POSTPONED: CRG Seminar: Forced displacement, silencing and the multiple faces of violence in Mozambique

 

How are past conflicts still present in Mozambican history and politics? How do villagers react when their communities are invaded by violent groups? Leave everything to look for other safe lands? From the war against Portuguese colonialism (1964-1974), through the post-independence war (1977-1992), the peace processes, democratisation and its implications in the generation of other forms of internal conflicts up to the recent armed upheaval in the far north from Cabo Delgado, they placed the displacement forced and silencing in an inseparable relationship for different communities that experienced different forms of violence and in different contexts. In this seminar, Dr Zacarias Milisse Chambe intends to address the narratives about the war that began on October 5 2017, in the District of Mocimboa da Praia, on the extreme coast of the province of Cabo Delgado, north Mozambique, by a group of radical guerrillas known locally as mashababe. Since then, from isolated attacks in remote villages, the violence spread to more districts in the region, with kidnappings of civilians, looting of barns and houses, thus imposing forced displacement of hundreds of thousands of people, in addition to an inestimable number of dead and missing people. Combining history and ethnographic work carried out since 2018 at the War Displaced Persons Center in Nacaca south of Cabo Delgado, where thousands of displaced people took refuge, Dr Chambe will talk about how through the forms of displacement in which populations from different villages intersect in the exercise of memory, in wanting to tell what experiences of trauma that are created by forms of silencing imposed by different actors passing through their new spaces of refuge.

Dr Corinna Jentzsch (Leiden University) will serve as discussant and Dr Lidewyde Berckmoes (ASCL) as chair.