‘Small’ wars, triggered by conflict between communities, transnational corporations, gatekeeper states, and, increasingly, religiously-defined communities for control over natural resources and populations are key to economic and political transformations across nation-states in the post-Cold War era (Ifeka, 2004a). Globalisation inserts the private sovereignty of corporate capitalism inside the political, public sovereignty of the nation-state (Joxe, 2002:155). Some of globalisation's political impacts can be seen all too clearly in Africa, where state decomposition seems linked to an intensification in the incidence and brutality of political violence between communities across ethnic, religious, political and territorial ‘borders’. Some West African societies, settled and migratory, are militantly reconstructing their worlds in ways that draw on symbols of ethnic distinctiveness and traditional faiths; others in the front line (e.g. the Niger Delta) are also demanding independence from or semi-autonomous status within the nation-state.
In Nigerian locations where I have worked since the mid-1990s,1 highly conflictual processes of decomposition and reformation are most pronounced in places where the customary commons – pasture, arable land, fisheries, freshwater rivers – are being privatised and the original users marginalised. As social-economic differentiation, political inequality, and perceived injustice grow, where formerly there were relatively cohesive bonds between ethno-religious and occupational groups exercising agreed rights to exploit the same areas at different times of the year according to the seasons, now competition for land is breaking bonds and opening up spaces in which ethnic formations identifying with the same god(s) are hardening. Some demand full or qualified rights of juridical sovereignty over their peoples, territories and ‘god-given’ resources. Political violence is densest at intersections of the global and local where capitalist production for profit, as in the oil producing Niger Delta, exists alongside non-capitalist fishing, agricultural or pastoral economies.
Here Royal Dutch Shell, ExxonMobil, ChevronTexaco, and the Italian company Agip have been subject in the past decade to intensifying attacks on their installations by individuals, youth militias and other groups, some hired by national, state or local elites who are based in or related to families in wetland kin-based moral economies.
Shell seeks to relate to communities it once publicly regarded as disposable and whose increasingly militant youth they defined formerly as a criminal menace, by providing development assistance – capitalism's panacea for poverty (Shell, 2002). ‘Restive’ youth are recruited for menial low paid casual work in and outside terminals, or paid ‘sitting allowances’ to keep them at bay. Some ‘oily’ development projects are in partnership with a government parastatal, the Niger Delta Development Commission, to demonstrate oil companies' good intentions to the state and communities.
In such situations of resource conflict traditional cosmologies, secret societies and modern religions (Islam, Christianity) provide ideological inspiration upon which people draw for resistance. People in general, but especially aggrieved or unemployed youths, are becoming increasingly fervent (and fundamentalist) in their religious views. They may seek relief in a greater fit between faith and the political collectivity (through Shari’a law), or they may find personal salvation and relief from poverty and unemployment in ‘miracles of fire’ that bring money and salaried positions (through Pentecostal, i.e. Gospel of Wealth churches).
It is these socioeconomic conditions that account for the growth in the past two decades of militant youth organisations at points of greatest strain between centrifugal (decentring primordial kin-based) and centripetal (centring for capitalist accumulation) ethnic and religious identities. Markers of difference empower three major stakeholders – kin-based communities, capitalist economic interests (landowners, oil companies) and political elites (the state) – to define their boundaries and defend their interests. Each group is confident that they alone are entitled and authorised to battle for exclusive control of common lands now being privatised by powerful interest groups (for profit-led farming and fishing as well as crude oil production). What tends to be common to all such groups, however, is reference to the ‘supernatural’ support of a god, gods or other spiritual powers from which they claim to have a mandate approved by the community (Boyer, 2002).
A general trajectory, whereby political and economic issues are re-presented in terms of religion, may sustain subtle but significant processes fetishizing violence. Youth interpret social relations amongst themselves, and between their organisations and the enemy ‘other’, in terms of relations between supernatural agencies of the singular (world religion) or multiple (animism) varieties. Attacking or killing enemies appears as a property inherent not in human ability but in the ‘thing’ (gun). Inanimate objects (guns) bought in the market are animated and objectified (fetishized). As Taussig (2002:479) explains, the political and indeed the economic is absorbed by a mystical matrix of ‘things’.
Youth Militancy & Ethnic & Religious Divisions
The Nigerian nation is made up of numerous ethnic and religious communities which have evolved their own moral orders, derived from a mix of mission and indigenous beliefs among the clan or lineage groups which constitute them. The amalgamation of these social systems to form the local governments, states and federation of Nigeria carried into this wider arena the pursuit of material and ideal interests, ‘but not the institutions and procedures for regulating, balancing and adjudicating them at the community or traditional political level’ (Joseph, 1987:187). Approximately half the Nigerian population are formally Muslim and the other half Christian, but customary tolerance of religious difference is being eroded by deepening economic inequalities shaped by globalising market forces and replaced with fundamentalist identities highlighting the absolute superiority of one faith over the other (Ali, 2002; Tripp, 2006). Absolutist doctrines are attractive to many alienated unemployed youth, some of whom come from areas with an already militant tradition of ‘boys’ revolts'.2
Although many youth are relatively inactive politically, preferring to focus on ingenious strategies of economic survival, others form associations with varying degrees of openness and closure to the wider community. Some engage in ‘criminal’ organisations with intent to plunder citizens for personal gain whilst others form vigilante youth organisations that empower themselves, or are empowered by local governments, to use strong persuasion or physical force to ‘protect’ their district, as when they ‘take the law into their own hands’ and lynch those accused of being armed robbers. Some youth organise in ‘ethnic militias’ (in government terms, ‘saboteurs’) who fight against the state for their people's political liberation and territorial sovereignty (Apter, 1997; Buur, 2003; Gore and Pratten, 2003).
Yawning economic disparities between world capitalism's productive, information-rich affluent areas and socially-excluded, impoverished zones, are particularly exposed in the Niger Delta. Thousands of kilometres of global capitalism's oil technology – pipe lines, flow stations, huge oil terminals and company compounds – sit literally cheek by jowl with fishing communities organised for the most partwithin non-capitalist relations of production for subsistence and seasonal sale of surplus, eking out a living in the oil-polluted swamps and soils of planet Earth's second largest wetlands. Here, capital-intensive systems of resource extraction and processing that rely on highly skilled labour imported from overseas and elsewhere in Nigeria exist alongside, and in general do not mesh directly with, non-capitalist relations of production between households. Invoking the 1978 Land Use Decree, the Nigerian state asserts its exclusive rights over ‘black gold’ ‘for the use and common benefit of all Nigerians’ (Francis, 1984:5). Yet communities insist that, as their founding forefathers' descendants, they are empowered to own and hold in common under ancestral customary law not only oil and gas, but all natural resources including land, creeks, coastal waters and the fish stocks therein (Ifeka, 2000, 2004b).
Ijaw family households in the Niger Delta interact as parts of a moral community respecting norms upheld by clergy of various churches; they may also interact as parts of a covert community respecting the mystical and physical powers of the Ijaw war god (Egbesu). Egbesu's warrior youth priests are initiated into secret knowledge of ‘medicines’ conferring immunity to enemy bullets; initiates are supported by ‘mothers of the community’, by male elders in their customary role of the ancestors' representatives, as well as by priests of shrines to gods of the sea, mangrove swamps and the fertile soils of drier upland areas (Ifeka, 2005). Militant fishing youth in currently militarised zones of the Niger Delta (e.g. Brass township facing Agip's oil terminal in Bayelsa state, Warri town facing Shell and Chevron-Texaco terminals in Forcados, Delta state) confront the state's security forces protecting oil company installations
The growth of political violence in Niger Delta fishing economies has been paralleled by increasing tension inland between pastoralists and farmer youth – phenomena treated almost invariably as separate and disconnected (Best and Kemedi, 2005). Observers tend to focus on the perceived importance of ethnoreligious difference, so they disconnect the violence of youthful warriors fighting for oil – their faces and heads mystically protected from enemy bullets by the war god's leaves and chalked facial designs – from violence far from the world media's cameras in the sub-humid and temperate zones of Cross River and contiguous states on the Nigeria-Cameroon border. There, farmers of various ethnic majority groups pray to the Christian god, whilst also relying on the ‘medicines’ of indigenous gods to ensure victory in protecting ‘their’ land from incursions by livestock owned by Muslim pastoralists of the Fulani political and demographic ethnic minority.
It is Islam and Christianity which here mark ethnic and socio-economic boundaries between farmers and Fulani pastoralists. Pentecostalist churches aim to evangelise Muslim communities, and to a lesser extent the reverse. World religions also intersect with customary cosmologies and secret societies possessing secret knowledge of gods which animate objects, fetishes, attributed with killing powers (Lambek, 2002:7-8). In the Delta wetlands, customary worldviews articulate militant youth's ethno-national identity, and protect their bodies against the bullets of a global economic enemy (oil corporations) and an ostensibly secular Nigerian state that Niger Delta people nevertheless identify with the Christian faith. Here youth at times act violently against their ‘parent’ culture's (Christian) faith, setting fire to churches and burning down priests' houses.
Informing these parallels between militant youth cultures of violence in the wetlands and inland, is the pivotal role of non-capitalist kin-based relations of production wherein people are not yet separated from the means of production – land and water – that reproduce labour (Marx, 1971). Scholars have failed to link the ‘institutional endowment’ of ethnic and religious divisions (Azam, 2001:3) to the predominance of family labour in production and reproduction for subsistence and survival. In times of crisis (illness, infertility, epidemic diseases, impoverishment) people go to shrines where priests invoke the old gods' customary means of protection against perceived mystical ‘enemy’ forces (Ifeka and Flower, 1997; Ifeka, 2000, 2004a, 2004b, forthcoming). Arguably, most subalterns' economic dependence on culturally distinctive ‘moral economies’ of kinship (Hyden, 1980) shapes popular religious practice. Subalterns know that the rich are reluctant to disburse lucrative patronage, so they seek out native doctors, priests and seers of the old gods believed to possess secret knowledge of mystically powerful ‘medicines’ that can ‘command’ the patron to release his largesse. Conversely, the wealthy and powerful, whether Muslim or Christian, have less need to seek mystically potent ‘medicines’ from animist priests. Popular belief however has it that rich Muslim men, socialised into the collective obligations of life lived in the ummah, are more likely than their individualistic Christian counterparts to support clients.
Whilst violent youth have recourse to ‘traditional’ rituals and sacrifice to gods of war to protect secret/quasi-secret militias, field data suggests that youth cultures of violence also iconise modern war weaponry fabricated in global arms factories (Ifeka, 2004a). As young Ijaw warriors are photographed in speed boats ready to challenge the Nigerian security forces, they wield AK-47s, their torsos wrapped round from shoulder to shoulder in bullet belts. The young men, some apparently teenagers, use white chalk to paint designs on their faces symbolising the warrior's protection by Egbesu, the god of war. Some also place medicated plant leaves on their foreheads to signify that their life force is sacralised by the god's protection and secured by rituals and sacrifice at Egbesu's shrine. As they deploy capital's advanced weaponry in armed combat, Ijaw youth and oil company/state security forces objectify (fetishize) relations between fishing communities, global capital and the state in terms of relations between commodities of violence (guns) mediated by the ‘customary’ protective power of medicated leaves.
Thus, youth cultures of resistance employ a ‘double’ articulation (Hall and Jefferson, 1976:15). On the one hand, youth are socialised in a ‘parent’ culture embedded largely in non-capitalist systems of power. Here social relations are customarily represented in terms of relations between mystical forces animated in man-made or natural objects, gods (fetishes), which struggle for victory over life and death. Though customary cosmologies are fragmenting, elements reported in ethnographic texts from the late nineteenth century suggest strong continuities in motif and meaning. Militant youth draw upon these traditions and may also participate in mosque and church, where clerics and priests provide channels of communication between kin-based communities and national and international arenas of discourse on issues of faith, the state and injustice. Conversely, militant youth organisations relate to capitalist corporations and the Nigerian state through guns, rockets and grenades bought in exchange for stolen crude oil.
Fetishism & Fetishization
In West African coastal contexts fetish means juju, which is pidgin English for the French joujou (doll) known in Portuguese as fetico (made) (Kingsley, 1964:96-110). Fetishes are products of human thought, and are maintained for the pragmatic purpose of getting spiritual power over events. As Ellen (1988:213-4) explains, fetishism may commence as people invest perception in a thing, and with subsequent reification and animation, it becomes a fetish, ‘an object conceived as a powerful being’, or a spirit connected to matter for as long as it receives human attention through prayer, sacrifice and perhaps daily offerings of food. Some marxist scholars, for example Taussig (1980), argue that fetish objects, generated through a group's collective experience, take on fixed qualities that in mirroring a perceived sociality conceal their true economic or political function and so mystify reality.
Among Anyang forest dwelling hunter-gatherers and small farmers living on both sides of the Nigeria-Cameroon border, a male-dominated community of kin groups controls the means of production (land and young men's labour) and reproduction (women). Households are only partially integrated into the market economy and a majority are still unconverted to Christianity. Fetishism here represents relations between women, men and youth in terms of ‘natural’ relations between powerful spirit beings that are simultaneously desired for their protective functions and feared for their destructive potencies. In the Niger Delta, Ijaw cults of the war god Egbesu, ancestral beings and other spirits of the sea and water, represent inequitable relations between people, oil companies and the state in terms of spirit beings' resistance to the violence inflicted by oil spills, gas flaring and security forces' brutal massacres. At the same time, Ijaw communities may also represent relations between people, the state and oil companies as relations between things – commodities like guns, money, petroleum – objects that are detached from the producer and whose acquisition mystifies relations between people in terms of commodities, things. In such contexts, the Ijaw express their experience of being at the global/local interface simultaneously in terms of commodity and ritual fetishism.
Fetishization denotes a shift from what Ellen (1990:5) calls ‘balanced simultaneity of the signifier and signified toward the thing in itself’; the concept ‘hardens’ as it is objectified as a powerful force or being. By the fetishization of political violence I mean groups struggling to access resources perceiving that they relate in no other way than through representations and practices of spiritual and/or physical violence; consequently, youth feel they have no social relations with the hated ‘other’ than through objects of force (guns, cutlasses, bows and arrows).
Anyang forest communities explain illness, disease and death not in terms of scientific theories of causality but in terms of mystical attack. Typically, one or more members of the village are accused of being witches who destroy life by introducing disease, infertility of women and crops, and unexpected deaths in order to enhance their own reproductive and productive powers. The men's secret society send out youth to mobilise their anti-witchcraft fetish (Lakumbo or Mfam). At such times relations between human beings are represented in terms of de-centring fetish powers (juju) that connect villages over a large area in ongoing spiritual warfare against witches whose reach may extend to Europe and America, centres of modernity and capitalism (De Boeck, 2005; Ifeka, forthcoming). In these forest contexts, political relations between men assume the fantastic form of relations among spiritual agencies, unleashing the destructive and protective powers of the demonic. The gods and their ‘medicated’ objects supply mystical means – the law sacralised through sacrifice – that enables devotees to protect the moral economy of kinship from attack by external enemies who ‘appropriate the scarce reproductive resources of others’ (Austen, 1993:104).
When people harden their focus on objects of violence (guns, fetish or juju figures), they materialise or embed the concept in commodity (gun) or spirit entities (war god). In consequence they experience social relations increasingly in terms of attack and defence, fetishized violence, that articulates major points of conflictual intersection between global and local.
Violence
Girard (1977) argues for the essential life-giving creativity of violence, arguing that revenge killing cycles can end in one ‘final’ killing that authorizes new social formations. By contrast, Baudrillard, among others, has maintained that violence destroys lives, social systems and tolerance of different faiths (2002:8, 17-19). Most militant Ijaw youth, however, might well agree with Girard since they believe that decades of relatively peaceful resistance have not persuaded the state to concede resource control to oil-producing communities. ‘’They have developed a veritable theodicy of suffering to rationalise violence as ‘just war’.
Two well-known Ijaw militias – the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) and the Cynthia Whyte Martyrs' Brigade – are aiming to consolidate popular support and seek understanding of their righteous cause in the Nigerian nation, the diaspora, and international human rights organisations. Following a successful attack in March 2006 on an oil facility, the militants took expatriate oil workers hostage. In a statement to the press regarding possible negotiations, MEND stated:
As much as our terms are non-negotiable, we want to be understood very clearly … MEND is … [privy] to the politics of such deliberations and finds it futile as it shall amount to avenues to import more economic hostilities to multiply the austerity and servility of the Niger Delta child. The demands of MEND cannot be subsidised as our resolve to rebel to free the Niger Delta child is a discretion greater than self, so no amount of economic, social or political persuasion shall redeem the last three hostages … [who personify] the Anglo-American ring of fire pillaging and ravaging the Niger Delta area with the weapons of mass sustainable under-development … (cited in Udo and Ojogo, 2006).
In Simmel's view (1955:13), ‘Conflict is … designed to resolve divergent dualisms: it is a way of achieving some kind of unity, even if it be through the annihilation of one of the conflicting parties’; conflict is a pivotal form of sociation. Applying Simmel's argument to militant youth's belief in violent means to secure otherwise unattainable political ends, an eventual political consensus, which allowed for new sovereignties to emerge with independent jurisdiction over their own peoples, terrains and natural resources, would be legitimate and justified even if it were achieved by violent means.
Whatever the outcomes, scholars like Arendt (1970) cleave to Hobbes' position that consensual (pure) power negotiated by citizens is the (true) origin of socio-political organisation (Tuck, 1989). Some, like Weber (Bendix, 1960), theorise power's inherent duality (force versus authority) in response to changing political and economic conditions; only a few writers argue with Girard the case for violence as a socially creative force. However, the latter view is echoed not only in fundamentalist discourses of terrorism but also by multinational corporations, nation-states and ethnic communities that authorise such practices in their own wars (Kemedi, 2003).
Towards a Conceptual Framework
Resource control struggles are Nigeria's specific terrain of intersection between capital and community. In this section I use case studies from my ongoing fieldwork to help identify factors shaping the emergence of youth cultures of resistance that, drawing on customary and modern faiths, fetishize social relations in terms of commodities of violence (guns) and protecting/attacking spirit beings. Poverty and unemployment may be a necessary but are not in themselves a sufficient cause of the recent growth in youth militancy. Many young men, literate and illiterate, feel that they can never compete in the overcrowded capitalist sector and that they are being coerced by circumstance to labour as kinsmen within the ‘traditional’ household division of labour in Nigeria's farming, fishing and pastoralist economies. Positioned at points of intersection between the global and the local, without the skills and resources to support wife/wives, children and hungry ‘brothers’, many experience shame. Though unable to supply material sustenance at the expected level, they can rely on the customary use of force, both spiritual and physical, to achieve respect and prestige as ‘good boys’ who protect their families and communities from unwanted external attack. They may form militias dedicated to the use of physical force, strengthened by spirit beings, to secure their goals.
Shame, as Scheff (1994:3-4, 39ff) demonstrates, leads the individual to feel resentful and then angry. In Nigerian contexts, it is possible that poverty and relative political powerlessness are necessary conditions for youth's increased sensitivity to perceived insults to individual and collective pride. As more young men feel shamed by loss of status and self pride there may emerge a perception of threat to the collective identity and stability of village, ethnic group and religious faith and consequently, the likelihood of a violent response. At this stage, argues Scheff (1994:111-123), the image of the ‘other’ as enemy and fit object of the self's violent cleansing or extermination is strongly experienced; relations between self and other are re-presented in terms of violence and expressed through religious symbols of righteous force.
Violence as Creative & Destructive Force
Although at one time or another most youth may feel shame at their predicament, only some of their number became militant activists, and of these only a few become leaders. The latter, often apparently more literate or educated than the membership, turn not to modern scientific knowledge but find in traditional secret societies a political model for handling the challenges of violent resistance (see Honwana and De Boeck, 2005). Though only a minority of youth become militant, most people, whether overtly or covertly, support those militias or vigilante organisations that community members believe use force for the collective good. Militant youth groups that lack community approval may be known as ‘area boys’, ‘armed robbers’, ‘hoodlums’, ‘mafia’ etc; these terms usually denote criminal groups deemed to be operating in defiance of community norms and the state's police forces.
Niger Delta youth, surviving within primordial ties of kin-based fishing communities situated close to exposed pipelines, siphon off and sell an estimated ten per cent of Nigeria's annual on-shore crude oil production. In this theft they are often backed by powerful patrons in high office at the state and national levels as well as their ‘parent’ communities. Youth may use part of the proceeds to purchase arms – originally of the small hand gun type but now increasingly sophisticated and lethal (Green, 2001b, 2002; Ifeka, 2001b).
The ensuing violence is both ‘constructive’ and destructive. In the Niger Delta new ethnic formations are emerging out of the sacrifice of many youth who have died in the cause of resource control and ethnic autonomy, such as Ijaw youth in Bayelsa state, whose perceived martyrdom is recounted below. In the case of the pastoral Fulani (Muslim) who are being persecuted by ethnic farmers (Christian), violence is highly destructive of life, properties and security of another subaltern group. Grazier victims would certainly agree with Baudrillard (2002) that killing is in no way creative.
Example 1: Violence As Creative
When working in Brass (Bayelsa State) I was told by several young Ijaw informants of a recent tragedy, and saw the terrain on which it unfolded. This event demonstrates some of the factors involved in conflict between oil companies and communities since the early 1970s when commercial production came on stream. It illustrates the experience of militant youth in the Niger Delta struggling against oil companies and the state for a semi-autonomous or independent Ijaw ethnic nation controlling its oil resources.
In 2001 a Twon Brass youth organisation led a peaceful demonstration of over sixty people up the cement path from the town to the Agip oil terminal in the swamp. The youth intended to enter the compound to present a protest to Agip managers to the effect that they were unemployed, lived in poverty, fished waters heavily polluted by crude oil effluents and drank contaminated water. They demanded that the company should ‘help our people’ who were customary owners of the wetlands. As the youth, followed by men and women, sought to enter the terminal, naval security forces with guns ordered the demonstration to halt. Women at the rear called out to the youth leaders to remain at the gate, and not to enter. Twelve or so youth ignored the warning, climbed over the gate into the compound and began to walk towards the management complex, whereupon naval security men hired by the oil company to ‘protect’ the installations, opened fire and killed three of the leaders.
The young men are memorialised in the form of a large billboard depicting the three martyrs, with an appropriate legend to their heroic sacrifice (Ifeka, 2001b). Members of the Ijaw Youth Congress subsequently argued that these three young men and many others had sacrificed their lives for the cause of Ijaw resource control and attainment of Isaac Adaka Boro's dream of a sovereign Niger Delta Republic. A supporter of Boro's twelve day rebellion in 1966 wrote recently that Boro died ‘an undying hero and martyr in the hearts and minds of angry Ijaw youths’ (Ijaw Nation, 2005; Ijaw Youth Council, 2006; also see Eshiet et al. n.d.; Olorode et al. 1999).
In this instance violence resulting in death is perceived as ultimately creative, because first, the action and subsequent public interpretations (such as the above) conjure up an image of the future desired polity; and second, youth's sacrifice of their lives identifies the emerging polity with lawful justice. Similar arguments justifying political violence for a cause larger than the interests of any one individual have already been illustrated from MEND.
Example 2: Violence As Destructive
This example exposes the experience of victims of inter-communal conflict in Bayelsa State, the Niger Delta. While in Brass in 2001, I met ‘refugee’ families from fishing community A across the water, whose village a hostile neighbouring settlement (B) had burned down in the late 1990s, despite the fact that both were Ijaw. A good number of former residents of community A were residing ‘temporarily’ in a Twon fishing port, some had taken refuge with kin in Yenagoa and Port Harcourt. (At that time there were also displaced persons from two other villages residing in Twon.) Former residents of A regarded themselves as the victims of unwarranted attack – though A and B had long been engaged in periodic strife. Families had been dispersed, their means of production (fishing boats, outboard engines, nets) destroyed, their shrines and graves abandoned. As one said, ‘our lives are finished’ (Ifeka, 2001b).
People I spoke to felt their community had been ‘scattered’, they had lost their collective identity and means of subsistence. “Refugee” youth were angry and aggrieved and brawled periodically with Twon indigenous youth organisations. Subsequently, in 2004-5, relations degenerated into major outbreaks of violence with a third party, the state's security forces, involved. Youth from village A alleged that some officers had been ‘bribed’ by Twon indigenous youth groups to participate or at least to turn a blind eye to acts of violence against refugees.
Last year the press carried reports that Agip and government had assisted displaced persons from village A to return and rebuild their lives. This example exposes the relativity of ethnic solidarity, given that hostility here was between Ijaws. More generally, descendants of founding indigenes in Delta settlements claim that their villages are much more ethnically diverse than a generation ago. They told me they are tired of taking in families from non-Ijaw inland ethnic groups who demand to fish largely dead creeks and the few remaining productive fresh water rivers (Ifeka, 2003). Their response is to re-centre community decision making, excluding all but ‘indigenes’, that is, families claiming descent in the male line from an ancestor who cleared swampland and founded the village. Economic desperation turns indigenes and refugees against each other in conflict which can lead to violence.
Example 3: Violence As Destructive
This example describes the view of Muslim graziers, victims of attacks by Christian farmer youth organisations in Ogoja and Yala LGAs (Northern Cross River state). Such violence occurs between two communities who, in a formerly less commodified economy, related through symbiotic exchange of mutually useful produce (milk for stubble grazing). In this area privatisation of communal village land is now advanced. A small but growing class of large landowners is appropriating and/or purchasing blocks of communal land as well as plots that the poorest farmers sell out of financial necessity (Peters, 2004). The remaining stock of communal land is insufficient to support the burgeoning majority, who often say that the political class ‘nationalised’ land in 1978 for its own financial benefit, and not, as was claimed, for the ‘use and common benefit of all Nigerians’ whatever their ethnicity and religion (Francis, 1984:5).
Inequality in access to, ownership and distribution of land among farmer and grazier units of production is increasing rapidly. Provisional income and household data show that smallholder farming villages are expanding their land reach; they are also becoming more economically differentiated, as a ‘comfortable’ few buy up common land, engage in cash crop agriculture, and promote privatisation at the expense of the poor (subaltern) majority whose youth face endless toil for others as landless labourers, share croppers and tenant farmers (Ifeka, 1996, 2002; Toulmin et al. 2002). Conversely, graziers who retain livestock are increasing herd size and pressure on grazing land. As with land, so with cattle: people say that fewer Fulani graziers maintain cattle today, those who do have larger herds than was common a generation ago. Herds – and farms – are getting larger as economic differentiation and privatisation progress.
While ethnic and religious communities intensify their competititve pressure on the available stock of productive land and clean water, so does cultural difference come to seem a marker of threat. Fulani become ‘strangers’ whose God and methods of worship are alien, who are called to prayer in a foreign language (Arabic), and who adhere to a very distinctive code of honour (pulakau) and avoidance of shame (semtende). By contrast, farmers' conversion to varieties of Pentecostalism strengthens their identification with the ‘true’ God and his Son Jesus. Many tell Fulani ‘you are strangers and should return to where you came from’ (Ifeka, 2006:90-91). Fulani informants told us that landowners think ‘we are trouble people, always cause problems, we are difficult people’, that farmers ‘hate us’. Farmers believe that Fulani send their cattle deliberately to destroy their crops. Since Fulani are excluded from land ownership, conflicts centre on issues of moveable property theft or homicide. For example, in an outbreak of violence over land at Ifiong, in March, 2006, three Fulani were killed, twenty cows slaughtered by farmer youth and many more ‘got missing’ (i.e. were taken by militant youth).
Fulani say: ‘farmers will not summon a meeting to call the Fulanis for negotiation … the courts and police are weak, only the army helps us’ and, ‘conflict, violence, war and killing is growing all the time’ (Ibid. p. 72). Chiefs are powerless, farmer youth ‘rule’ the villages; it is the youth, not the elders, who decide on the day's target, for example burning a Fulani nomadic school or stealing their cattle for consumption and sale. Some youth organisations allegedly control local government council decisions on security and conflict issues. Farmer youth attend church on Sunday, but also form vigilante organisations, some of which are said to involve secret oaths and blood sharing for ‘true brotherhood’ unto death at the juju's shrine. Eager to be provoked so they can use force against offending graziers and gain prestige as young ‘warriors’ in their village, most brandish cutlasses and some use hand guns to protect their people from perceived threats of attack by graziers armed with bows and arrows.
Privatisation is shrinking the commons. Afraid of farmer attack, graziers concentrate their cattle in ‘safe’ areas that are too small to support the volume of livestock, and so the land becomes degraded. As conflict and insecurity levels rise, so do Fulani fears that they can no longer maintain traditional standards of honour, and both men and youth experience shame and anger. The smallholder majority is also stressed because they live on the edge of becoming landless labourers and tenant farmers as richer men buy up land (Ifeka, 1996).
Example 4: Violence Cleanses & Re-creates the Community
In early January 2006, in the relatively peaceful north-east corner of Cross River State on the border with Cameroon, the ‘Obanliku Local Government Area Vigilante Youth’ (allegedly approved by the council) took action against an alleged rapist (Ifeka, 2006:72-3). Here, in a farming area, violence is perceived as cleansing and reaffirming community norms around reproductive rights over women, whose fertility is commonly identified with that of the land.
An informant told us that the boy had repeatedly raped a girl all night. Before ‘she gave up’ (died) the following day, she described her assailant. He had been in jail in 2005 for the same offence against other girls. The dead girl's brother went together with the above youth organisation to ‘avenge the girl's death’. Although the rapist fled into the bush the youth found him and allowed the brother to beat him to death. The police took a week or two before they came to investigate; they arrested several youth whom they almost immediately released. The case of the brother, also arrested, is still ‘pending’. In the view of the village whose ‘daughter’ was violated unto death, the community has been cleansed of a public nuisance; men can relax, their wives, daughters and sisters are now safe; small livestock will be healthy and harvests bountiful.
Militant Youth Cultures & the Gods
I now assess the significance of the above case studies for this analysis of cultures and practices of youth resistance. I have suggested that in these simultaneously differentiating (decentring) and unifying (centring) processes, social relations between disputants over resource ownership are re-presented and intensely focussed in terms of relations between objects (gods, guns) that kill and destroy ‘enemy others’ identified with the ‘wrong’ faith and ethnicity. Activist youth in fishing, farming and pastoralist communities detach force from human agency, objectifying violence in the form of spirit things (gods) or commodity things (guns) that articulate group internal and external relations. I seek now to identify core elements – for example spirit and commodity fetishism – of youth cultures of force which would seem to connect manifestations of militancy in Nigeria's transnational petroleum and agro-pastoral economies.
First, there are similar social processes underlying and contradicting observers' failure to note a connection between political violence in the Delta compared to farming/agro-pastoral economies. Resource conflicts within and between Niger Delta communities are fragmenting former relations of symbiosis and reciprocity between kin, affines, ‘settlers’ and ‘indigenes’. Similarly, former ties of symbiosis between pastoralists and farmers – marked, for example, by farmers receiving dairy products in exchange for allowing pastoralists' cattle to graze on stubble and unplanted grassland – have broken down in the past two decades under pressure of population growth, agrarian expansion, and larger herds. Privatisation by absentee landlords further erodes the stock of land and so creates gaps where formerly there were relationships (Blench, 2005). In some localities fundamentalist Pentecostal churches and Islamist clergy are adding fuel to the fire of broken bonds ensuing in resource conflict. As Simmel explained, ‘separation does not follow from conflict, but, on the contrary, conflict from separation’ (1955:47).
Second, there are the common social psychological factors associated with militant youth organisations seeking strong internal cohesion which enables the groups to dissociate themselves from visible interaction with others, so they become ‘invisible’, their secrets protected from disclosure. Earlier this year a BBC journalist interviewed Major-General Godswill Tamuno, self-proclaimed military leader of ‘Nigeria's shadowy oil rebels’, MEND, who was described as strolling anonymously in the street (BBC News, 20 April 2006). Though the more effective militant youth organisations in the Niger Delta seem to be the most secretive (‘faceless’), others are variously open or semi-closed; perhaps the extent to which secrecy is instituted depends on context, purpose of the action, and perception of danger from attack by ‘enemy bullets’ (mystical or physical). Nevertheless, rituals of secrecy in organised contexts may empower militant youth, however marginalised, to influence their own communities as well as those they attack, for: ‘The secret offers, so to speak, the possibility of a second world alongside the manifest world; and the latter is decisively influenced by the former’ (Simmel, 1950:330).
Everywhere strong emotions of shame and rage set the scene for an unending spiral of violence (Scheff, 1994:2-3). Vigilante farmer youth told me, ‘we deal with trouble well … we have power’ (i.e. fetishes, medicines, charms and the like); others said, ‘we are one’ (Ifeka, 2006:84-6, 91-3). This, and other field data on forest cosmologies, suggests that farmer and fisher youth draw on traditions of warriorhood authorised by the gods in order to maintain self and cultural pride; they also access secret knowledge of mystical means of protection from spiritual and physical ‘bullets’ launched by ‘enemies’ – pastoralists, immigrant fisherfolk, oil companies, government security forces. Consequently, in these agro-pastoral and fishing economies, sociality is defined alike in terms of conflicts that express ‘dis-sociating’ (hatred, envy, need) rather than ‘sociating’ processes (Simmel, 1955:13).
Third, there are forms of youth leadership based on prestige in need of shoring up against hostile external influences and heavy state surveillance. As a political class preoccupied with personal accumulation looks on with indifference, fishing, farming and pastoral economies, significantly shaped by kin-based non-capitalist relations of production and framed variably by customary cosmologies, offer youth experiencing the disordering impact of globalisation the option of restoring pride in self and community by accessing the old gods and mystical powers. The Anyang men's society (Lakumbo), the Ijaw war juju Egbesu, and Cross River's Ekpe society rely on secret knowledge and rituals to uphold the otherwise ephemeral prestige of individual leaders, to instil fear so people think twice before committing theft or engaging in malign gossip of witchcraft, and to maintain respect for the society's god (fetish) and its power to kill witches (Ruel, 1969; Ifeka, forthcoming). The gods' mystical powers, known only to members in possession of its secret, transforms individual leaders' prestige, earned as powerful hunters or warriors in combat against witches and oil company security forces, into something more authoritative and enduring.
Thus, similarities in form between militant youth cultures and practices in Nigeria's transnational petroleum and agro-pastoral economies reflect militants' formation at points of intersection between global capitalism and local economies based on non-capitalist and petty commodity production. Here youth mobilise in opposition to the Nigerian state as it authorises expropriation by oil companies, wealthy notables and local landlords of economically valuable resources from the community's customary commons. Niger Delta and inland farmer youth draw on ‘traditional’ (reinterpreted) cultural motifs to affirm their dangerous vocation, their simultaneously life-affirming but also life-threatening engagement in the visible and invisible worlds of existence. The interpretative appeal to ‘past’ motifs of the righteous battle against evil is similar in form, the content is different according to local traditions. Though differences in content are significant in individual construction of meaning and identities, underlying structural processes are shaping the development of regional cultures of youth resistance at points of intersection of the global and the local.
Conclusion
I have here explored the hypothesis that militant/non-militant youth subcultures engage in a ‘double’ articulation: to the ‘parent’ culture in the kin-based community as well as to the political culture of state/capitalist power and beyond, in global shadow networks of world religions of force (Muslim jihad, Christian crusade) whose influence in shaping the growth of youth cultures of resistance needs further investigation.
Political violence in Nigeria pivots on struggles between on the one hand, a hugely rich local capitalist elite allied with transnational corporate partners that dominate global accumulation and, on the other hand, a subaltern impoverished majority living largely within non-capitalist and petty commodity production relations. Militant youth organisations are emerging that articulate intersections between, first, agro-pastoral and fishing kin-based ‘moral economies’ in which labour still retains some control over land, the principal means of production, and second, systems of state power supporting international capitalism. The literature largely disconnects Nigeria's transnational petroleum economy, where the most ‘advanced’ militant youth organisations are at war with oil corporations and the state, from youth-led political violence in kin-based pastoral, agricultural and fishing economies. Yet the growth in subaltern political cultures of force cuts across this top-down disconnection and indicates that the political class does not exercise ‘hegemonic’ rule in the Gramscian sense of taken for granted ‘natural authority’ (Hoare and Nowell-Smith, 1971:12-13). Rather, hegemony may reside with youth cultures of resistance that are endorsed by ‘parent’ communities. Rising youth militancy that draws on customary cosmologies of fetishism has given the old gods a new lease of life, a new found popularity among literate and illiterate sections of Nigeria's transnational petroleum and agro-pastoral economies.
Youth adopting a militant tendency are entering into history/capitalism through political violence. Equally, endemic conflict – a myriad of ‘small wars’ – fosters ‘work of a centrifugal logic, a logic of separation’ and decentring processes. These conflicts promote divisions framed in ethnic terms (Clastres, 1989:165), which resist the centripetal logic of unification under civil society's sole external authority, the sovereign state, and its cult of the One God.
The mystification or fetishization of political relations and their appreciation in rituals dedicated to drawing down the divine for empowerment, make meaningful the political system in which people live. Mystification of political relations of control/influence over others' actions is an attribute of people's capacity to perceive the decisions they take as having a life of their own. Matters of life and death evocative of the sacred law and sovereignty appear ‘magically’ to people in the form of heroic or spiritual beings seemingly disconnected from the social will, personages with a (double) mystical and political Janus face whose mysterious ‘double’ articulation resonates in the secrecy which seems to uphold the violence of sacrifice amplifying the fetishization of power (Nooter, 1993:33-46).