Weaving the fabric of grassroots peacebuilding in Senegal

Five young men and a woman file into our midst and take their seats in a row. Their teacher stands in front of them and calls the roll. He gets to one young man who’s dressed in traditional costume. He berates the student for appearing in such dress and dismisses him. The young man next to the dismissed student stands, confronts the teacher angrily and follows his fellow student out of the class. The teacher continues with the roll call. Another student stands, and respectfully explains to the teacher that the student in traditional garb is required to dress that way during his period of circumcision. In older days youth in the process of circumcision did not come to school, but now they’re required to. If he wore regular clothes he would be in trouble at home. “Please, respect his culture and allow him to return.” The teacher coughs gruffly and assents, and the roll call continues.

The scene I describe above was a role-play—the last moment in a workshop for journalists of grassroots radio stations in the Casamance region of southern Senegal, West Africa. In July, I traveled to the Casamance to facilitate workshops as a Karuna Center associate, practicing ways to weave ideas about peacebuilding into these journalists’ radio programming. This particular role-play followed a day of practice in developing a list of ideas and messages they see as key to communicate in their stressed local communities—and figuring out how to communicate these messages concretely through skits, soap operas, and talk shows. The role-play demonstrated at least 3 ideas the groups had articulated:

1. respect for the many different cultures in the Casamance is absolutely necessary for community healing after 25 years of violence (see below);
2. standing up to actively support people who are marginalized because of a difference can have multiple positive effects; and
3. being given a chance to “save face” is important in the process of acknowledging wrong-doing.

Though the Casamance is the agricultural breadbasket of Senegal, its poverty rates are among the highest in the country. Its inhabitants are geographically and ethnically closer to neighboring Gambia and Guinea than they are to the rest of Senegal, and there is a widespread sense among people of the region that the government up north in Dakar, the national capital, exploits Casamancais resources unjustly. In the 1980s, the Casamancais people began protesting, at first peacefully, for better treatment from Dakar. As their peaceful marches were aggressively suppressed by the central government, some young Casamancais began forming a group of combatants committed to Casamance’s independence from the rest of Senegal. This led to a low-level civil war which has lasted over 25 years and which has brought about vast population displacement, the destruction of infrastructure and a general lack of development, landmines in roads and farmland, and the killing and rape of villagers by both rebels and the national military.

Karuna Center was invited to provide training in peacebuilding practice for 40 people representing 21 Comites de Paix (Peace Committees). These Comites, formed as part of grassroots peace action projects led by World Education, comprise leaders of religious, educational, political, women’s, youth and other groups. The representatives we trained would in turn become the Comites’ own local trainers in peacebuilding. Following three days of training for representatives of the Comites (two led by me, and one by World Education), I led a two-day workshop with 40 journalists from local community radio stations that work in synergy with the Comites de Paix.

The 5 days of work overflowed with energy, invention, warmth, creativity, and humor. A central theme throughout our work was the problems that emerge when displaced people return to their villages as signs of peace accumulate. Some are people who were forced to flee for safety, whose lands may have been used by others in their absence; and more at issue, others were rebels/combatants who were once members of the communities, and went on a mission of pride on behalf of all Casamancais 25 years ago, but who have in various ways participated in the death and damage that have affected their own community members since. They fear returning, and rightly so. There were several people in the group who had lost family members or faced death themselves—and at the same time, the returning combatants are the family members of others.

Three days after the first workshop ended, I went back to the rural town of Oussouye where we had spent our workshop days, to sit in on workshops our participants had planned in the 3 intervening days and were now facilitating for other members of their Comites. It was remarkable to witness the immediate transformation of ideas about conflict, organized into drawings and exercises in a folder brought from Karuna Center, make their way into the many other cultures of the Casamance who sat together in the room—to be taken apart, realigned, tested, added to and subtracted from. An idea is transformed each time a person entertains it, and people in different cultures entertain ideas within the lenses of their own experience. I think about how the ideas of peacebuilding have affected how I live, as well as other people who have accompanied me in recent years, and I feel hopeful, in a humble, cautious way.

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