Performative memory and re-victimization: Truth-telling and provocation in Sierra Leone

Abstract

In transitional justice and peacebuilding literature, the presentation of traumatic memory is thought to be predictably socially generative of healing, reconciliation, and justice. In rural Sierra Leone, however, the truth-telling performances of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission were commonly experienced as provocative and as providing “no good thing.” This article explains this phenomenon by demonstrating how truth-telling in this case generated particular social expectations and perceptions of the self as victim among those who performed traumatic memory. However, because the process required no one to perform the reciprocal role of patron in this context, where reciprocal relationships of patron and client are the social norm, the process was unpredictably socially generative. The socially generative nature of performative memory led to dissatisfaction with the performance of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Recognizing that performances of memory are also performative provides new purchase on the potentially negative implications of truth-telling in complex patrimonial systems.

Keywords

memory peacebuilding performativity reconciliation Sierra Leone transitional justice

Introduction

This article explores the local experience of a particular practice of memory, the public performance of truth-telling within the context of a Truth Commission (TC). There are many theories in the literature about how truth-telling works within a TC. There are those who focus on the process of acknowledgment, or the “affirmation of atrocity” (Minow, 1998: 4), which is thought to be a form of justice for those long denied recognition (Asmal, 1992: 501; Roht-Arriaza, 2006: 2), and others who focus on the psychosocial processes of apology and forgiveness thought to initiate reconciliation (Fisher, 2001; Nadler and Shnabel, 2008). Still others believe that truth-telling creates a “collective memory” (Chapman and Ball, 2001: 15; Sooka, 2006: 319) shared by the whole population and providing a means to minimize “the number of lies that can be circulated unchallenged in public discourse” (Ignatieff, 1996: 113). Unfortunately, although there is little empirical evidence to support these claims (Brahm, 2007), scholars have heaped a great number of supposedly beneficent effects upon the process of truth-telling (Mendeloff, 2004).

It was in direct response to such claims that I spent 10 months in Sierra Leone during 2008 and 2009 evaluating the local effects of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) for Sierra Leone. My goal in this research was to respond directly to critiques such as those expressed by Mendeloff (2004) and Brahm (2007), who argued that there is little evidence that truth-telling is either good or bad, and to test the interpretations of anthropologists such as Shaw (2005) and Kelsall (2005), who considered the formal procedures of the TRC specifically to be disconnected from local culture. During these 10 months, I conducted 62 semistructured interviews with residents of the northern town of Makeni: 30 with nonelites who had attended the hearing as audience members, 20 with nonelites who were chosen randomly from a database of all addresses in Makeni, and 12 with a selection of local elites in the town. Throughout, my goal was to evaluate the experience of the hearing among the broader audience and not specifically among those victims or perpetrators who told their stories, although I did also speak with a number of participants who had testified at the hearings. What I found was that the TRC was indeed of questionable benefit to local people and that many had experienced the TRC not as helpful, but as a provocation.

Hanna, for example, a 29-year-old housewife in Makeni, poignantly described the TRC as coming “to add pepper in my wound,” and a local man who often ate lunch on the steps of the nongovernmental organization (NGO) with which I volunteered for 3 months described the truth-telling process as “pouring hot water over your head.” A journalist friend of mine told the story of an old Pa who had both hands amputated during the war and who had chosen not to attend the hearings because they were of no use to him. As you hear so often in Sierra Leone, he was coping; he had managed to press on after the war, to rebuild his life, to send his children to school, to forget small–small. But when he heard on the radio, the voice of the man who chopped his hands, it all returned to him. In that moment, explained my friend, the memories of the war came back to the old Pa, hot and painful, and he hated that man anew.

While a number of authors have already shown that the truth-telling processes of the TRC were inappropriate within the culture of Sierra Leone (Kelsall, 2005; Millar, 2011b; Shaw, 2005), this article explores why this was so through the perspective of performativity theory, which provides more generalizable lessons for reconciliation theory in diverse settings. It argues that performances of self within society lead both to the internalization of that self within the performer and also to the expectation of socially and culturally appropriate reciprocal performances from other actors within society. In this article, I illustrate how the ritualized performances of traumatic memory demanded by the TRC for Sierra Leone instantiated, in the performer and in audience members who identified with the performance, the role of the victimized. Individuals who performed that role or audience members who psychologically identified with that role internalized culturally specific expectations of reciprocal performances of patronage and assistance.

However, performative memory at the TRC only generated one of the necessary roles; nobody was required to perform—and thereby internalize—the role of patron or provider. Whereas much of the literature focuses on the relationship between victims and perpetrators in postwar reconciliation, in many ways the case of Sierra Leone calls instead for a focus on the relationship between the clients and the patrons as it was when the reciprocal performances of patronage were not forthcoming that the socially generative nature of performance became unpredictable. Instead of experiences of healing, reconciliation, or justice, truth-telling generated experiences of frustration, anger, and resentment. As I heard regularly from local people around Makeni, the TRC provided “no good thing.” In sensitive transitional settings, like postwar Sierra Leone, this unpredictability can potentially be destabilizing and, therefore, endanger prospects for a peaceful transition.

In the rest of this article, I will first provide a brief overview of the conflict in Sierra Leone and the process followed by the TRC in conducting its public hearings in the postconflict period. I will then describe the transitional justice and reconciliation theory regarding how truth-telling leads to psychological healing and intergroup reconciliation, before briefly describing the actual local experiences of the TRC on the ground in Makeni. I then turn to performativity theory and the internalization of social selves through social performance. I describe performers not as isolated agents, but as performing both within and on their social context, which then confirms or denies their performance, and I describe how social counterparts play a pivotal role in acknowledging or affirming the social self being performed. In the final section, I will describe how the absence of reciprocal performances of patronage led, in Makeni, to an unpredictably generative process which was, for many, provocative. The article will conclude with recommendations for future TCs and for future research into their effects. I will argue that conceiving of ritual performances of memory as performative can help scholars and practitioners to plan, administer, and evaluate socially generative processes of reconciliation and transitional justice.

War and reconciliation in Sierra Leone

The Sierra Leonean conflict began in early 1991 when a force of Revolutionary United Front (RUF) fighters infiltrated over the border from Liberia. Although initially quite small, local disaffection with corruption and a general dissatisfaction with the state of government allowed this initial group to quickly develop into a significant fighting force and a threat to the state (Shearer, 1997: 849). Within just a single year, the All People’s Congress (APC) government, which had ruled the one-party state for 24 years (Shaw, 2002: 249), was unseated in a coup prompted by the increasing violence. However, the RUF refused to enter peaceful politics, and the war degraded into a series of coups and failed governments. Some 50,000 people died in the ensuing violence (Bellows and Miguel, 2006: 394), and 1.7 million were displaced, either internally or overseas (Amowitz et al., 2002: 214).

Over the course of the 11-year civil war, “Sierra Leoneans experienced displacement, looting, burning, rape, torture, amputation and the killing and abduction of family members” (Shaw, 2007: 185), and there was widespread violent abduction and indoctrination of child soldiers by the RUF (Fanthorpe, 2001: 364). Such atrocities were, however, not committed only by the rebels. The term “sobel” was coined to describe those who were “soldier by day and rebel by night” (Dougherty, 2004: 315), using whichever cover was best suited to acquiring the spoils of war. In addition, and highlighting the predatory nature of much of this violence, rural women experienced the brunt of these atrocities, not members of the various fighting forces (Zack-Williams, 1999: 156), and wartime violence has resulted in innumerable postwar hardships.

It was within this postwar environment that the TRC attempted to implement its specific form of reconciliation: the collection of victim, witness, and perpetrator stories in one-on-one statement-taking sessions and the presentation of a select number of these stories in front of live audiences in town halls throughout the country and over the radio. These hearings, carried out between the 14th of April and the 5th of August 2003 were a major component of the TRC’s work and included a “series of thematic, institutional and event-specific hearings in Freetown” (Truth and Reconciliation Commission for Sierra Leone, 2004: 181) and 4 days of public hearings and 1 day of closed hearings in each of the country’s 12 district headquarter towns. As has been the case in most TCs since the famous South African case (Freeman, 2006: 26), these public hearings were supposed to “cater to the needs of the victims” and promote “social harmony and reconciliation” (Truth and Reconciliation Commission for Sierra Leone, 2004: 231).

Truth-telling in theories of justice, reconciliation, and healing

The plan for the public hearings in Sierra Leone was consistent with a vast body of literature that describes the positive effects of truth-telling in transitional or postwar states. Many theorists have seen truth-telling itself as a form of justice, arguing that allowing perpetrators to hide the events of the past from victims and survivors is itself another violation and that knowing the truth will thus provide some measure of justice (Minow, 1998; Popkin and Bhuta, 1999). There is in fact a significant push to have the “right to truth” recognized in international law (Antkowiak, 2002; Naqvi, 2006). Such arguments claim explicitly that failing to acknowledge past atrocities is itself unjust, so truth-telling is the provision of justice.

Others argue that truth-telling will break down barriers between the parties to the conflict, will act not to provide justice, but to provide reconciliation. To such scholars, conflict is seen to create an in-group and an out-group (Bar-Tal and Bennink, 2004; Fisher, 2001; Volkan, 1997), and the process of truth-telling is a collective storytelling therapy, which creates a new national narrative and “collective memory” (Chapman and Ball, 2001: 15; Sooka, 2006: 319). This new collective memory of the past, being shared by the whole population, provides a means to minimize “the number of lies that can be circulated unchallenged in public discourse” (Ignatieff, 1996: 113), and promotes peaceful coexistence.

For many authors, truth, and by extension, truth-telling, is the pivotal moment initiating reconciliation between two sides emerging from conflict. Just as recognition of a wrong is the first step to putting it right, so truth is seen by many as the first step toward reconciliation and healing. Desmond Tutu, the chairman of the South African TRC, for example, had a “tendency to understand the task of the TRC in terms of the metaphor of ‘healing the body’ of the nation” (Allan, 1999: 46), and the first task was to investigate the disease so it could be correctly healed. Similarly, Fisher (2001) describes the performance of reconciliation as comprising four stages: “acknowledgement, apology, forgiveness, and assurance” (p. 37), where acknowledgment can largely be seen as the recognition of the other’s experience of the conflict as subjectively true, and both Lederach (1999) and Kriesberg (1999) developed models of reconciliation that required the exploration of “the truth.”

But a distinction must be made between finding and performing the truth, or between truth-seeking, and truth-telling. Prior to the South African case, TCs did not generally include public performances of memory, but were reliant more on the investigation of police and military records and private interviews with victims, survivors, witnesses, and perpetrators. These early TCs were not broadcast to an audience by television or radio, but were typed up, collated into a report, and submitted to government. In a direct shift away from this model, the South African TRC turned the public performance of personal memory into media images that could “be conveyed to the country as a whole” (Van der Merwe, 2001: 189), and which Krabill (2001) described as providing a “moment of common experience that transcend[ed] the daily divergence of lives” (p. 570). In South Africa, this is said to have contributed to reconciliation by communicating diverse experiences of the conflict across the racial divide (Gibson, 2004).

In short, many theorists of transitional justice, conflict resolution, and reconciliation have accepted the idea that victims and survivors of violence have an “instinctive need to tell their stories” (Allan and Allan, 2000: 462), and further still, to do so in public. Here, we witness the expansion in theory of individual processes of healing to the national level. The “individual and political realms mov[e] inevitably closer,” and individual reconciliation and forgiveness are considered to have collective or national affects (Hamber, 2007: 118). Prager (2008) has indeed argued that “[t]o heal the nation requires the curing of the self” (p. 406). Public truth-telling—the performance of memory—is, therefore, theorized to be predictably socially generative; it is thought to produce experiences of justice, psychological healing, and intergroup reconciliation.

However, in direct contradiction to these theories, local audiences in Sierra Leone had a distinctly negative experience of the process (Millar, 2010, 2011a, 2011b; Shaw, 2005). Truth-telling in this case was provocative, not healing. Echoing the words of Hannah, which I presented above, Saidu, the 61-year-old headmaster of a primary school who had lost everything during the war and felt he had been left languishing without any support in the postwar period, felt that the TRC was “trying to create some problems” because “when I forgive somebody, even if I remember it in my mind, you don’t say it out loud.” Similarly, Alpha, a 32-year-old farmer who was very negative about the TRC and had chosen not to attend, believed the process to be “only provocation to those that they seized advantage on during the war … Because they just keep talking about it all the time, TRC, TRC, and I don’t see what they have done for us.”

Boubakar, a 48-year-old teacher who had attended the hearing, wanting to witness the event because he had lost his daughter during the war, argued that the TRC “was just talk that they came and talked. What they talk, they didn’t even do it. So I do not feel that they even came to help Salone,” and Yamboi, a 30-year-old salesman with a good understanding of the process, believed that “what they said they would do for people, they were not able to do those things. So, I feel that they are not able to make it successful.” Brima, a 25-year-old farmer, felt that the TRC “has just come and given us a lot of talk … will not just come and talk, talk, talk, talk, and I will forget about it,” and Adama, a 39-year-old trader who had not attended the hearings but had heard its sensitization campaign on the radio, argued astutely that “when you see that person who has killed your relative or friend, when you see him, your heart will still run back.”

Clearly, Adama’s opinion reflects the experience described above in the story of the old Pa, a victim hearing again the story of his or her own victimhood and returning to the emotional state of that moment when he or she had been tortured, amputated, raped, or forced to witness atrocities. As she says, “your heart will still run back.” But why is it that Sierra Leoneans had this experience of the truth-telling performances of the TRC, as opposed to the psychological healing, intergroup reconciliation, and justice predicted by so many truth-telling advocates and identified by Gibson (2004) as successful in South Africa?

A number of authors have previously noted the cultural misfit between the truth-telling process and locally accepted memory practice in Sierra Leone (Kelsall, 2005; Millar, 2011b, 2012a; Shaw, 2005, 2007), and Millar (2012b) has highlighted the lack of “otherizing” during and after the war—so structurally different from the case of South Africa or those in Latin America—and the resulting lack of a need for intergroup reconciliation. However, these critiques can be furthered by understanding more deeply how individuals integrate the expectations of a performed role—both the expectations of their role and those of others—and so provide a perspective to understand why the social performance of truth-telling can result in negative and unpredictable social experiences as noted in this earlier work. These findings are more generalizable—they speak to more than the cultural specifics of this case or the dynamics of this war. Indeed, they speak to the performative nature of truth-telling in all cases. To explain why this is, I will first provide a brief review of performativity theory.

Performance theory and social generation

In this section, I am concerned with explaining three aspects of social performance theory: first, how social performance is generative of selves; second, how social performance is generative of social reality; and third, how cultural norms demand appropriate reciprocal performance from others in the social environment to complete performance and generate predictable social outcomes. I will present, in brief, the theories and arguments of a number of key thinkers to illustrate the central tenets of performativity for scholars of disciplines unaccustomed to these theories, before turning in the next section to the implications of this theory for TCs as performative ritual events. First, I describe how performance is theorized to be generative of individual selves. Two authors whose work is central to this claim are Erving Goffman and Judith Butler.

Performativity and the self

In The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Goffman (1959) described how an individual’s performance of small tasks in everyday settings—around the house or in conversation with others—projects an image of that individual to society. In a simple sense, such presentations project the image of the performer and tells society who that person is. However, the more significant claim is that such “projection commits him to what he is proposing to be” (Goffman, 1959: 10). In other words, performances project what the performer wants to be seen to be in society, but they are also limiting, in that they then commit the performer to that role: the self we project becomes the self we must project.

Similarly, Judith Butler (2006) argues, in Gender Trouble, that social performance continually reifies gender norms in society and that “gender is always a doing.” It is in the very acts performed that we locate an individual’s gendered self. She says that “gender proves to be performative—that is, constituting the identity it is purported to be” (Butler, 2006: 34). For Butler (2006), “words, acts, gestures and desire produce the effect of an internal core or substance” (pp. 185–186), but only on the surface. Gender, she argues, does not exist prior to the performance in the individual performer. It is only through the performance that gender is realized, and the gendered subject cannot be considered to “preexist the deed” (Butler, 2006: 34). For Butler (2006), therefore, “identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results” (p. 34).

In this way, both Goffman and Butler describe the power of performance to create identities. However, such performances are not generated in a vacuum, but occur within and act upon society. Society is the structure within which agency is actualized and the performer appropriates suitable modes of performance from society. Goffman (1959) notes, for example, that performances are driven by “standards we unthinkingly apply” (p. 55), but it is only by seeing these standards somewhere else, by identifying norms of behavior and practice out in the world, that such performances can be shaped. Goffman (1959) argues that such social models allow a “mask of manner [to] be held in place from within,” but only when they are accepted by the performer (p. 57). Performances must, therefore, be seen as both generative of a self-performed and themselves generated by external social standards internalized and incorporated by the actor and reproduced in performance.

Similarly, Butler (2006) does not claim that individuals create their own unique performance of gender. Instead, she describes performances as individual “styles of the flesh” (p. 190) or inscriptions “on the body” (p. 184). She states that “these styles are never fully self styled, for styles have a history, and those histories condition and limit the possibilities” (Butler, 2006: 190). In this way, individuals cannot be seen as inscribing their own bodies with styles—norms of gender performance—but as being inscribed upon by the social world. Again, society structures the individual performances that are generated. Gender norms are created in society, seen by the performer, reproduced in performance, and then instantiated in the individual in the performative act. Both authors, therefore, recognize that performances, as much as being performed, are also pre-formed, socially delimited, and internalized within the performer through interaction with society that confirms and reaffirms the validity and appropriateness of their performance.

This is a critical point for my argument in this article: the self is itself inscribed with models and norms of social origin. As such, each individual’s self-concept is generated through socially prescribed performance. In performance, “a soul inhabits him and brings him to existence” (Foucault, 1995: 30). But, as individuals become convinced of their own performances, they are internalizing the standards, politeness, and decorum of the society in which they perform (Goffman, 1959: 107). The performed self is confirmed by society’s reaction to it. In everyday interaction, we are convinced of the validity of our performance by the subtle validations of our audience; the fact that my students perform the subtle rituals of respect (listening, taking notes, facing me in a lecture hall) reaffirm to me that I am correctly performing the role of lecturer.

Performativity and society

But in performing our roles—those internalized and accepted norms of behavior—we act not only to generate our-selves but to affect society. Social acts are performative not only in the generation of selves but in generating the social world. As Arendt (1958) described, the idea of performative acts can be found in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, where the term “energeia,” or “actuality,” refers to acts that “exhaust their full meaning in the performance itself,” where “the work is not what follows and extinguishes the process but is embedded in it; the performance is the work” (p. 206). J.L. Austin (1975) took up this idea of the performative act and applied it to what he called “speech acts,” which he described as “the doing of an action” through an utterance (p. 5). In his own terms, “the issuing of the utterance is the performing of an action” (Austin, 1975: 6).

Austin describes examples of such performative speech acts such as “‘I do’ [sc. Take this woman to be my lawful wedded wife],” or “I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth.” Both of these sentences are themselves performative acts, in that with their utterance the speaker has performed a social act (i.e. getting married or naming a ship) (Austin, 1975: 5). Such performatives create a new social reality and are, as such, socially generative acts. Goffman clearly describes how entire social realities are generated and maintained by performance, not simply the reality of selves. As he eloquently describes, in this social generation, “we must all carry within ourselves something of the sweet guilt of conspirators” (Goffman, 1959: 105).

However, just as individual performances of self are socially delimited, so socially generative performative acts must be relevant to and consonant with the social context. Describing this element of his theory led Austin (1975) to coin the term “illocutionary act,” referring to acts consisting of “utterances which have a certain (conventional) force” (p. 109). These utterances are performative, but only in the correct context. Austin (1975) uses the example of a warning or an order (p. 131) such as “be careful, there are sharks in the water.” Through this sentence, the speaker is not convincing or persuading the listener; he or she is performing the complete act of warning. However, the act is only completed and predictably socially generative in a particular context (e.g. on a beach). It is completely meaningless, or at best unpredictably socially generative, in other contexts (e.g. in the middle of a shopping mall or at the top of a mountain). By “conventional,” therefore, Austin means that the presentation must be contextually appropriate.

In a similar vein, Hornsby argues that there must be the “presence of reciprocity” for the success of a speech act, in that the audience must recognize the illocutionary effects of the speech act. This is only possible within “certain socially defined conditions” which are delimited by “the mind-sets and expectations of those with whom we speak” (Hornsby, 1994: 198–199), that is, the audience. Similarly, Jeffrey C. Alexander (2004) claims that performance succeeds or fails to be socially generative depending on the extent to which one can “convince others that one’s performance is true” (pp. 529–530). He argues that various elements of performance—signifiers, scripts, actors, audience, means of symbolic production, mise-en-scéne, and social power—must be consistent, or “fused” with each other, in order for performative success, or the generation of new social realities, to be achieved (Alexander, 2004: 529). Only when performances are fused will they achieve what he calls “cultural extension” and “psychological identification,” or the reciprocal exchange of meaning between the performer(s) and the audience (society) (Alexander, 2004: 531).

All of these authors thus show that selves are internalized by individuals through the performances we project to the world, but that the norms and models of behavior we project are structured by a delimited set of performances we see in the social context within which we are located. In turn, the performances we enact have social effects: we perform within society but also on society, and social change occurs as a result of performative action. All of our actions are, together, generating our lived reality. However, acts will only be predictably performative—will only have predictable social affects—if the audience to such acts understands them and is able to respond accordingly and if those performances are, at least to some extent, commensurate with expectations and relevant within the norms accepted within the social reality of our audience. So, what does this mean in the context of the TRC’s truth-telling performances in Makeni? How does it help to explain the negative experiences of truth-telling in Sierra Leone?

Performing victimization, expecting patronage

First, I would argue that the entire process of the TRC—its sensitization campaign, its statement-taking process, the speeches of the big men who ran the project nationally and locally, and the public hearings themselves—communicated to large segments of the population that they were victims. TCs have often, in fact, been promoted as “victim-centered” mechanisms (Freeman, 2006: 24) designed to address the needs of victims, to respect victims, or to provide victims with healing and justice. The Sierra Leonean TRC too made such claims—it was coming to heal the entire nation which had, as a whole, been traumatized by the war (Truth and Reconciliation Commission for Sierra Leone, 2004: 2)—and these claims were interpreted by local people to mean that the TRC would perform the role of patron: provide help, resources, and assistance to those victimized during the war (Millar, 2010, 2011a).

However, as many authors have noted, most transitional justice processes also place a great responsibility on the victim and may result in additional harm. As Brounéus (2008) has described, many victims who told their stories at the Gacaca Courts in Rwanda experienced “[t]raumatization, ill-health, isolation, and insecurity” (p. 72), while De Ycaza (2010) describes how, in the same case, victims were called on to play many roles in the “performance” of justice and to carry quite a bit of the procedural burden (p. 14). Yael Danieli (2009) has argued that “every step throughout the justice experience” potentially leads toward “(re)victimizing and (re)traumatizing victims, or compounding their victimization” (p. 355), while Prager (2008) notes that “[n]aratives of past wrongs tend to externalize conflict to the outside world … preserve others as villains and promote a sense of oneself as a victim” (p. 411).

This is no less true for the truth-telling model of reconciliation. Giri (2011) laments, in the case of the South African TRC, that the victim is asked to perform memory in public but that performance “is not accompanied by material reparation” (p. 605), while Mendeloff (2009) notes that the empirical evidence is mixed regarding the cathartic versus retraumatizing effects of truth-telling. In the case of the TRC for Sierra Leone, I would argue that local people were clearly primed to identify themselves as victims and to internalize that role. As mentioned above, it was TRC policy to affirm that the entire country had been victimized and that Sierra Leone was a traumatized nation (Truth and Reconciliation Commission for Sierra Leone, 2004: 2). As Prager (2008) argues, the purpose of all transitional justice processes has been the “reestablishment or creation of a historic link between all members of the polity” (pp. 406–407), and in Sierra Leone, the TRC attempted to create that link by defining everyone as similarly damaged by the war, similarly victimized. While perpetrators were identified and testified during the hearings, even perpetrators were recognized as having suffered and were accepted back into the community as clients of big men if they performed appropriate acts of supplication (Kelsall, 2005; Shaw, 2010).

Unfortunately, if everyone plays the role of victim, nobody plays the role of savior. In Sierra Leone, this is of particular significance because of the social expectations of reciprocal exchange implicit within a patron–client system. Such systems are dominant throughout West Africa and give rise to expectations of service to Big Men and reciprocation in the form of support, protection, and insurance for clients. Among the Gola, in the south of Sierra Leone, for example, “a big person (numu wa) is a powerful patron on whom others depend for political or economic assistance” (Leach, 1994: 60), and in Sierra Leone, generally, consumption by the big man is “balanced by generosity and other benevolent forms of extension to their dependents and supporters” (Shaw, 2002: 256). In this way, systems of patron–client relationships are reciprocal; there is “the implicit understanding that a chief will give his protection to those who submit to his authority and place themselves in his hands” (Jackson, 2004: 47).

However, if and when the big men overdo their privileges and consume resources without providing for their clients, they are no longer operating within this socially normative system. Shaw (1996) in fact argues that such big men risk being accused of the worst forms of cannibalistic bad medicine (p. 37). In Sierra Leone today, the role of the big man is occupied by politicians, representatives of international NGOs, businessmen, religious leaders, traditional chiefs, and leaders of the local secret societies. These big persons are responsible for the needs of their dependents, and their dependents rely on them for resources, support, and opportunities. Such patron–client relationships are the norm; they are the accepted practice (Millar, 2011b), and within this context, clients “beg” big men for resources and big men are responsible to provide.

To “beg” is to supplicate oneself to those bigger than you, to request assistance from them. Begging, putting oneself in the service and in the debt of a Big Man, is an everyday norm in Sierra Leone and expected practice for meeting one’s daily needs. Finding a job, paying for school fees, dealing with medical emergencies, all such occasions lead clients to “beg” patrons for resources and support. And, indeed, the public hearings of the TRC were no different. This is what we see in Kelsall (2005) and Shaw’s (2010) descriptions of perpetrators begging for forgiveness during the hearings, and a simple reading of the transcripts from the public hearings shows that the vast majority of those who told their stories at the public hearings of the TRC, when asked at the end of their testimony if they had anything to say to or ask of the commission, asked for resources and support, for help from the commission (Truth and Reconciliation Commission for Sierra Leone, 2004: Appendix 3). To local people harmed during the course of the war, who may have lost a house, a farm, a family member, or a way of life, the public hearing of the TRC was an opportunity to “beg” to the assembled patrons, to request aid. The provision of this aid, the exchange of resources from the big men to the supplicant, would have represented the closing of the circle, the completion of the performative drama.

Unfortunately, however, as noted above, while all of those performing the truth-telling performances were encouraged to play the role of the victim, nobody was encouraged to play the role of patron. While the TRC was identified as the patron by those testifying and those in the audience who identified with them, the TRC as an institution and the Big Men who were involved in its administration were seen by local people as failing to perform the patron role. As a result, there was a vacuum that no actor was prepared to fill and those who so desperately needed help felt aggrieved or provoked by the process. As Prager (2008) has cogently noted, “[t]he social world, when reconciliation or repair is the objective, is required to demonstrate its capacity to reconstitute social relationships” (p. 416). But in Makeni, these social relationships were not reconstituted because no party stepped forward to perform the required role.

While all those who performed the role of victim, and those many hundreds in the audience or listening on the radio who identified with that role, internalized the socially and culturally delimited role of the victimized—through the performative process of truth-telling—nobody internalized the role of patron. The very clear result, in the case of Sierra Leone, was an experience of the TRC as provocation. The process was socially generative, only not predictably so. It is difficult to know whether this was a temporary or a permanent situation, and while the data presented here cannot conclusively say, Millar (2011a) has shown that those who have been able to rebuild their lives to some extent after the war have been able to overcome such provocations, while many who remain even today marginalized and in poverty cannot.

Conclusion

This article has attempted to explain the failure of the TRC for Sierra Leone to provide experiences of justice, reconciliation, and psychological healing by viewing the truth-telling process of the TRC as a performative act, instantiating in the individual performers a social role—that of victim—which, in Sierra Leone, demands a reciprocal performance of patron or savior. Unfortunately, the process of truth-telling failed to demand that anyone perform that reciprocal role—including the TRC itself—and so the process was experienced by many as a provocation. While transitional justice, reconciliation, and peace studies scholars often seem to consider TCs to be predictably socially generative of positive outcomes—both individually and collectively—this article has highlighted the fact that these processes can be, and probably often are, unpredictably generative. They do not do what we think they do.

In social performance theory, there often appears to be only two ends to the performance spectrum: either social performance is successful (it produces the desired social affect) or it fails (there is no social affect). Alexander (2004) does introduce some nuance in the idea that performance can be more or less “fused” or more or less “de-fused,” but in his theory too successful social performances that are “convincing and effective,” or that are more “ritual-like,” are those that are fused, while those that are more de-fused appear “artificial and contrived” (p. 529), without socially generative affects. What I have shown, however, for the case of the TRC for Sierra Leone, is that performances of memory should not be considered as only successfully or unsuccessfully socially generative, as either fused or de-fused, but should be considered potentially unpredictably socially generative, or con-fused, if you will. Much as, in a very different context, Payne (2008) has shown that truth recovery projects in Latin America served to expand the democratic space for deliberation in unsettling but ultimately positive ways, public truth-telling can have unexpected, but not always positive, effects.

In Sierra Leone an individual in need of assistance goes waka, walking from patron to patron requesting some small–small thing and slowly acquiring what he or she needs. Indeed, many of my interviewees in and around Makeni who saw the public hearings of the TRC as a provocation voiced their frustrations with the lack of reciprocal assistance from big men in town and from the TRC itself, which they identified as a patron. While the TRC’s report—published in 2004—required the government to administer a reparations program in response to the needs of the people as voiced at the hearings, none of my interviewees in 2008 and 2009 had seen any signs of reparation. Indeed, the reparation program was only starting to get to its feet in 2009, and even during 6 months of fieldwork in 2012 not one of my interviewees in Makeni had benefited from these programs and no evaluations of these programs have yet been published. Those who had been primed to see themselves as victims were, therefore, quite understandably confused as to why the TRC itself did not perform the role of patron. As many of my interviews noted, the TRC provided “no good thing.”

Two key recommendations emerge from this argument: one pertaining to the planning and administration of TC processes, and another pertaining to their evaluation. First, it is clearly important for planners and administrators of TCs to understand the local cultural context and to take it seriously in their plans. In Sierra Leone, and in much of West Africa, the existing patron–client system primes the disempowered to turn to the empowered for help and resources required to meet both long-term and immediate needs. Therefore, within this social/cultural context, the experience of a TC without timely reparations should have been expected to be provocative. If the planners and funders of TCs are knowledgeable of the local culture, these errors will be less likely to occur, and, importantly, less likely to go unfixed over the course of the project once the problem is identified.

Second, it is very important that administrators of TC processes conduct ongoing assessment of the impact of their processes. As noted above, the truth-telling processes of TCs are often thought to be predictably socially generative, but even if they are not, as I believe is quite likely, then ongoing assessment of local experiences and impact could identify the break between theory and practice early in the administration of a project—if such ongoing evaluation was conducted. In Sierra Leone, although the TRC’s public hearings occurred over the course of 4 months it appears that few changes were made to the hearings process. Even if some of the TRC staff and commissioners noticed the provocative or aggravating experience among some victims, witnesses, and audience members, changes were not made to the process to deal with these problems. Integrating evaluation staff and processes into the body of TCs could overcome such problems.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank participants in the January 2012 “Conflict, Memory and Reconciliation Conference” in Kigali, Rwanda; Professor John D. Brewer; and two anonymous reviewers for comments on earlier versions of this article. Any errors or omissions are my own.

Author biography

Gearoid Millar is a Lecturer in Sociology at the Institute for Conflict, Transition, and Peace Research (ICTPR) at the University of Aberdeen. His research examines the local experiences of international peacebuilding, transitional justice, and development projects and his work has previously appeared in the International Journal of Transitional Justice, the Journal of Peace Research, and International Peacekeeping. His forthcoming book, titled An Ethnographic Approach to Peacebuilding: Understanding Local Experiences in Transitional States, will be published with Routledge in May 2014.

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