Negotiating Truth-Seeking, Ritual Television, and Healing in Mozambique

Abstract

Civilian populations constitute the majority of victims in civil wars in Africa and around the world. Following peace agreements, one of the main concerns of war survivors and their offspring focus on attempts to rebuild broken relationships. Around the world, post-war rebuilding has centered around struggles to implement official mechanisms of truth-seeking and accountability, healing and forgiveness, and silence and amnesties. This chapter focuses instead on African cultural and religious practices of truth-seeking and healing in the aftermath of the civil war (1976–1992) in Mozambique. The chapter analysis the negotiations and shifts in local embodied accountability mechanisms which culminated in the integration of notions of mass media technologies and television into truth-seeking processes. The participants involved in bitter disputes about alleged wartime violations are urged to watch on a ritual television and use their imaginative abilities to uncover the details of the truths of past violations. The overall truth-seeking process is specialized but also highly participative. It involves the alleged perpetrators, victims, and witnesses, who all negotiate what they watch on a ritual television, and in creative ways, filled in with songs, gestures, and culturally meaningful metaphors, generate narratives of past events and an understanding of why the serious violations occurred during the civil war. This type of post-war recovering processes helps to explain the reasons that war survivors in numerous communities in the center of Mozambique did not involve in revenge acts to settle their wartime disputes.