Pain and Vengeance:The Women of Jos

By Sterling Carter

Food distribution at an internally displaced persons camp in Jos, January 20, 2010 (Reuters)

On Tuesday, I wrote about how Search for Common Ground organized a meeting between community leaders and journalists with the goal of better utilizing media to attain peace in Plateau State. On Wednesday, Search for Common Ground brought together 35 women community leaders and journalists to discuss how we can increase women’s voices in the media. The goal: to give voice to those typically marginalized by conflict in order to attain a sustainable peace.

The two meetings raised similar issues. However, the character of the two groups could not have been more different. The men spoke of their exhaustion: ten years of conflict, neighborhoods and communities torn apart by violence, children raised on hatred and mistrust challenging their leaders, becoming more extreme, calling for more violence. The emotion was raw and powerful and helped more than anything to put a human face to this conflict.

I expected similar emotion from the women, and had steeled myself for our meeting the next day. Indeed, one of the first women spoke about her role as a teacher, how she worked with children from some of the worst affected areas and their reactions to growing up in such violent circumstances. Many of the children, during an art therapy session, depicted houses on fire, knives, guns, a bomb. When she asked the child about the bomb the simple response was, “That is what I will use to take revenge on the people that killed my uncle.” The impact on children was something the men had brought up the day before, but to hear mothers speak about their children gave the issue shape and clarity. There is a whole generation positioned on the razor’s edge of violence, and at times it seems like the slightest breeze could reignite the embers that are smoldering in Plateau State.

What surprised me, then, was the womens’  reaction to the violence. Much more so than the men, the women dredged up the past and viewed it with an ugly, black hurt that colored the entire conversation. Rumors of “no go zones” and silent killings abounded, with women from indicted communities countering with their own horror stories about the opposing side. It was honestly shocking to hear women, so often considered the peace makers, speak with such anger and pain. In their voices I could hear the specter of the violence that has consumed these communities for so long and the danger that, in their anger, they may be the ones shaping their childrens’ views of the conflict.

During the break, I asked one of the journalists, a friend of mine who works for the government-owned television station, why the women spoke about peace with so much vengeance in their voices. She told me that for many of these women, this is the first forum they’ve been given to express their anger, their hurt, the trauma they’ve seen and experienced. The “white papers,” investigations conducted by state and federal government into the Jos violence, have often ignored womens’ voices. The various peace committees that have been formed have never included women in positions of authority or opened the door for women to express their hurt. For many, this was the first chance to express that pain, even as it divided them into various accusatory camps.

One common refrain among the women was that the violence was the fault of men, that men committed the violence, men lead the violence. “Women, we must tell our men to stop this violence.” In the past, I’ve agreed with this opinion, that war is men’s creation and men’s crime. However, juxtaposed with the hurt of these women, I can only recognize that we are all culpable in violent communal conflict such as this. Young men may commit the violence, but they are often under the exhortations of others. Violent conflict such as this is driven by fear, mistrust, and insecurity. Young men are often expected to take up the mantle of warrior, protector. Even if there are no direct calls for conflict, the pressure in most patriarchal societies is too great to ignore.

So I think we must throw away these gendered opinions of conflict and realize that we all have a stake in our communities. We shouldn’t assume that women are inherently always the victims in conflict, though women and children often suffer more than men. However, denying that women play a role in conflict, both as actors and as victims, denies them the anger and trauma inculcated by extreme violence. Denying them a voice in the peace process, a chance to work through that pain, can rob a community of a chance at sustainable peace. By recognizing our shared guilt, we recognize our shared humanity. Humans are fallible. We are imperfect creatures, and, recognizing that, we can begin to work together to pick up the pieces and rebuild.

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Sterling Carter is an international intern with SFCG’s country office in Nigeria.Originally from rural Indiana, he spent the last two years in Niger with the Peace Corps. He has also interned with SFCG’s Africa Program in our DC headquarters. This summer, returns to Africa to work on our activities in Jos, the capital of Nigeria’s Plateau State, which divides the Muslim North from the Christian South. Over the past decade, Jos has been the center of interreligious/interethnic violence that has claimed over 3000 lives and displaced hundreds of thousands more. Sterling will be conducting an assessment on the violence in order to inform SFCG’s upcoming project linking religious leaders, civil society activists, and journalists for a series of radio roundtables and media projects aimed at building peace in local communities. Learn more about our work in Nigeria here.