one of the sort of blind spots that the RUC of the ICC have given that quote.
The training of the force from its inception in 1921 had always been against what we call the subversive element the IRA.
And so.
Get the IEC deputy commissioner in his testimony to the Scotland enquiry, acknowledged that quote no IRA attack took place anywhere in Belfast.
That's not actually a quote from the deputy commissioner. It's a quote from McCain's history.
But in reality, the IRA in Belfast in 1969 was defunct.
The report of the Scullin enquiry endorsed the justification narrative,
the legitimating narrative of the state of the police and reproduced its imaginings and its denials and its silences.
And the report largely excuse the how you see on the B specials and absolving the police of any significant involvement in the invasion.
And in doing so, it upheld the reputation of state institutions and actors as moral agents of law and order,
and installed a hegemonic official narrative and memory about the start of the war that's obscured the reality of state violence in precipitating its.
Now,
this officially endorsed framework of meaning also enables the consolidation of a key narrative in the memory culture of Belfast loyalist communities.
That the so called riots, so-called riots of August 1969 were instigated by the IRA,
to which loyalist paramilitary groups were reactive and defensive.
In fact, anticipatory fears of an impending Republican assault had been systematically
provoked since April 1969 by the loyalist paramilitary Shankill Defence Association,
the SDI that warned against imminent attacks from the Falls Road and used these unfounded rumours to canvass
support for organisations set up to defend Protestant localities from these imagined Republican incursions.
Sara Nelson, in her book, Ulster's Uncertain Defenders,
identifies a widespread belief amongst Ulster Protestants that the riots were part of a coordinated attack by Catholics and Protestants,
and describes this as one example of what she calls community myths about August 1969, echoing here the zero John Howard's diocese paper this morning.
But according to Nelson, the existence of such myths points to the quite considerable difficulty experienced by most Protestants.
In coming to terms with what Nelson calls the extralegal violence committed by loyalists and the police community,
myths provided a common sense and unquestioned framework of local understanding for people in loyalist areas.
Quote from Nelson, which kept their self-image intact as loyal and law abiding people.
And to quote and enable them to make sense of the upheavals and the violence that was erupting around them.
Community myths of the community coming under attack in 1969 and loyalist paramilitaries as defenders,
rather than those primary aggressors were absorbed into local loyalist properly a popular memory.
So if in the final section of the talk, briefly we turn to the oral histories.
In due course, we can find Nelson's community myths surfacing in interviews with Protestants who were parents and children in 1969.
Interviews that were collected by Dukas partner organisations in the Shankill.
In the projects conducted between 2012 and 14.
In these interviews, one strands of memory concerns the shock of seeing that the Catholics were getting put out of their houses.
The houses were burning. People were taking their furniture out of their houses, houses on fire.
But another strands of memory is of the fear. Quote when we were told the Catholics were coming to puts us out.
That spurred some families to evacuate for a few days to other parts of the city.
And in one interview, an individual remembers being in bed and the B specials wrapped at our door at about 6:30
in the morning to tell us that the Catholics were coming from Ballymurphy to push us out.
There were hundreds coming from Ballymurphy to put to put the Protestants out.
Now, the imaginary character of this provoked fear of an IRA assault on the Shankill
from nationalist Ballymurphy is clear from here in the borough's history.
Ballymurphy in the Irish War.
Ballymurphy is a nationalist housing estate further west on the interface, which had a reputation as a bad state with social problems.
It was also fierce and also Republican. But on the 14th of the 15th of August 1969, the reality, according to the bureau,
it was it was a community organiser working inside that community throughout the conflict,
when barricades were erected around the Ballymurphy estate in protection against any attempted invasion from the neighbouring loyalist areas.
Three shotguns were required for defence and these were sent running from barricades a barricade to make much of
the display of the weapons so as to bluff their neighbours into believing Ballymurphy to be an armed fortress.
Clearly, Ballymurphy was in no position to invade the Shankill, but nevertheless the structure of feeling crystallised in these groundless memories
from the Shankill in 1969 of being under attack from the Catholics or under the
threat of attack from the Catholics in Ballymurphy persists in a long emotional
afterlife and underpins understandings over 40 years later in oral history interviews.
But we, the Protestant people, were getting it really passed.
The Catholics were doing the bombing and the shooting, and they were getting away with it.
Now, in conclusion,
then I just I'd like to point to the way the work of transforming relations and developing new historical dialogues across divisions at grassroots
level is shaped and constrained by the reproduction of hegemonic narratives from conflict times which have embedded in local memory cultures.
In Dukas, Shankill interviews memories of intimate,
personal and familial responses to the outbreak of the war also carry narratives derived from state sponsored justifications
and from locally formed community myths into the era of reconciliation and the shared future and comparable,
though not identical, lacuna could also can also be traced in nationalist and Republican memories,
perhaps especially about the devastating impacts of loyalist communities.
When a resurgent IRA campaign did indeed begin in 1971 and began bombing pubs and
other civilian targets in the Shankill grassroots and cross community memory work like
that of the Dukas Oral History Archive faces the difficulty of negotiating the resulting
imaginings denials and silences that necessarily enter into those conversations.
But it promotes across the interface, and I want to end with a reflection that transformative moments of this local grassroots level
transformative movements of this local grassroots level is bound up with the politics of
winning necessary narrative shifts and acknowledgements by state and non-state actors within the
wider public arena of legacy politics senses all matters of truth and justice at the moment.
The prospects for this in relation to the Northern Ireland war are not good, but on the other hand, they are not without hope.
Thank you very much for listening. Thank you.
And now, last but not least, we have our very own shop steward, Alexander,
professor of Commonwealth Studies at the Department of International Development.
Jocelyn works on social and political history in southern Africa and is particularly interested in liberation struggles and their legacies.
She co-authored the book Violence and Memory and is the author of The Unsettled Land, The Politics of Land and State Making in Zimbabwe.
And today, Jocelyn will talk about the memory of violent repression in Zimbabwe.
Thank you very much. Right. Hi, everyone.
I'm going to be very unfashionable and not have a PowerPoint presentation,
so I apologise because you're going to have to just look at my face to the whole thing, right?
I want to start just by thanking Jessie, Johanna and Catherine as well for starting the organisation of this day when we lived in a in a different
world and keeping it going in this much altered one really well done that can't have been easy.
So my presentation focuses on local memory making process as an actor.
Actors in Matabeleland Zimbabwe focussing on state violence in the years after independence in 1980.
I've written about this history of violence for many years,
but my interest was recently piqued anew owing to a boom in what we might call pneumonic activity that sat alongside a widespread,
widespread claim that this history was silenced.
So this seeming paradox of what I'm calling noisy silence that I want to explore, I'm going to start with a few words about the 80s violence.
I think probably not everyone is familiar with it. OK, so this period of violent repression is known as Gukurahundi,
and it took place immediately after independence following a lengthy armed liberation struggle.
It was rooted in the unresolved tensions of that struggle, in which not one but two nationalist movements had fought.
The victor in 1980 was NPF, the party that ruled Zimbabwe up to today,
Zanu-PF used the country as the new country's security forces to target its nationalist counterpart,
Zuku, with the intent of eliminating it as a political rival.
And in that aim, it succeeded. In 1987, Zaha, who was absorbed into the NPF under the so-called unity accord and ceased to exist.
The Zanu-PF government's violent repression focussed on the western regions of the country, notably in Matabeleland, where Zapu was strongest.
It was carried out by state agents, most egregiously, the newly formed fifth brigade of the National Army.
The official narrative of Gukurahundi, at its simplest,
is that government forces were hunting dissidents from Zappos armed wing who were along with their leaders seeking to overthrow the new government.
But this story can't explain the nature of the violence in which an estimated 10000 civilians were killed and thousands more were detained,
tortured, starved and disappeared by the intelligence services, police and paramilitaries.
The target constituted by Zapu and its armed wing was also rapidly blurred in political discourse
and practise to include all members of the minority ethnic group that inhabited this region.
The underbelly and the majority of the biggest group in Zimbabwe is the Shona.
So this had the effect of giving Gukurahundi a cultural, cultural, historical and linguistic weight.
And one of its legacies was the making of a very politicised in the Valley identity.
I think I should just stay right at the beginning really clearly that this the
official narrative of Gukurahundi is has never been hegemonic in this region.
This region has had many of its own stories and you can say their stories,
though the contradictory and disputed have always been hegemonic and the local has always been hidden amongst.
OK, so that's a few sentences on Gukurahundi as an event. I mean, I turn to the kind of local noise around it in recent years.
So more than three decades after the signing of the unity accord and the end of violence,
a conviction that this violent history is silenced pervades the Matabeleland provinces.
So the claim of silence comes from young political activists, journalists and the independent media.
Civic leaders based in the region's capital city Bulawayo, rural traditional leaders,
members of a large diaspora and a great number of people on social media, of course.
So it would be foolish to suggest that acts of silencing don't have a very real element to them.
Fear has always been attached to speaking out about Gukurahundi.
Many of those who have done so have suffered violence, threats and serious prosecution in courts.
There's nonetheless an unstable space in which noise can be made, and it has grown and changed in two recent moments of transition.
One short lived unity government that incorporated a new opposition movement alongside the NPF between 2009 and 2013,
and the second following the political rupture created by the November 2017 coup.
So that coup brought down Xenopus iconic leader Robert Mugabe, the man who had directed Gukurahundi.
He was, however, replaced by his erstwhile henchmen of that and later periods Emmerson Mnangagwa.
So from Matabeleland, this was an ambiguous transition because it left the Gukurahundi perpetrators in power.
Nonetheless, the widely touted promise of a new dispensation provoked an outpouring of Gukurahundi talk.
So this outpouring has taken many forms, in part because there's never been any kind of formal redress.
So the frames of law or reconciliation or truth are not dominant, though they are pervasive.
There's no single current counter-narrative, but at least the telling of stories across a variety of genres and media.
So these treatments of Gukurahundi appeared in Zimbabwean authored novels and in plays, some staged in Zimbabwe, others in South Africa in history,
some of them biographies written and published in Bulawayo and in substantial new academic studies,
alibis involving academics often based again in South Africa. They appeared in contested memorial making processes and in paintings.
The artist owned Mexico held a major exhibition of paintings depicting the violence of the grindy at the Blue Whale National Gallery in 2010.
And that's a state institution, though was rapidly shut down in Mexico was taken to court on public order charges.
Two major documentaries by the blue whale based journalist and filmmakers, MS and Novella also appeared one in 2008 and one in 2018.
Both brought harassment and threats, but both were publicly screened in Bulawayo, and Derbali has also established a Gukurahundi library.
The second was actually establishing a Gukurahundi theme park.
And there are many kind of there's a kind of big video collection of accounts of Gukurahundi survivors.
So the showing of his 2018 film was in part, made possible by the attendance at its launch with members of the post-coup institution,
the National Peace and Reconciliation Commission and PRC. This was Zimbabwe's first attempt at something like a truth commission.
The DNPR sees independence is deeply compromised and it has been controversial in Matabeleland,
but it has acted as a kind of new vector for public debate and action, including the exhumation of a handful of mass graves from the 80s.
The NPCI has also held meetings in Matabeleland that attracted protest, notably from the young men of the Markazi Republic Party,
a separatist political organisation that has put Gukurahundi at its centre.
The party derailed meetings by dancing, singing and waving banners calling for justice,
denouncing President Mnangagwa and condemning the Shona speaking and our NPC commissioners.
The history of Google. Google was also raised again and again in the context of semi-public and public events from the funerals of
Sappho luminaries to the remaking of the public holiday that marks the unity accord as Google Hindi Day,
complete with marches, songs and banners adorned with the faces and stories of victims in central well.
So all the media attention as well.
That's the kind of sense of the noise. So where does the sense of silence come from?
So I draw on the idea of recognition to explain the experience of silence amidst noise.
Silence doesn't mean a failure to tell or to know the failure on the part of particular audiences to engage and to hear.
Most importantly, in this case, perpetrators who are still in power.
So this specific failure of recognition has not meant that there is no record recognition at all,
but rather that it's circumscribed in ways that have consequences, both for what we might call communities of hearing and for strategies of telling.
So theme, running through much of the literature on the legacies of violent pasts to simplify hugely is that
acts of silence create buried memories that are corrosive of political and social relations.
While truth telling and the act of sharing stories is restorative and healing.
So this telling and sharing returns agency humanity to individuals by spanning the private and public spheres and affirming collective ideals.
And as this movement has been, Gloucester's as recognition, though as is widely noted again, there are many obstacles to this act of recognition.
In brief, stories of violence may fail to achieve recognition by remaining untold, unheard and believed or unsayable.
Work on soldiers or on victims of sexual violence, for example, have explored these outcomes,
as have studies of truth commissions that identified the constraints put on the stories that can be told within them.
So if two truth commissions can themselves silence and leave narratives unheard.
What happens to recognition where perpetrators are still in power?
So one outcome is that people and groups explore an awkward middle ground between
private and public seeking recognition from authorities and collectives,
communities of hearing. Short of the state and these have different purposes and different effects.
So Exhumations have come to play a complex role in creating substantial local forms of recognition that do not seek to engage perpetrators.
So one of the post-coup exhumations involved reburial of a man called Julius and Lovell, who was tortured and shot by the fifth brigade in 1983.
They brought together his extended family, some of whom had not seen each other since the day of his murder.
Along with a range of church and community leaders. The exhumation and funeral involved telling of Julia's life and of his death through testimony,
social ritual and forensic science, which acted to remake the bonds and memories across this family.
In a newly noisy form. The perpetrators, as falsify errors and deniers, were not entirely absent, however,
the cause of death on Julius State issued death certificate was listed as headache.
The family fought and failed to have it changed, their sensitive story is still truncated.
It's palpable, as is their alienation as citizens.
The desire to document in order to challenge state denial lies behind the work
of the document documentary maker Zenzele and the values I mentioned just now.
His work collects evidence largely through witness testimony, and it also deliberately seeks a reaction from the state through public performance.
So his community of hearing includes the victims of Gukurahundi, but his strategy of telling is aimed at the perpetrators.
And this has shaped how he has told his story first and foremost as a string of extreme atrocities.
The number of which is increased in each telling.
And secondarily, as a political history of the betrayal of one nationalist movement by another senator.
A younger generation who did not themselves experienced the violence of the eighties have told Gukurahundi stories in
yet another form and protest and social media and here I have to say I enjoyed very much the Charles's paper on it.
I'm probably getting your name wrong now, but the paper on Lebanon around youth, and this is another kind of case of intergenerational activity.
So I'm drawing here on the work of Lena Rowan on the angry, youthful members of the Americas, the Republic Party.
And she argues that this generation didn't learn about the past through unvarying the
memories of their parents that produced their own version to make sense of the present.
This was shaped as a reaction to official narratives of Good Hendi and to their experience of extreme economic and political marginalisation.
The past they unburied put to the side the story of the crushing of zappers in favour of
Gukurahundi as an ethnic genocide perpetrated by the majority Shona against the underbelly.
So in this county, 80 in this account in the 80s, violence was simply one step in an ongoing effort to destroy the underbelly shown us as a collective
were cast as both the perpetrators of the eighties and the beneficiaries of the present.
The political endpoint of the intricacies story is a rejection of the nation of
Zimbabwe in favour of an idealised version of a pre-colonial and developing state.
OK, I'm concluding now in the grey area between public and private, where recognition can only be partially given.
It still matters,
and it still plays a central role in making memories that do not belong to the perpetrator state and that can bring together communities of hearing,
if not necessarily of healing.
The incomplete recognition on offer can also produce an alienating politics on one hand and a divisive, hyper hyperbolic politics on the other.
Both of which create profound obstacles to mutual recognition across a host of different lines generational, political and ethnic.
Thank you. Thank you very much.
I really like this image better sound of noisy silence that you provided us with,
I think it captures really well the paradoxes that surround traumatic memory in all different post-conflict scenarios.
You know, I've created some questions. First, I will start with Graham.
So Graham just not asks you, can you tell us something about the contestation of hegemonic memory from within
the loyalist camp or to counter memory narratives only come from the nationalists?
And then connected to this is also a question have these narratives travelled or migrated south of the border or across the Irish Sea?
Thank you for these questions. I've tried to refer to answer them in the chatter, in the question and answer actually,
rather than thinking that was the thing we were, we were doing here rather than paying full attention to it.
Jocelyn spoke about. But thanks for the question. Yes, and you're right, there is no homogenous unity to loyalist popular memory.
So I've really emphasised the Connexions running through in my paper to try and draw out
the ways in which hegemonic narratives become embedded within oral history interviews.
But within the Dukas archive, you'd find many, many examples of much more, you know, a much wider range of memories,
a much wider range of of nuanced responses to the history and the sense of how the diversity
and complexity of those grassroots memories play out and and and and become visible,
I think is one of the things that's really interesting for the project.
For four, for Dukakis, how to get underneath as it were the some of the big public political collective memories that are still being articulated.
And you know, we saw John putting up some of the murals, for example, you know, in his talk this morning.
But how to get underneath that to the complexity of the range?
And I think that where we're at a very early stage of being able to understand and give voice to that to that range,
it consultation certainly has focussed on the role of loyalist paramilitaries and also actually on the role of the British Army.
But many Protestant unionist loyalists never supported and hostile to loyalist paramilitary action,
but wanted to affirm this narrative of law and order. And it's a very powerful, I'd say, and very deeply rooted narrative that wants to, wants to,
wants to emphasise the sense of the difference between the forces of law and order,
you know, legitimate violence versus the illegitimate terrorist violence of the other.
And I think the other thing I'd say about the Shankill would be that the there is also a kind of bringing together across this.
This range of differences, a tendency to crystallise around the the the victimhood of the community,
the suffering and the pain of the community at the hands of the real violence committed by the IRA after 1971.
So that would be, I hope that answers partly the question.
I say partly that they had a unique memory remains in place,
but it's it's it's fractured and it's under the peace process and the narrative of reconciliation.
It's opened up to a whole range of of nuances and inflexions that we need to understand more about.
We have one more question to address.
Although I think it might also be interesting for you, Charleson.
So the question is why did this dualism between Brazilians and colonisers appear in Brazilian
identity construction rather than in other dominant colonial settler identities like in South Africa,
Kenya, Zimbabwe, where intergenerational identity was constructed as Europeans in Africa?
Yeah, I really like that question. And let's say what was the case in Jocelyn's study?
But in Brazil, it was very important to like Brazil created this racial democracy where because it
had so many subgroups of mixed Brazilian born Europeans that were living in Brazil,
all the variety of indigenous groups with their many languages and cultures and of course,
the the former slaves that were brought to Brazil and there had also their their many cultures and languages and so on.
So Brazil decide to play all that down and create a sense of Brazilians which value the mixture.
It wasn't good to be European or black or indigenous.
It was like as if the best was the best of all these worlds together.
And that may been Brazilian goods. In Brazil, there was this sense of mixture and that were was called the racial democracy that Brazil is famous for.
Obviously, they're denied a discussion about about slavery, about violence perpetrated and suffered by these groups, as well as indigenous groups.
We created this sense of of what it is to be Brazilian and then to enhance that.
It was also this what is known Brazilian, and there was usually this European coloniser.
So that is what happened in in an independent Brazil, especially Republican Brazil, around in the thirties, 1930s.
Schlesinger, you want to add something. I see that another question is come in.
That's about Gukurahundi. Yeah. Would you like to answer that?
I know you're a completely out of time again, so maybe I'll just jump on that while it's there for a minute, so.
Go for it. Oh, OK. So the question is about.
During the 2008 election in Zimbabwe. And what's happening now, which is another round of fairly repressive politics?
Would you say there's been and there is another silent Gukurahundi going on at the moment?
So I mean, I think that has to be that's a question you cannot answer globally about Zimbabwe.
If you're standing in Bulawayo, you would answer that question. One way for standing in Harare, you would answer it another way.
And that's partly my point is that if we're talking about hegemonic narratives here, they're very different in different parts of Zimbabwe.
There's no single narrative about Burundi. So the narrative about Gukurahundi being repeated today in Bulawayo, which is pervasive,
is about Shona colonising that part of that country and exploiting and double-D speakers,
taking their jobs, taking over their businesses, you know, running the city council, taking over positions of schoolteachers in the civil service.
That range of complaints, whereas in Harare, Gukurahundi being reproduced now is also a narrative.
But it's about how the techniques of violence used in the 1980s and the perpetrators
of violence of the 1980s are continuing to orchestrate repression today.
And that's also a common line of argument.
But it's not the same one as the one in the way.
So I think that that is politically significant, that those are so distinctive as to views on what Gukurahundi is today.
But obviously, I take very much take your point that there are parallels in the forms of repression across the 40 years of Zimbabwean independence.
All right, and thank you very much. Three fascinating presentations, and now I am handing back over to Chelsea and to another keynote speech.