The Savage bonfire: practising community reconciliation in post-conflict Sierra Leone

Abstract

Fambul Tok is a Sierra Leonean non-governmental organization with an agenda of starting and facilitating the post-conflict reconciliation process in the rural communities of the country by organizing bonfires and cleansing ceremonies. It is an attempt of local community reconciliation based on traditional justice and reconciliation mechanisms. In this thesis I focus on ethnographic analysis of a single bonfire that took place in 2010 when a war-time commander Mohamed Savage apologized to the people who hold him responsible for most of the crimes committed in their town, including killing, looting and torture. I show how the creation of the ritualistic space as a context for addressing the crimes in a community setting enables all the actors in it to participate in an event that allows them to reconstruct memories of forgotten social bonds and re-imagine and re-produce their identity as a community through both speech acts and habituated bodily practices. I argue that the dynamics between the traditional cultural practices of everyday justice and forgiveness and the post-conflict reconciliation rituals is a complex one, since the bonfire is not only a simple implementation of traditional practices, but also a vessel for introduction of culture of forgiveness and social harmony into the community. I rely on the data collected through interviews with the participants of the bonfire and a four month long participant observation in their daily lives.