The Crisis of Belonging and Ethnographies of Peacebuilding in Kaduna, Nigeria
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Date
2019
Authors
Maiangwa, Benjamin
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Abstract
This research uses critical qualitative and narrative inquiry methods to discuss intercommunal conflicts in Kaduna, Nigeria. This approach is with a view to examining postcolonial African crises that border on group claims to belonging, and to explore local—people-centred—peacebuilding approaches. Data were analyzed using a set of procedures including inscription, description, transcription, tidying up, coding, and interpretation of transcripts and field notes.
Violent conflicts among different communities in Kaduna have been on the rise since the 1980s. Several scholars have attributed many factors to the escalation of these conflicts, including historical, economic, socio-cultural, political, psychological, and environmental conditions of violent conflicts. This research accounts for the complex dynamics, inherent ideologies, complexities, and contradictions of the conflicts by putting the foregoing factors into a coherent framework and argues that they pivot on the crisis of belonging in postcolonial Africa.
Thus, drawing on extant works of literature on violent conflicts and fieldwork research the author conducted in southern Kaduna between 2016 and 2019, this research argues that the nature of the conflicts in southern Kaduna has accreted around controversies over Indigenous, nomadic, and autochthonous claims of belonging. The findings of the research revealed that on one side of the conflicts are those who imagine themselves as autochthonous indigenes (legitimate sons and daughters of the land) dealing with an existential threat of a foreign, expansionist, and mobile invader. The autochthonous indigenes imagine their group identity in terms suggestive of a natural, nativist, blood belonging or connection to land.
On the other side of the conflicts are those who lay claims to a notion of belonging that is both Indigenous and nomadic—if not cosmopolitan. The latter group is the nomadic indigene who imagines land as a free resource to which no other group can lay natural claims of ownership. Hence, as the research contends, the conflicts in southern Kaduna swivel on a crisis of belonging underpinned by two diametrically opposed ideological views and dispositions of belonging: Indigenous-autochthons and nomadic-indigenes.
The research findings show that the dynamics of the conflicts reveal inconsistencies and ambiguities in these polarized idealized versions and visions of belonging in Kaduna. The ideological impetus for the conflict also raises questions about the broader predicaments of citizenship rights and nationhood in Nigeria. Simultaneously, the findings of the research revealed the groups’ experiences of positive encounters and ethnographies of peacebuilding. In so doing, the research underscores the importance of advancing people’s approaches to peace, resilience building, and problem-solving in the presence or absence of the state or external support.
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Keywords
Fulani, Southern Kaduna, Ethnic Minorities, Indigeneity, Nomadism, Peacebuilding