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Understanding Conflict
Imaginaries
Provocations from
Colombia and Indonesia

Simon Philpott
Nicholas Morgan
Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies

Series Editors
Oliver P. Richmond
University of Manchester
Manchester, UK

Annika Björkdahl
Department of Political Science
Lund University
Lund, Sweden

Gëzim Visoka
Dublin City University
Dublin, Ireland
This agenda-setting series of research monographs, now more than a
decade old, provides an interdisciplinary forum aimed at advancing inno-
vative new agendas for peace and conflict studies in International Relations.
Many of the critical volumes the series has so far hosted have contributed
to new avenues of analysis directly or indirectly related to the search for
positive, emancipatory, and hybrid forms of peace. Constructive critiques
of liberal peace, hybrid peace, everyday contributions to peace, the role of
civil society and social movements, international actors and networks, as
well as a range of different dimensions of peace (from peacebuilding, state-
building, youth contributions, photography, and many case studies) have
been explored so far. The series raises important political questions about
what peace is, whose peace and peace for whom, as well as where peace
takes place. In doing so, it offers new and interdisciplinary perspectives on
the development of the international peace architecture, peace processes,
UN peacebuilding, peacekeeping and mediation, statebuilding, and local-
ised peace formation in practice and in theory. It examines their implica-
tions for the development of local peace agency and the connection
between emancipatory forms of peace and global justice, which remain
crucial in different conflict-affected regions around the world. This series’
contributions offer both theoretical and empirical insights into many of
the world's most intractable conflicts, also investigating increasingly sig-
nificant evidence about blockages to peace.
This series is indexed by Scopus.
 Simon Philpott • Nicholas Morgan

Understanding
Conflict Imaginaries
Provocations from Colombia and Indonesia
Simon Philpott Nicholas Morgan
Newcastle University Newcastle University
Newcastle upon Tyne, UK Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

ISSN 1759-3735     ISSN 2752-857X (electronic)

Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies
ISBN 978-3-031-03975-1    ISBN 978-3-031-03976-8 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-03976-8

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022

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 Acknowledgements

Many people have made the research that informs this monograph possi-
ble. The Screening Violence project began as a conversation over a couple
of drinks among academic colleagues at Newcastle University. Discussion
quickly extended into reading about the social imaginary and regular
meetings involving other investigators on the project, namely, Guy Austin
and Philippa Page, both at Newcastle University. Paula Blair joined our
discussions on the social imaginary and sharpened our understanding of
film and the ways we might use it as a research tool. Peter Baker posed
challenging theoretical questions. Having decided to frame the project
around five different polities with overlapping but different experiences of
political violence, Roddy Brett, now at Bristol University, and Brandon
Hamber, at Ulster University, joined as investigators and brought focus
and clarity to our thinking about imaginaries. Without those two years of
preliminary work and reflection, the project would not have gotten off the
ground. Thank you one and all! Since being awarded the funding, it has
been a delight to work with the core team of Guy Austin (our tireless
Principal Investigator, or bagman as we know him), Roddy Brett, Brandon
Hamber, Philippa Page, and our Research Associate, Gemma McKinnie. It
is hard to imagine a better team of academic colleagues to work with.
We wish to warmly thank our Professional Services colleague Carolyn
Taylor of the School of Modern Language at Newcastle University for her
outstanding skills in putting our project budget together and for her
forensic management of the budget once we had been awarded the grant.
In our research sites in Colombia and Indonesia, we have been privi-
leged to work with numerous academic and filmmaker colleagues who

v
vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

made the research possible. It is their commitment to and support of the

project that enabled us to identify potential project interlocutors who have
so generously given of their time and with great courage shared their own
experiences. In Indonesia, we would like to extend our deepest gratitude
to Diah Kusumaningrum, Ayu Diasti Rahmawati, Muti Kurniasari, Ogik,
Coory Yohana Pakpahan, all based at Gadjah Mada University in
Yogyakarta. Whether brainstorming on Indonesian films suitable for
showing in the project, organising film showings, setting up screens and
projectors, looking out for the well-being of project participants, or facili-
tating travel to different parts of the country, we were in awe of our col-
leagues’ energy and thankful for the committed intellectual engagement
with the Screening Violence project. A special note of thanks to Poppy
Sulistyaning Winanti who, as Vice Dean for Research, Community Service,
Cooperation, and Alumni Affairs at Gadjah Mada, made comfortable
working visits possible and extended warm hospitality. Many thanks to
Yosep Anggi Prasetya, Arya Sweta and their team at Limaenam Films
whose initial interest in the project has extended to working patiently with
us at the many film showings and putting together an account of the proj-
ect through the eyes of documentary filmmakers.
In Colombia we owe a debt of gratitude to old friends. Pablo Burgos
was the eye behind the lens and a tireless travelling companion in the most
difficult of personal circumstances. Our academic partner Manuel Beltrán
at the Universidad Claretiana in Quibdó played a key role in organising
focus groups in Yuto and Quibdó while Napoleón García Anaya did the
same at the Universidad Tecnológica del Chocó and in Tutunendo. Rafael
Perea Chalá and Oscar Larrahondo were instrumental in setting up the
screening at the Universidad del Pacífico in Buenaventura, while Tancredo
Iván Vargas set up the very first pilot event in Bogotá. Gearóid O Loingsigh
provided his usual invaluable advice during the planning stage and team
members Orlando Castillo and Ana Mercedes Panchoaga offered their
insight, contacts, and endless patience in explaining the project’s aims and
encouraging participation. Yilver Mosquera facilitated a crucial series of
interviews in his beloved Patía and the arrival of Eduardo Restrepo pro-
vided a boost at a key moment in the project. It is a pleasure to know that
we still have another eighteen months to share ideas with many of these
colleagues. We also note that it is a bittersweet moment as we lament the
passing of José Oscar Córdoba, Rector of the Universidad Claretiana in
Quibdó, who supported the project from the outset with his usual
charisma.
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS vii

Our greatest debt is to those who have worked with us over years,
watching, responding, reflecting on the films we have shown and often
sharing difficult intimacies with others in the audience and with the
research teams. To those who participated in film showings in Bogotá,
Yogyakarta, Tutunendo, Solo, Quibdó, Jakarta, Buenaventura, Yuto and
Ambon, our sincere thanks. That some participants must remain nameless
provides the most vivid reminder that the legacies of conflict can endure
for decades. Thank you for helping us better understand what our research
is trying to achieve.
The research carried out for this monograph was only possible through
generous funding provided by the Arts and Humanities Research Council
(grant number AH/R006512/1).
 Contents

1 Concepts  1

2 Contexts 27

3 Encounters 73

4 Concluding Thoughts121

References125

Index131

ix
 CHAPTER 1

Concepts

Abstract In this section, we discuss the concept of the social imaginary,

highlighting key themes and thinkers in its development, paying particular
attention to the work of Cornelius Castoriadis and Charles Taylor. While
not conventionally understood to be scholars of the social imaginary, we
note Benedict Anderson, Antonio Gramsci, and Michel Foucault, all serve
as points of reference in reflection on the development of the social imagi-
nary. We highlight the ways that the work of Hegel and Marx need to be
read imaginatively to fully appreciate the depth of their critique. Our con-
cerns with liberal ideas and practices of peace-building are set out in the
context of an introduction of conflict imaginaries. We argue that conflict
imaginaries are the shared images and analogies that situate subjects in
relation to political violence but that they are specific to communities and
individuals, highly contested, and that multiple imaginaries may be at
work in framing a conflict. We critically analyse the claims of those who
claim to be mere bystanders to conflict situations and reflect upon the
concept of competitive victimhood. We situate our research in contexts of
space, scale, and time, and note our determination to address local imagi-
naries of conflict. Finally, we emphasise that unlike scholars of the social
imaginary who focus on the facilitation of sociability and community
building, our work addresses the factors that produce and reproduce con-
flict in the imaginative realms of those who experience it and partici-
pate in it.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2022
S. Philpott, N. Morgan, Understanding Conflict Imaginaries,
Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-03976-8_1
2 S. PHILPOTT AND N. MORGAN

Keywords Social imaginary • Conflict imaginary • Cornelius

Castoriadis • Charles Taylor • Liberal peace • Antagonists • Bystanders
• Time • Space • Scale • Affect

Understanding Conflict Imaginaries

The reflections presented in this short monograph emerge from a project
that sets out to explore the collective representations through which con-
flict is understood in places that have experienced intense periods of civil
strife. The sites chosen, in Algeria, Argentina, Colombia, Indonesia and
Northern Ireland, share violent histories but are in many respects very dif-
ferent, with diverse political cultures and different relationships to the
polities to which they are embedded. Our underlying assumption is that to
understand conflict properly we need to explore the imaginative worlds of
those who live with it, whether as participants or bystanders. The project
analyses the metaphors, tropes and images used in each of these locations
to represent political violence in order to determine what they have in
common and what separates them.
Working across different research sites posed an important question
about how best to access the imaginations of the interlocutors we sought
to work with. Recognising that asking communities to reflect on their own
conflicts is difficult and perhaps simply reinforces local imaginaries, we
decided upon working with the different communities in each of the five
primary research sites through viewings of films about the conflicts of oth-
ers. The visual mediums of fictional cinema and documentary film are rela-
tively inclusive and often emotionally engaging, and so encourage
participants to explore their understandings of conflict and reconciliation
through their interpretation of a range of different contexts. We argue that
asking communities to reflect on the violence of other polities creates a
space for critical reflection on the ways that individuals and communities
understand their own experiences of conflict and possible transitions from
it. Thus far, our research indicates that screening representations of unfa-
miliar conflicts produces rich discussions about the nature of political
violence.
The place of political violence within these imaginative worlds is a com-
plex one. Violence ends debate and silences discourse and in a very imme-
diate sense it speaks for itself. Yet political violence has an impact not only
on perpetrators, survivors and witnesses but on everyone who knows that
 1 CONCEPTS 3

it has taken place. This kind of violence takes place within shared frame-
works, some of which explain and legitimise it, while others disavow and
condemn it, or support an equally violent response. As well as sending a
message, therefore, violence itself emerges from a particular way of imag-
ining the social world. To understand how conflict comes about and why
it disappears, therefore, is not simply a matter of analysing its material
stakes or the balance of power between combatants but also of immersing
ourselves in the passions and beliefs that animate it. Although we recog-
nise that such imaginings are rooted in the material conditions of a world
in which violence is routinely used in the daily organisation of social, polit-
ical and economic life, we emphasise their importance in determining the
direction that any given conflict may take.
We assert that the only way to meaningfully explore such representa-
tions is by focusing on local understandings of antagonism, armed con-
frontation and post conflict coexistence, however the latter might be
defined. Our primary ambition, therefore, is to introduce and give sub-
stance to the concept of conflict imaginaries. In this respect, we note that
despite the necessity of researching violence in its specific context, both
scholarship and policy documents have often invoked a universalizing dis-
course of human rights and transitional justice. We agree with the insights
provided by those critics who suggest that such an approach lacks suffi-
cient nuance precisely because overarching analyses and proposed national
solutions often neglect intense local experiences that demand distinctive
attention. Citing Roger Mac Ginty, Jan Selby observes that ‘…liberal
peace-building exercises a “near monopoly” within contemporary peace
operations, such that it applies worldwide a “highly standardized” model
of how to create sustainable peace—“a peace from IKEA: a flat-pack peace
made from standardized components”’ (Selby, 2013, pp. 61–62). Selby’s
remarks highlight the importance of engaging with local understandings
of antagonism that not only shape the tenor of conflict and post-conflict
but also play an important role in determining the prospects for peace and
reconciliation.
There are two further reasons why we consider it important to think in
terms of conflict imaginaries. Firstly, the approaches mentioned above
tend to characterise internal conflicts in quantitative terms. UN docu-
ments, for example, describe ‘non-international armed conflicts’ as ‘pro-
tracted armed confrontations’ which ‘must reach a certain threshold of
confrontation’ or a ‘minimum level of intensity’ to be officially recognised
(ICTY, 1995, para. 70). Quantitative definitions of this sort are part of a
4 S. PHILPOTT AND N. MORGAN

broader set of institutional discourses of conflict, transition and post-­

conflict that set out to guide the interventions of international agencies in
any post-conflict situation. Such quantitative metrics reveal little of the
specifics of any given case and in particular of how violence is embedded
in other forms of social conflict. Galtung’s influential distinction between
‘negative’ and ‘positive’ understandings of peace presupposes the impor-
tance of thinking beyond the presence or absence of violent actions, while
his ‘triangle of violence’ invites us to consider the relationship between
‘direct’, ‘cultural’ and ‘structural’ forms of violence, though Galtung does
not use all of these terms in his original text (Galtung, 1969). For all its
limitations, his emphasis on the importance of confronting ‘structural vio-
lence’ is a suggestive notion that questions the contested notion of the
‘liberal peace’, which has undergone sustained critique within disciplines
such as International Relations (inter alia Duffield, 2007; Pugh, 2005;
Richmond, 2010; Selby, 2013). We are deeply interested in how structural
violence striates the imaginaries of social actors and how these imaginaries
themselves channel the course of violent confrontation. While there are
undoubtedly patterns in the ways civil strife unfolds and concludes, with-
out a sophisticated understanding of local imaginaries there is no prospect
of apprehending the elements that make each conflict unique.
Secondly, we are interested in the consequences of the liberal underpin-
nings of much research into political violence. For example, Duncan
McCargo and Robert Taylor argue that the deep embrace by American
political science of liberalism, with its assumption that human beings are
‘rational’, self-transparent actors motivated by material interest, militates
against an understanding of other ‘realities’ (see McCargo & Taylor, 1996,
pp. 211–213). Citing John Gray, Taylor notes that ‘it is distinctive of lib-
eral thinkers to deny that there is within the diversity of forms of govern-
ment and society disclosed to us in history a legitimate variety of
frameworks for human well-being’ (Taylor, 1993, p. 8). On this view, it is
equally legitimate to argue that liberalism has a similarly limited apprecia-
tion of the ways that human beings experience violence, as perpetrators,
victims or bystanders. Narrow in their understanding of modernity yet
hegemonic in the social sciences, liberal assumptions limit research into
political violence and its consequences (Selby, 2013, pp. 58–59).
Thinking in terms of conflict imaginaries, we claim, allows us to avoid
some of these problematic assumptions by focusing on the value-laden
collective representations that shape the social world within which the
actions of violent actors make sense. Our recognition that all social actors
 1 CONCEPTS 5

share such cognitive models immediately raises questions for us as research-

ers for we, too, inhabit not only the social imaginaries associated with our
disciplines but also those that mark our own personal life histories. We do
not pretend to have successfully negotiated such problems in the work
done to date but have tried to address them by engaging in a fieldwork
process in which we work at length with a range of interlocutors, explor-
ing their understandings of conflict and violence while making clear our
own assumptions about the project in which we are engaged.

Social Imaginaries: A Slippery Concept

Before going any further, however, some consideration of the idea of the
social imaginary is in order. Though referenced with a certain regularity in
the social sciences, the concept remains underdeveloped in contemporary
social science, and lacks grounding in empirical research. Thus, while the
use of the term implies the reader’s familiarity with its meaning, many
references to the social imaginary are little more than explanatory gestures
that appeal to a ‘cultural’ category that invites as many questions as it pro-
vides answers. In such cases, a little probing reveals that the social imagi-
nary seems to denote a set of assumptions and attitudes—one might say
prejudices—that are deemed to be dominant in a given context at a given
moment, though who shares them, how they shape the actions of real
people, and how they may be related to different sets of attitudes and
assumptions is generally unclear. Examples might include the belief that
American egalitarian individualism produces a political culture driven by
rationality whereas the role of religion in Islamic polities renders Muslims
ill-­suited to dealing with contemporary political problems. The passionate
nature of Italian and Spanish peoples explains why there are so many suc-
cessful motorcycle racers from these countries whereas English eccentric-
ity explains their love for cricket, a game sometimes played over 5 days and
producing no result. Such imprecision reveals the existence of a ‘common
sense’ use of the concept, too underdeveloped to be much use as an ana-
lytical tool. Nonetheless, a number of scholars have developed the central
concept in some detail, in the process suggesting points of similarity with
other ways of thinking about collective understandings of the social that
do much to reveal what is at stake in these debates. It is with these uses of
the social imaginary, therefore, that we start our attempt to arrive at a
working definition of the term.
6 S. PHILPOTT AND N. MORGAN

Perhaps the most influential and certainly the most referenced use of
the term deploys it as a label for a fundamental set of assumptions that
makes social life possible. Cornelius Castoriadis, who offers the most
densely elaborated of these accounts, argues that it is a neglected concept
in the social sciences and humanities. His interest in the imaginary arises
from his disillusionment with the determinist aspects of contemporary
Marxism. Against this economism, Castoriadis’ work is animated by a
desire ‘to identify the creative force in the making of social historical
worlds’ (Gaonkar, 2002, p. 1). Positing an ontology of creation, he argues
that every polity is self-creating or ‘self-instituting’: it cannot be produced
by or deduced from pre-existing conditions, even though these constrain
it. This approach explicitly recognises that while human beings do all the
same things, they do so in unique and unpredictable ways (Gaonkar, 2002,
p. 7). Castoriadis therefore repudiates the idea that new and emergent
forms of social life are merely adaptive surface variations of an underlying
order, but rather emphasises ‘the emergence of radical otherness, imma-
nent creation, non-trivial novelty’ (see Gaonkar, 2002, p. 6). Furthermore,
to identify the imaginary is to discover that which, ‘amongst the infinity of
possible symbolic structures’, ‘specifies one symbolic system, establishes
the prevalent canonical relations, orients in one of the innumerable possi-
ble directions all the metaphors and metonymies that are abstractly con-
ceivable’. Thus ‘[w]e cannot understand a society outside of a unifying
factor that provides a signified content and weaves it with the symbolic
structures’ (see Strauss, 2006, p. 324). On this account, the imaginary is
a fundamental, set of unifying beliefs shared by all the members of a
given polity.
A further unavoidable point of reference is Charles Taylor, who defines
the social imaginary as comprising how people imagine their social exis-
tence, their relations with others of the same polity and, in particular, their
assumptions about how social interactions are supposed to take place. This
includes everyday expectations about how one conducts economic trans-
actions, socialises in a pub, or engages with political processes, as well as
‘the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expecta-
tions’ (Taylor, 2004, p. 23). Taken as a whole all of these presuppositions
amount to ‘a form of understanding that has a wider grasp of our history
and social existence’ (Gaonkar, 2002, p. 10). This complex and not fully
articulated understanding of a given socio-political situation is routinely
carried in ‘images, stories, and legends’ and is widely shared, making
 1 CONCEPTS 7

possible common social practices and a generally shared sense of legiti-

macy (Taylor, 2004, p. 23).
These definitions suggest links to other ways of thinking about the
deep presuppositions that underpin everyday life. They are not quite the
same as Wittgenstein’s ‘background’, which includes the physical condi-
tions of possibility within which meaningful acts take place, are reminis-
cent in some respects of Searle’s related account of ‘social reality’, which
notes the usually unremarked processes through which ‘cars, bathtubs,
houses, money, restaurants and schools’ come to ‘seem as natural to us as
stones and water and trees’ (Searle, 1995, p. 4). They are also similar in
some respects to what Hannah Arendt calls ‘common sense’, ‘the basic
human facility that lets us make elemental judgments about everyday mat-
ters’ (Crehan, 2016, p. 49) and which ‘presupposes a common world into
which we all fit’ (Crehan, 2016, p. 51). The taken-for-granted nature of
the social world conceals the work of the imaginary in bringing it into
being. For Castoriadis, the imaginary is, the ‘constitutive magma of mean-
ing’ (see Gaonkar, 2002, p. 6), and there can be no language, culture, art,
or institutions external to the ‘radical novelty’ immanent to human beings,
individually and collectively (Castoriadis, 2007, pp. 72–73). Yet he also
emphasises that ‘[o]nce created, both imaginary social significations and
institutions crystallize, or solidify…[into] the instituted social imaginary’
(Castoriadis, 2007, p. 73). Here the radical imaginative potential of
human beings is tamed, channelled, regulated and brought into line with
social norms, with the demands and requirements of a given polity. From
this perspective, socialisation is a process of absorbing social institutions
and shared meanings, of grasping notions of right and wrong, of learning
what is to be revered and hated. ‘When that socialization occurs, the radi-
cal imagination is stifled, to a point, in its most important manifestations:
it expresses itself more conventionally and repetitiously’ (Castoriadis,
2007, pp. 74–75).
A central problematic emerges, namely, the tension between the possi-
bilities of the human imagination and the collective manufacture of the
norms and taboos that restrain this underlying potentiality. The political
significance of this state of affairs has been the object of much discussion
and is at the centre of a number of well-known debates. At its most radical
the belief that the social imaginary is so naturalised it is rarely if ever appar-
ent to those who inhabit it, appears in Althusserian notions of ideology,
with their claim that it is ideology itself that constitutes human subjects
and that there is, therefore, a direct link between the notions of
8 S. PHILPOTT AND N. MORGAN

‘subjectification’ and ‘subjection’, an idea subsequently developed in some

of Foucault’s work (Althusser & Balibar, 1972, pp. 225–253; see, for
example, Foucault, 1980). At this point, then, we engage with complex
theoretical exchanges about the role of collective representations in the
construction of political subjectivity, often referred to as the structure ver-
sus agency debate. In a famous paragraph, Marx writes that ‘[m]en make
their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make
it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing
already, given and transmitted from the past’ (Marx, 1978). Here he
implicitly recognises the importance not just of the material disposition of
resources in a given social formation but of something very like the social
imaginary in the shaping of political beliefs and practices. Thus, he claims
that it is precisely when contemporary actors ‘seem to be occupied with
revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not
exist before’ that they ‘anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their
service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in
order to present this new scene in world history in time-honoured disguise
and borrowed language’ (Marx, 1978). Weber, in open dialogue with
Marx’s work, uses a striking metaphor to represent the relationship
between ideas and practices. While noting that ‘[n]ot ideas, but material
interests, directly govern men’s conduct’ he immediately adds the telling
comment that, notwithstanding the importance of material interests, ‘the
“world images” that have been created by “ideas” have […] determined
the tracks along which action has been pushed by the dynamic of interest’
(Weber, 1946, p. 280).
The refusal of idealism, accompanied by a recognition of the power of
social imaginaries, continues to characterise later debates. From a concep-
tual point of view, we note a problematic tendency to reify the imaginary,
to wrench it out of context and remove it from those who create, modify,
and invoke it. Its singularity in these accounts is in itself a problem, as is
the need to identify what represents the fundamental logics of social life
that are supposedly shared by all. According to Taylor, for example, ‘once
we are well installed in the modern social imaginary, it seems the only pos-
sible one, the only one that makes sense’, a metaphor that suggests that
the social imaginary is a place we inhabit rather than something that exists
intersubjectively (Taylor, 2004, p. 17). Such claims bring the conceptuali-
sation of the social imaginary closer to other frameworks that attempt to
account for the relationship between collective representations and social
practice, such as Bourdieu’s habitus, that ‘generative principle of regulated
 1 CONCEPTS 9

improvisations, installed in a lasting fashion’ (Bourdieu, 1972, p. 78).

Bourdieu’s emphasis on the embodied, internalised nature of the habitus,
resonates with the taken-for-granted, unexamined nature of Taylor’s puta-
tive imaginary, even though his emphasis is on the cognitive dispositions,
based on experience, through which people come to understand them-
selves as social beings. The importance of metaphor is strikingly exempli-
fied here: for Taylor human beings are installed in the imaginary, while for
Bourdieu something rather like the imaginary is installed in them. In both
cases a range of assumptions have been so naturalised that social actors
find it difficult or even impossible to recognise them, let alone interrogate
them. The implication is that even when they feel they are improvising or
being spontaneous they are in fact limited by the shape of their social
imaginary. Bourdieu uses a similar metaphor to Weber’s to explain this
relationship, describing the habitus as a ‘train that takes along its own
tracks’ (Bourdieu, 1980, p. 73).
The artistic ingenuity and imaginative reach of these explanatory meta-
phors is striking. Whether in high theory or popular culture, image, meta-
phor, allusion, simile and a range of other devices inform the ways human
beings make their world meaningful. David McNally, for example, notes
Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit is packed with ‘jokes, puns, wisecracks,
sarcasm, parody’ while Marx’s Capital, by careful design and artful pre-
sentation, ‘overflows with symbolism, metaphors, ironic barbs, and a stun-
ning range of allusions to world literature.’ The outrage, condemnation,
irony, Gothic imagery, and highly dramatic constructions are not examples
of florid pose but integral to Marx’s search for a language in which to
express the horrors of capitalist everyday life. Marx’s references to vam-
pires and werewolves are deliberate, calculated, and require the reader to
engage Capital as a work of imagination or a text the affective power of
which arises from the pain of the labouring body (McNally, 2011,
pp. 117–119). Yet their deployment reminds us that in exploring imagi-
naries we are working with the same tools and materials that are the object
of our analysis.
Of course, we are stretching these comparisons to suit our own pur-
poses, as most of the thinkers referred to here do not use the term social
imaginary and the metaphors that are the vehicles for their insights con-
jure up divergent ways of understanding the relationship between repre-
sentations and practices. A principal difference is between models that
seek to identify underlying assumptions shared by whole ‘societies’ or
‘civilisations’, problematic terms in themselves, and those that seek to
10 S. PHILPOTT AND N. MORGAN

identify the different dispositions that characterise different ‘groups’, as is

the case with Marxist approaches and the sociological thinking of Weber
or Bourdieu. However, even those models that emphasise the importance
of underlying assumptions in the quotidian functioning of social life none-
theless have to recognise some measure of heterogeneity. Foucault’s early
theorisation of the épistémè, for example, is strikingly reminiscent of
Castoriadis and Taylor’s view of the social imaginary in its claim that ‘there
is always only one episteme that defines the conditions of possibility of all
knowledge, whether expressed in a theory or silently invested in a prac-
tice’. Yet later he will note that ‘the épistémè is not kind of underlying
grand theory, but a space of dispersion, an open field of relationships end-
lessly available to interpretation’ (our translation (Foucault, 2001, p. 676).
Indeed, the notion of the social imaginary as a fundamental cognitive
guide which enables social reproduction is both seductive and in many
respects implausible, not least because of the functional role it affords a
cohesive set of collective representations, especially as formulated by
thinkers like Taylor.
In this respect, Anderson’s notion of the imagined community is a use-
ful point of comparison. While his approach helps to explain how the
nation is naturalised, leading as it does to people being prepared to die,
and kill, ‘for such limited imaginings’ (Anderson, 1991, p. 7), it does not
engage with the ways in which the nature of this imagined community
becomes a bone of contention, its contours, meanings and consequences
a source of intense political dispute. In other words, while the belief that
there is such a thing as the nation is shared by people who come to think
of themselves as part of this form of political community, the direction and
development of that community is a source of intense disagreement. The
fissured and politicised nature of these understandings means that when it
comes to imaginaries of conflict Gramsci’s notion of ‘common sense’,
which, as Kate Crehan notes, is very much at odds with Arendt’s use of the
term (Crehan, 2016) provides another important point of reference. The
description of common sense as ‘an ambiguous, contradictory and multi-
form concept’ or ‘a chaotic aggregate of disparate conceptions’ (cited in
Crehan, 2016, p. 51) provides a useful way of thinking about social imagi-
naries as made up of fragments rather than complete systems. Furthermore,
Gramsci’s claim that common sense ‘is a collective noun, like religion:
there is not just one common sense, for that too is a product of history and
a part of the historical process’ (cited in Crehan, 2016, p. 56) underlines
the contextual, contested and potentially antagonistic nature of collective
 1 CONCEPTS 11

representations. It is the ‘messiness’ and plurality of Gramscian common

sense that most interests us here.
Finally, we also want to note that the question of just how social imagi-
naries are disseminated has not been considered in any detail. In this
regard, we note the contribution of Davoudi and Brooks who emphasise
the performative nature of social imaginaries. In their discussion of imagi-
naries of scale, they note that an imaginary is ‘a performative act through
which socio-spatial relations are reproduced and contested, and political
projects are consolidated.’ Similarly, ‘[p]erformativity foregrounds rela-
tions of power in which contestation and resistance are ever present’ and
‘urges us to attend to questions such as: why, what and how certain scalar
imaginaries are called into being, and what makes some stick and become
institutionalized and others fade away or get side-lined’ (Davoudi &
Brooks, 2021, p. 54). Within this in mind, we note the importance in our
work of how conflict imaginaries are performed in social settings such as
our focus groups.

Conflict Imaginaries
How, then, do we define a conflict imaginary? At the outset, we should
emphasise that this concept is an abstraction that we attempt to use as an
analytical tool. We focus on periods of violent conflict but the way that
collective representations frame these experiences is inevitably related to
broader representations of the social. Broadly speaking, we agree with
Gaonkar’s view of social imaginaries, in the plural, as occupying ‘a fluid
middle ground between embodied practices and explicit doctrines’
(Gaonkar, 2002, p. 11), a point that we will expand on shortly.
Furthermore, we seek to limit our assumptions. Thus we make no precon-
ceived claims about how regular they are, nor how much of a hold they
exert on real social subjects, nor to what extent they might be seen to hold
communities together. Rather, we use the notion as a provisional label for
the imaginative resources, the repertoire of images, analogies and tropes,
that emerge when we ask people to tell us how they understand conflict.
Instead of assuming that such repertoires are obvious and transparent, we
argue for the need to describe and analyse them in detail in order to under-
stand their implications. We further assume that conflict imaginaries are
only intelligible as such if they are arrayed against other ways of thinking
about the social world, ways of thinking that are not just abstractions but
intimately associated with people who imagine the world differently:
12 S. PHILPOTT AND N. MORGAN

people who have different interests or identities, people who are adversar-
ies, opponents, enemies. Indeed, conflict imaginaries imply the existence
of a ‘theory of mind’ on the part of those who produce and reproduce
them, as they imply that those who are not on ‘our’ side see the world dif-
ferently from ‘us’.
Conflict imaginaries, then, are the sets of shared images and analogies
that situate subjects in relation to political violence and those who partici-
pate in it. They are inevitably related to broader understandings and rep-
resentations but play a specific role in modelling the nature of antagonism,
revealing identifications and enmities, and expressing a range of affective
investments and attachments. They include emotionally charged images,
which we set out to excavate and analyse. The attempt by political entre-
preneurs of all stripes to impose their perspectives through the use of emo-
tionally potent oversimplifications is an important part of this dynamic,
and the role of emotion is something to which we will return shortly. Yet
we also suppose that such images are open to a variety of responses and
interpretations, which depend on the structures of feeling (Williams,
1977, p. 128) through which people understand their relationships to
others. We suppose that social actors are usually aware of the existence of
contradictory, often competing imaginaries, without necessarily accepting
any of them in their entirety, and we aim to describe how these are appro-
priated and adapted in context by our participants. Indeed, we want to
consider how all of these signifying resources are used to achieve contex-
tually defined goals.
Beyond these ‘contents’ and ‘uses’, we seek to be attentive to the con-
ditions of possibility that make them thinkable, that is to say, to the under-
lying assumptions that have to exist in order for particular ways of
imagining conflict to make sense. This aspect of our work directs our
attention back towards the deeper underpinnings of social imaginaries. In
this regard, we recognise that it may be the case that actors in conflict
share fundamental assumptions about what society is or ought to be but
nonetheless have opposing interests. It is also possible—indeed, we would
claim likely—that conflict is represented as stemming from irreconcilable
ways of imagining community, as a struggle between different expecta-
tions about the deep structural norms that people believe should prevail in
a given polity.
All of the above needs further development and illustration, so at this
point let us consider both the sorts of contents that we expect to find in
our conflict imaginaries and the relationship they have with the
 1 CONCEPTS 13

experiences of people who have lived with conflict. Any conflict imaginary,
we believe, inevitably contains the answers to four main questions, who,
why, when and where, the answers to which contextualise and to some
degree ‘make sense’ of the experience of violence. None of these ques-
tions, however, can be taken in isolation, as they are all interrelated in
complex ways. As we attempt to systematise our understanding of conflict
imaginaries we will focus on how deep affective attachments are expressed
through them. In the following section, therefore, we consider some of
the contents that we expect to find in conflict imaginaries, which partly
reflect the initial results of the fieldwork carried out during the pilot phase
of the project. We cannot currently systematise these contents, however.
We do not adopt a structuralist approach and make no assumption about
the exhaustiveness or otherwise of the provisional categories presented
below, which will constantly be open to revision. They can, in any case,
only be understood in relation to each other, and it is the underlying ‘log-
ics’ of the metaphors, tropes and memes that make up conflict imaginaries
that most interest us. All of these engage with each other in different and
often complex ways. Indeed, the point about imaginaries is that they
refuse to be tamed, and are resistant to systematisation within simple cat-
egories. However, in order to flesh out our notion of the conflict imagi-
nary we approach the term under a number of subheadings. We do not
adopt a structuralist approach that tries to cram the imagination, with all
of its vibrancy, diversity and darkness, into a rigid set of preconceived cat-
egories. On the contrary, we recognise that the implications of metaphors
are often unexpected, setting the path for the actions that may be con-
ceived at any given moment. Sets of metaphors converge or pull in differ-
ent directions, creating particular representations of reality. Exactly how
that happens, and how it frames practice, only emerges with detailed anal-
ysis. In the following section, therefore, we present a provisional list of
features to be taken into account, though these are not be thought of as a
prescriptive set of categories of analysis.

Antagonists and Bystanders

The framing of antagonism is an obvious place to start in our exploration
of conflict imaginaries (henceforth CIs). CIs describe the nature of con-
flict, representing those who are involved and what is at stake. This often
takes the form of representations of who ‘we’ are and who ‘they’ are that
explain the nature of the confrontation. There is often a responsive aspect
14 S. PHILPOTT AND N. MORGAN

to CIs, which recognises and responds to how antagonists imagine the

conflict, though sometimes the enemy is so dehumanised that what they
think is of no consequence. The identitarian aspect of these imaginaries
may hinge not only on the fact that the enemy somehow threatens the
identity of one set of participants but that they stop them from being who
they want to be, blocking their ability to fulfil a destiny or collective desire.
A further point here is that the group identities framed within CIs, which
play a key role in driving conflict, emerge or are transformed through the
struggle itself, and this process leaves its mark in the representation of the
identities of all those involved. That is to say, CIs may be saturated with
pre-existing identitarian tropes, but the communities they invoke are
never simple sociological realities but contested, dynamic visions of com-
munity that both influence and are influenced by conflict. Such collective
identities are multiple: ethnic, religious, class-based, national, regional,
political and so on. Given that our focus in this project is on internal con-
flict the ways in which CIs figure the relationship of the combatants to the
imagined community is crucial, and notions such as regional, ethnic and
national identity are unavoidable points of reference.
Opposing CIs often engage in ‘competitive victimhood’, which amplify
‘our’ grievances and minimise ‘theirs’, sometimes reversing the idea of
exactly who is victim and who is perpetrator. Even in a situation like early
1990s Rwanda, where it may seem clear that Tutsis were overwhelmingly
the targets of Hutu militias, the latter often claimed they were the true
victims as it was the conduct of Tutsis that roused them to atrocity. On
this account, the humanity of those engaged in killing is necessarily sacri-
ficed because they must unwillingly take action against those who bear
responsibility for conflict (Gourevitch, 1999, pp. 93–99). Some CIs frame
violence as between opponents who are entirely other, aberrant subjects
who bring suffering to whole communities for perverse reasons. In such
cases, the imaginers may see themselves as victims, trapped between
opposing camps, though these non-participants often have complex rela-
tionships with violent actors, and may think of themselves as having more
agency than the non-participant role suggests.
Sometimes, CIs relegate violence to particular places and actors, and
the imaginers deliberately choose not to confront the realities of conflict.
In Colombia, the saying algo debía, ‘they must have been involved in
something’ (literally ‘they must owe something’), seeks to ascribe a logic
to conflict, suggesting that those who suffer somehow brought it on
themselves, and that a shrewd avoidance of politics will somehow protect
 1 CONCEPTS 15

the imaginer from a similar fate. In cases such as that of Rwanda, however,
people who may wish to remain as bystanders were drawn in by those
undertaking the unpleasant ‘work’ (as violence is sometimes categorised)
of torture and butchery supposedly on their behalf. Omer Bartov argues
that the intimacy of intra-communal bloodshed makes knowledge of it
unavoidable and so claims of being a bystander to violence untenable
(Bartov, 2020). Doing nothing, failing to witness, and remaining silent
are, on this view, forms of complicity. Of course, successful broadening of
participation in informing, exposure, intimidation, and murder, dimin-
ishes issues of impunity, of being implicated in inhumane activity on the
part of active perpetrators. Of Rwanda, Gourevitch notes: ‘[i]f everyone is
implicated, then implication becomes meaningless. Implication is what? A
Hutu who thought there was anything to be implicated in would have to
be an accomplice of the enemy’ (Gourevitch, 1999, p. 96). In some cases,
it is the silence of the victims that allows certain CIs to be reproduced
without response. In his flawed but striking film The Act of Killing (2012),
Joshua Oppenheimer reveals an Indonesian community in which long-­
congealed imaginaries permit perpetrators of serious crimes to understand
themselves as heroes, their status sanctioned by a complicit state appara-
tus, while their victims live in agonised silence. In each of case, then, we
need to be attentive to the fact that some imaginaries find expression more
easily than others. To been seen to imagine conflict in particular ways may
open participants up to continuing threat.

Space and Scale

The spatial aspect of CIs locates violence and represents its scale. In the
first sense, the mapping of violence is one of their most significant features,
especially at a local level. Such imaginaries reveal crucial information about
where danger lies and where is safe, where boundaries are to be encoun-
tered or ambiguous spaces. Indeed, boundaries are key in the definition of
community, which may be separated along relatively clear geographical
lines or mixed in complex mosaics that mean that violence takes on an
intimate and particularly ugly character. We explore how conflict imagi-
naries emphasise the links between community, place and violence, and
how the striations of violence create zones of prohibition, ‘oases of peace’
that can be threatened, invaded and overwhelmed, alongside troublingly
ambiguous sites marked by doubt and fear. As internal conflict flares, old
boundaries may harden, acquiring more menacing connotations while
16 S. PHILPOTT AND N. MORGAN

new boundaries, invisible to the eye and imperceptible to outsiders, make

what had once been a short and peaceable walk to a nearby market into a
calculation of risk and hazard.
A frequent feature of internal conflict is the intimacy of the crimes com-
mitted (succinctly discussed by Bartov, 2020). Neighbours attacking
neighbours, groups within communities that had hitherto successfully
managed fissures in the social fabric, falling quickly into rumour-fuelled,
extreme violence against people whose past conduct is likely at odds with
hearsay about their supposed inhumanity. While we emphasise the materi-
ality of the imaginary, and the importance of political economies as a
driver of conflict, the acknowledgement that the violence we are analysing
often occurs between people who not only know each other but have a
range of mutually beneficial social and economic relationships is as signifi-
cant as it is discomforting. On the one hand, it indicates the existence of
distinctive conflict imaginaries among people who inhabit the same street,
and who were perhaps visitors to each other’s homes prior to the outbreak
of violence down that street. That is, people previously bound together by
common norms and expectations may quickly develop imaginaries that
cast self and other as irreconcilable. In short, what once was thought of as
a ‘community’ can quickly be fractured and imagined as a space of
confrontation.
Furthermore, while the notion of internal conflict inevitably implies at
some point an appeal to ideas of community, such communities are not
simple sociological realities that map out the bounds of the local. For
example, the supposition that the inhabitants of rural areas constitute
organic, bounded communities that necessarily share a strong sense of
identity—a problematic term in itself (see chapter 2 Brubaker, 2006) is
often a misconception and even when such communities do exist their
sense of collective identity is the result of a history of imaginative work. In
Colombia, for example, ‘ethnic’ communities have politicised their self-­
understandings both as a result of grassroots activism and in response to
turn of the century legislation that afforded them constitutional rights,
including collective land title. These groups also have a significant engage-
ment with international agencies and activist movements (Restrepo,
2013), so their attachments to local, regional and national identities are
also linked to complex geopolitical self-understandings. When it comes to
considering how Afro-Colombians and indigenous groups understand
their relationship to the ‘armed conflict’, for example, simple identitarian
notions obscure the nuances of what is at stake, as do the generalisations
 1 CONCEPTS 17

about these ‘communities’ themselves. Moreover, while all imagined com-

munities have an outside, by the time we reach the national scale, patterns,
layers, and practices of exclusion are often multiple and profoundly antag-
onistic. For many, being formally designated as Colombian or Indonesian
provides scant protection from devastating forms of exclusion, including
extra-judicial disappearance and murder. At the same time, the need to
reform the nation, to save it, to protect from those who would destroy it,
is a recurring point of reference in the imaginaries that drive violence.
Spatial imaginings of conflict are not simply a matter of two dimen-
sional mappings of the sites and boundaries of conflict, however. The ver-
tical axis tends to be used in metaphorical forms of mapping that set actors
in relation to each other in terms of relative status, often as an expression
of anger at inequality. That the ‘social pyramid’ is naturalised in most con-
texts is telling in itself, the more so in places like our case studies with their
very different colonial histories, where the class-based nature of status is
partly lived through ethnicity. Sometimes the vertical and horizontal axes
converge in striking ways, as in the case of the Colombian city of Medellín,
where the mapping of the complex social cartography of the city is some-
times attached to an ironic inversion. Here, the imagined social pyramid,
with the privileged on top and the poor below, is reversed through an
appeal to another time honoured metaphor, with ‘heaven’ (wealth and
privilege) located below while ‘hell’ (poverty, marginalisation and vio-
lence) is above, in the crowded barrios that stretch up the slopes of the
Aburrá valley.
Another important feature of the spatial aspect of CIs is the representa-
tion of scale. The body is the smallest, most intimate scale, the site of vis-
ceral feelings about safety or vulnerability, closely followed by the family
and the local community. In these conflicts life itself is often at stake,
something that those who have experienced violence first hand know very
well, but which may seem distant to those who have not, even though they
are aware of the possibility of finding themselves one day in the position of
victims or perpetrators. Scale also plays a role in how the responsibility for
the conflict is imagined: it may be the fault of small groups or even a few
individuals, or an expression of human nature and therefore present in
everyone, a perspective that appeals to the scale of the entire species while
returning attention on the scale of the body, within which the potential for
violence resides.
Above all, however, we note that representations of scale play an impor-
tant role in setting out the stakes of any given conflict: is it a struggle over
18 S. PHILPOTT AND N. MORGAN

access to local resources, about identitarian claims, demands for auton-

omy, independence or sovereignty? Is it part of a battle for the ‘soul of the
nation’ or of a transnational struggle against capitalism, communism,
colonialism or racism? Is it a struggle for democracy? In most CIs it is a
mixture of these things, and it is often revealing to consider at what point
they invoke different scales, and for what purpose. Conflicts commonly
represented as having international, national, or even regional dimensions
may ignore local framings that are often at odds with such grand narra-
tives. Thus, a Javanese peasant accused of communism by a neighbour
covetous of their property and land might well frame their experience of
persecution in the context of those very local factors rather than see them-
selves as collateral damage of CIA global strategy. That said, analyses based
on class can be found in many places, and we are in no doubt as to the
capacity of peasant communities for sophisticated analysis of global poli-
tics. While the imaginaries that circulate within population groups
described as rural or indigenous are marked by distinctive features—as is
the case with any other ‘community’, in fact—these are combined with
local interpretations of what we might describe as features of ‘transna-
tional’ imaginaries. Indeed, the geopolitical imaginaries that frame vio-
lence at different moments engage with local conflicts in complex ways.
For example, the conflicts we study appear in a different light depending
on whether they are seen from the perspective of the Cold War or that of
neoliberal hegemony. In this regard, we need to bear in mind the role of
the kinds of subjectivity constructed by such ideological formations, not
simply as impositions from outside but as nuanced self-understandings
marked by both local histories and global designs.

Time
Conflict imaginaries also inevitably have a chronological aspect. In the first
instance what ‘they’—or ‘we’—did then, and to whom, is a source of
grievance and confrontation, both now and in the future. This is apparent
in the images that mark popular narratives and collective memory, espe-
cially through the framing of iconic events that mark rupture or key anec-
dotes that illustrate or explain participants’ beliefs, opinions and actions.
The sense of a before and an after may be particularly evident in cases in
which conflict leads to the transgression of once stable social norms. In
such circumstances, once worthy lives are rendered abject, while hitherto
unthinkable acts of violence quickly become normalised, even necessary.
 1 CONCEPTS 19

However, it is also clear that mass violence never springs from entirely
uncultivated ground. Inevitably, preparatory ‘work’ (as it is sometimes
called) precedes incidents of mass violence. In his striking work on the
Rwandan genocide of the early 1990s, Philip Gourevitch highlighted
months of Hutu demonization of Tutsis, much of it carried out via the
medium of radio (Gourevitch, 1999, pp. 93–99). Such preparation
requires the manufacture, reconfiguration, and mobilisation of grievance
and suspicion, in itself linked to the trauma of colonialism.
Indeed, as David Campbell noted of the conflict in what was Yugoslavia,
the past will readily come into play: old resentments and slights are rekin-
dled for present purposes. Combatants rearticulate and reproduce history
and violently deploy it in a specific present. As he puts it, certain ‘individ-
ual practices render one not only as an ethno-nationalist but also an ethno-­
historian who naturalizes his nationalism historically’ (Campbell, 1998,
p. 83). A dominant group or groups symbolically expelling others from
the nation on account of their religious or political beliefs, or their ethnic-
ity, class, or caste (or some combination of these identity markers) may
assist in creating the conditions for ‘necessary’ action against those no
longer deemed co-nationals. Campbell’s formulation strongly hints at the
suppleness, the plasticity, of histories that can be bent and shaped to serve
many different purposes. As Schmidt and Schroder put it, ‘[t]he symbolic
meaning of prior wars is re-enacted and reinterpreted in the present, and
present violence generates symbolic value to be employed in future con-
frontations’ (Schmidt & Schroeder, 2001, p. 9).
As in the case of the former Yugoslavia, these narratives may refer to a
very long historical narrative. The Troubles in Northern Ireland, the
product of longstanding tensions between nationalist/republican/
Catholics and loyalist/Protestants endured for some thirty years of spo-
radic, low-intensity conflict. While mutual antipathy worsened once ten-
sions manifested as violent conflict, suspicion and disdain arose in
entrenched, longstanding discrimination in employment, housing, politi-
cal representation and policing that went back long before the period of
the Troubles themselves. The imaginaries associated with these practices
invoke hundreds of years of history, and longstanding antipathies. Yet it is
also striking that short-lived, intensive conflicts may produce social imagi-
naries of similar durability to lingering, low-intensity, systemic forms of
conflict. In Maluku, for example, a province of Indonesia with a similar
population to Northern Ireland, a short-lived conflict between 1999 and
2002 led to more violent deaths than The Troubles and a higher number
20 S. PHILPOTT AND N. MORGAN

of internally displaced people. The very different history of Maluku meant

that for centuries Christians and Muslims successfully and formally man-
aged differences and tensions, without conflict. The concept of basudara,
of shared kinship and mutual aid and assistance across the religious divide,
held the peoples of Maluku in community. Yet, when the bonds of com-
munity broke down under a range of new pressures, violence arrived
swiftly and disastrously. Both are complicated cases but the history of ten-
sion between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland is enduring
while violence between Christians and Muslims in Maluku was intensive.
Despite the conflicts having quite different trajectories, however, the
imaginaries, once in place, have proven exceptionally difficult to loosen.
One description of Ambon (the epicentre of the violence in Maluku prov-
ince) is that there has been ‘reconciliation without truth’ because con-
fronting the truth threatens reopening still raw wounds and places at risk
the integrity of institutions that involved themselves in the violence (see
van Klinken, 2017, pp. xv–xviii). In short, a new history has been born
that has the potential to be rearticulated to fit the needs of future conflict.
Bearing particular sets of identities often implies powerful emotional
attachments to specific histories. All of the figurative resources that pro-
duce CIs are steeped in a history that is constantly invoked, elaborated and
re-elaborated. Yet the use of historic resources may be complex and trou-
bling, productive of all kinds of ambiguities. Thus, the Freudian concept
of Nachträglichkeit (‘afterwardness’), whereby there is retroactive attribu-
tion of traumatic meaning to earlier events now forms part of the contem-
porary Israeli experience of the Holocaust. On this account, repressed
memory becomes trauma and manifests retrospectively. As summarised by
Bill Nichols: ‘Haunted by the ghosts of wars past, and that horrific ur-­
event, the Holocaust, subject to a seemingly endless series of chronic trau-
mas, time takes on a new quality for Israelis’ (Nichols, 2014, p. 84). Raya
Morag’s work on perpetrator trauma in Israeli society and cinema has
important insights on intergenerational transmission of experience. For
example, Morag argues that while Israeli soldiers serving in the Occupied
Territories, increasingly as armed police, have no direct experience of the
Holocaust, it nonetheless produces a profound crisis of identity arising
from the tensions between Jews as victims and Israelis as perpetrators.
Morag uses the term ‘persecuted perpetrator’ to refer to the ‘crisis brought
about by the historical burden of the Jews as a persecuted people […] real-
ized in the utterly unbearable—and inevitable—subject position.’ She
invites comparison with American soldiers serving in Iraq and notes the
Another random document with
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guide our men, who presently straggled in two or three at a time, till
all had arrived, with the exception of Jumbi, his assistants, and the
animals. As they had not turned up at ten o’clock in the evening, we
got out a large signal rocket, and after some searching found a
suitable stick and set it off.
Something, however, went wrong, as instead of ascending the
rocket described a low curve in the air and then pitched into the dry
grass in front of the camp, instantly setting it into a blaze. We had to
bestir ourselves then. It took us an hour of hard work coupled with
some small amount of profanity to get the flames subdued.
The humour of the situation then struck us, and we laughed till our
sides ached, to the great astonishment of our poor perspiring men,
who could not see anything funny in it at all. Another rocket was then
sent up with better results, as it ascended to a great height and burst
most satisfactorily with a loud report and a shower of multi-coloured
stars. It answered its purpose, as half an hour afterwards Jumbi and
his assistants came in with the animals, all dead beat, having been
over fourteen hours on the road.

FOOTNOTES:
[8] Professor J. W. Gregory, D.Sc. Lond., “The Great Rift
Valley,” pp. 322 and 325 (1896).
[9] W. C. Harris, “Particulars concerning the Great River Gochol
and the Countries adjacent thereto from Native Information
collected in the Kingdom of ‘Shoa.’” Trans. Bombay Geog. Soc.,
vol. vi. (1844), pp. 63, 64.
[10] Leon des Avanchers, “Esquisse Geographique des pays
Oromo ou Galla.” Bull. Soc. Geog. Paris, ser. 4 (1859), map and
p. 164.
[11] J. L. Krapff, “Travels, Researches, and Missionary Labours,
etc., in Eastern Africa” (1860), pp. 43-45.
[12] P. Rigby, “Remarks on the North-East Coast of Africa, and
the Various Tribes by which it is Inhabited.” Trans. Bombay Geog.
Soc., vol. ii. (1844), p. 80.
 CHAPTER XI.
DOWN THE WASO NYIRO ONCE MORE.

We send to M’thara for guides—Sport at the “Green Camp”—Non-

return of the men sent to M’thara—Our anxiety—Their safe return
with guides—We continue our march down the river—Desertion
of the guides—We push on—Bad country—No game—We meet
some of the Somalis’ men—News of the Rendili—Loss of our
camels—In sight of the “promised land.”
Early on the morning following our arrival at the “Green Camp” we
despatched three men to M’thara with a message to N’Dominuki,
asking him to send us a couple of Wandorobbo guides from Embe,
as we wished to go across country to Lololokwe, and, if we deemed
it necessary, further north to Mount Nyiro, at the south end of Lake
Rudolph. The rest of the men went back to the two dead rhinoceros
to obtain a supply of meat. George went out during the day and shot
three grantei. In the afternoon El Hakim also went out shooting. He
took the ·450 Express, as he intended shooting grantei only. He
secured four. On his way back to camp he was annoyed by a
rhinoceros which had the temerity to stalk him, so waiting for his
pursuer he neatly planted a bullet in the creature’s brain, at a
distance of about ten yards. I have read that the skull of a rhinoceros
is invulnerable, especially from the front, but on examining El
Hakim’s beast, I noted that it had been shot from the front, the bullet
entering the temple and penetrating the skull at precisely the proper
angle, reaching the brain. There was no blood, the bullet-hole being
so clean-cut that the skin closed over the wound in such a manner
as to make it difficult to discover where it had been hit. It was as neat
and workman-like a job as I have ever seen.
We stayed at the “Green Camp” for some days, occasionally
shooting game to supply the larder, cleaning our weapons, mending
our clothes and boots, and otherwise occupying our time to good
purpose. A zebra which I shot supplied us with hide, and we repaired
our travel-torn boots by the simple process of stitching a piece of raw
hide over them with a surgical needle and thread, and then hanging
the boots out in the air. The hide shrank on as it dried, and formed a
fairly well-fitting though clumsy covering; but it was only a temporary
arrangement at best, and required constant renewing, as over rough,
stony ground the hide would wear through in three marches.
On the plains to the eastward of the camp roamed vast herds of
game—zebra, oryx, water-buck, and grantei. Rhinos were
disgustingly frequent, El Hakim shooting two more that had evinced
an impertinent curiosity regarding his movements, when he was
taking a walk abroad one afternoon. The rhinoceros were all of the
black or prehensile-lipped variety of the Rhinoceros bicornis, and we
found that they had, on the average, much smaller horns than other
specimens of the same family south of Kenia.
We all kept in splendid health, George and I in particular being
burnt almost black by the fierce sun; and we felt that we should be
content to remain where we were for an indefinite period. Game was
more than plentiful, the climate was glorious, and we were free as
the pure air we breathed. Only those who have been placed in
similar circumstances can appreciate the full value of that word
“free.” We did precisely what seemed good to us in our own eyes.
We rose early, bathed in the warm spring, ate our breakfast, and
then went shooting, or, if disinclined for that, we sat in a folding-chair
in the shade of the trees and read, or mended our clothes, ever and
anon raising our eyes to watch the herds of game walking steadily
past our camp on their way down to the river to drink. In time we got
to know the various herds, and even to recognize individual
members of the same herd. The different herds also had their
regular times for drinking, which never varied by more than a few
minutes. The water-buck were the earliest; they came down just after
sunrise. At ten o’clock precisely the graceful grantei would come
down in herds, scouted by the young bucks. They were followed at
midday by the oryx; and at four in the afternoon the zebra arrived in
their turn. The rhinoceros, on the contrary, went down at all times,
whenever they felt inclined, though they usually drink at night.
 It was a perfectly Arcadian existence, which we left with very real
regret when the exigences of travel compelled us once more to
resume our weary march over the sun-scorched desert country
down-river.
During our stay my shot-gun was not idle. In the evenings there
were numerous doves in the vicinity, which made a welcome change
in our menu; and now and again I secured a few grouse. Hares, too,
were always obtainable with a little trouble. One night, about eleven
o’clock, we were called out of bed by the sentry, who put his head
into our tent, and in an awestruck whisper ejaculated, “Kuja
kutasamo m’bogo, Bwana” (Come and see the buffalo, master). We
went outside, where we were joined by El Hakim, who had also been
called. It was a brilliant moonlight night, and the country was almost
as clearly visible as in the daytime. On the bank of our little stream,
just opposite the camp, a mighty herd of buffalo was marching along,
utterly unconscious of our proximity. They showed up wonderfully
distinct in the brilliant moonlight, as they stalked majestically past. A
passing cloud covered the face of the moon, and the weird sense of
power and grandeur was further heightened by the temporary
obscurity, as the now dim and ghost-like procession moved past. We
gazed at them with a feeling that was half exultation and half awe, as
we reflected that to us had been vouchsafed a sight at once so
impressive and now, alas! so rare.[13]
As on the fifth day after the despatch of the men to M’thara there
were still no signs of them, we began to grow anxious, and sent
Jumbi and another man back to investigate, with orders to return in
three days at the utmost. Our provisions were also growing short, as
we had finished all our sugar; the mustard also had given out. Two
days later, as neither Jumbi nor the three men first sent to M’thara
had put in an appearance, we made arrangements to pay a flying
visit to M’thara on the morrow, to find out what had become of them,
as we were more than a little anxious about their safety. The next
morning, therefore, the absentees having made no sign, we started
for M’thara, leaving two or three men in charge of the camp. We took
no tents or baggage—nothing but a blanket each and some food,
together with a good supply of ammunition. After two hours on the
road, to our great relief we met the laggards returning with two
Wandorobbo guides. They explained that N’Dominuki had
experienced some difficulty in procuring the guides, and they were
consequently detained. We were too thankful that they had rejoined
us in safety to critically examine their story, so we let it pass, and at
once retraced our steps, arriving at the “Green Camp” at three
o’clock in the afternoon.
The guides were typical specimens of the Wandorobbo hunter,
and greatly resembled each other in appearance. They were both
elderly gentlemen, with grey and grizzled hair. Though of medium
height, their backs were bowed, partly by age and partly by the
stooping, creeping posture they adopt when walking. They trod softly
as cats, their heads thrust forward, nothing on the road escaping
their observant gaze, though seemingly they were lost in abstraction.
Each carried a small bow, a bundle of arrows, tipped with poison,
and a walking-staff. A strip of goatskin, tied over the left shoulder,
descending as far as the waist, a bead necklet, and an armlet or two
completed a by no means superabundant costume. Their luggage
consisted of a small skin bag, containing a knife, a couple of pieces
of wood for making fire, and a few pieces of string; and in addition
each carried four or five pounds of Kikuyu tobacco, wrapped up with
banana leaves into spherical parcels.
From them we learnt that the Rendili were a long distance down
the river—much farther down than we had been. This intelligence
revived us somewhat, and next morning we set off once more on our
journey down the river. The “cinder-heap” was once more crossed,
but, thanks to the guides, by a much better road than the one by
which we had made our toilsome march. The going was still bad
enough, in all conscience, but in comparison to our first experience
our progress seemed wonderfully easy. Besides, we knew the extent
of the lava-belt now; before we did not know what was in front of us,
and the uncertainty had contributed to no small extent to the
magnifying of the horrors of our position.
We halted for breakfast on the other side of the lava-belt, and at 2
p.m. were preparing to resume the march, when Ramathani
approached us in a very hesitating manner, evidently wishing to
communicate something which he found unpleasant. Questioned as
to what had happened, he blurted out, “Bwana, the guides have run
away!” We were absolutely nonplussed. It is difficult at all times to
fathom the motives that influence a savage; but whatever could have
induced those guides to come three days’ journey to us, delaying us
seven days meanwhile, only to run away again on the first march, we
could not possibly guess, nor could we even faintly imagine.
We were now in a precisely similar position to that in which we had
been placed a fortnight before, with the single exception that we now
had certain information (for we saw no reason to doubt it) that the
Rendili were down the river. After a consultation we decided to push
on, guides or no guides, and trust to luck. We therefore resumed the
march, and, after a long hot tramp, reached our old camp of July 31
and August 4, where we remained for the night. A peculiar incident,
that I have never been able to understand, occurred on that day.
Before we resumed the march, after the desertion of the guides, I
went out of camp alone in search of game. The country was very
rough, being intersected in every direction by steep “kloofs” and
“dongas,” interspersed with gravelly mounds. Loose blocks of quartz
were scattered everywhere, mingled with flakes of rock-crystal and
smaller pieces of quartz of a greenish colour, due to the presence of
epidote. Stunted and misshapen thorny acacias and a few aloes
formed almost the only vegetation. I was laboriously climbing a
gravelly slope, when suddenly there was a rush and a roar as of a
mighty whirlwind bearing directly down upon me. I looked round in
some alarm, as it is very unpleasant being caught in one of these
dust-devils with nothing solid handy to hold on to. To my intense
surprise I could see nothing whatever. Not a leaf or a branch stirred,
and not a particle of dust or sand rose. The rushing, tearing sound
increased in volume, and drew nearer and nearer, finally seeming in
full blast not more than twenty feet from where I stood. But nothing
stirred; the air was perfectly clear, and everything else remaining still
as death. It was a most uncanny sensation. I abandoned the idea of
a whirlwind, thinking perhaps there might be a blow-hole in the
vicinity for escaping volcanic gases. I searched the neighbourhood
carefully under that impression, but found nothing of the sort. Finally,
the sound died away. Two or three times after that, during my walk,
the same thing occurred. On one occasion I seemed to be standing
in the very midst of the whirlwind. It rushed and roared round about
me, and I involuntarily gripped a tree-trunk to steady myself against
the expected shock. But nothing happened; nothing moved. I am not
a nervous person, and my reason convinced me that there was a
perfectly natural explanation for the phenomenon, but, nevertheless,
I had a very nasty sensation in the small of my back. I was irritated,
also, at being unable to discover the cause of the noise.
The next day we marched over the now familiar desert country to
our old “Swamp Camp.” Remembering the midges, we did not stop
there, but pushed on for another mile, and camped on the top of a
cliff overlooking the river. Opposite us the cliffs of red gneiss rose to
a height of over 300 feet. The face of the cliff was inhabited by
thousands of monkeys and baboons, who chattered excitedly over
our arrival, an excitement which was not allayed by a bullet I sent
through a group of them, which flattened itself against the cliff wall
with a sharp smack. They at once scattered to various places of
safety behind the rocks, and from thence made rude remarks in
monkey language.
We went out after lunch to make a short survey of the route
ahead. The result was most discouraging; a more barren and
desolate landscape I had never seen. Soft brown earth, into which
we sank over our ankles, was strewn with volcanic débris in the
shape of our old enemy the lava blocks. Vegetation was scarce, and
game conspicuous by its absence. It seemed rather a hopeless task
to attempt to cross such country without guides, but we determined
to make a supreme effort.
We were now beginning to suffer a little for want of salt. I had a
nasty sinking feeling in my stomach, with a tendency to vomiting,
and I always felt empty inside, even immediately after a very full
meat meal; but this wore off after a week or two. We were restricted
to a few ounces of native meal (m’wele) per diem, which our chef de
cuisine, the indispensable Ramathani, made into little flat cakes,
fried with meat, which was the only other item on our menu.
 For some days we ploughed over the rotten brown earth just
described. It was a painful experience, as the sharp blocks of quartz
and lava bruised our ill-shod feet. The sun was intensely hot, and
distant objects danced and shimmered in the heat-haze.
On the morning of August the 15th we had camped for breakfast
on the river-bank, when we were greatly excited by a sight of two
sheep grazing peacefully further down the river. Our men
immediately started in pursuit, and captured them after an exciting
chase. They were of the fat-tailed variety, and were Rendili sheep
beyond a doubt. All that afternoon was spent in searching the
country round, but we saw no signs that led us to believe that the
country was inhabited. El Hakim shot a rhinoceros while we were
out. It was feeding in the open. He was carrying the ·577, and
proceeded to stalk it, accompanied by George, who carried the ·450
Express. When within thirty yards of the rhino, El Hakim motioned to
George to remain where he was; he himself crawled thirty yards to
the left, so that hunters and hunted formed a triangle. El Hakim fired,
and the rhino, on receiving the shot, charged straight down upon
George. It was then that I had an opportunity of observing a
wonderful exhibition of nerve and true sportsmanship on George’s
part, begotten of the confidence we both placed in El Hakim’s skill.
Holding his rifle at the ready, George awaited the wounded beast’s
mad rush without a tremor, refraining from firing in order not to spoil
El Hakim’s second barrel—a confidence which was fully justified by
the result, as that individual’s left barrel spoke when the enraged
rhinoceros was within a dozen yards of George, dropping it dead
with a bullet through the heart. George afterwards declared that he
could not have stood the strain much longer, and would have fired in
a few seconds more. We had now sufficient meat for our immediate
needs, and were still determined to push on, though the country
seemed almost entirely devoid of game, and feeding ourselves and
our men was getting to be quite a serious problem. A rhinoceros only
lasted the men two days, as, in spite of its huge bulk, it cuts up very
badly, there being a good deal of waste; and, in addition, the men,
who even at ordinary times were tremendous meat-eaters, in the
entire absence of cereals, developed a carnal appetite that can only
be described as monumental.
 Returning to the spot where we had lunched, we resumed the
march, going another mile down the river before camping. When the
tents were pitched, Ramathani busied himself in cooking our
unpalatable meal of grantei-steak fried in an insufficiency of fat.
Soon afterwards we heard an excited shriek of “Afreet! afreet!”
(Devil, devil) from Ramathani and some of the other men near him.
He rushed up to me and implored me to bring my “bunduki ya
n’dege” (literally, “bird-gun”) and slay the “afreet.” I laughingly
inquired where the “afreet” was, and he pointed upwards into the
branches of a large tree, whose branches spread laterally over the
fire at which he was cooking. I could not see anything, and was
about to turn away, ridiculing him; but the men appeared so
genuinely terror-stricken that I paused and looked up again. Judge of
my surprise when I discovered that the “afreet” was nothing more
than a large water-lizard stretched out on a branch. A dose of No. 6
shot on the side of the head brought it down with a thump on the
ground. Examination showed that none of my shot had penetrated its
skull or body, it being merely stunned by the shock. None of the men
could be induced to touch it under any pretext whatever, saying that
it was highly poisonous, and its bite meant instant death; so, seizing
it by the tail, I carried it over to our table. It woke up while I was
carrying it, and, squirming upwards, attempted to bite me, causing
me to drop it hurriedly, to the intense amusement of the men. I killed
and dissected it. Its heart beat for quite half an hour after I had
removed it from the body. The reptile was four feet in length, and
over a foot in girth.
The next morning we divided the men into small parties and sent
them out to search the surrounding country for inhabitants, while I
climbed a hill near the camp and minutely examined, with the
binoculars, the whole country round; but in vain. There was no sign
of any inhabitants; the country seeming to be deserted by man and
beast alike, and lay under the scorching sun “the abomination of
desolation.”
I returned to camp at midday, the search parties returning at the
same time reporting that they had seen no signs of the Rendili nor
indeed traces of anybody whatsoever. We therefore resumed our
march down the river at half-past two in the afternoon. The
vegetation had almost disappeared, with the exception that along the
river-banks a few rows of thorn trees here and there indicated the
position of lines of depression in the earth’s surface, probably the
beds of sand rivers; the rest of the country was strewn with stony
débris which converted a march into a painful and difficult
pilgrimage.
At sundown we pitched the tents, but found that it was impossible
to drive the pegs into the rocky ground, so the guy ropes had to be
made fast to huge boulders collected and piled for the purpose. To
add to our discomfort, a strong cold wind sprang up as the sun set,
and blew great guns all night, the tents thrashing and thundering in a
way that precluded sleep, and threatened every moment to blow
bodily away. Firewood also was scarce, and the men spent a most
miserable night in consequence. The two Rendili sheep, which we
had been keeping for our own consumption, escaped during the
night, and we never saw them again. We did not linger long in that
inhospitable spot, but at sunrise again resumed our weary march
down-stream.
Game was absolutely non-existent, and the men, having finished
the last of the rhinoceros, were in great need of food. Where it was
to be obtained we could not imagine, unless we were to kill one or
two of our cattle, which we were very loth to do, except as a very last
resource.
After a solid four hours’ march we camped on the river-bank under
a clump of palms, and determined on the morrow to make one last
effort to find the Rendili by means of search parties, and then, if
there were still no signs of them, to make the best of our way back to
the game country by forced marches.
The animals were sadly out of condition for want of proper and
sufficient nourishment, and we were afraid that if we went further and
were still unsuccessful in our search, they would all die before we
could get back. “It is a long lane that has no turning,” however, and
about four o’clock in the afternoon one of the men, whom we had
sent out to look for game, came into camp, shouting excitedly that he
had seen “many people.” El Hakim and George at once saddled up
the mules and investigated. The “many people” turned out to be
eighty of the Somalis’ men, bound for Dhaicho (a trading settlement
on the eastern side of Embe) in order to buy food. Most important of
all, they told us that Ismail, with the main body, was camped among
the Rendili, who were five days’ march further down the river. This
news cheered us up wonderfully. Resting our men for the remainder
of the day, we were on our way again on the following morning long
before daylight, led by a guide lent us by the Somalis. We pushed
forward as fast as our men could travel, and we had every reason for
haste, as they were entirely without food. We halted at ten o’clock in
the forenoon for breakfast. At least we breakfasted, the men having
nothing to eat at all, while we had little more. At two o’clock we were
again on the road, and at four o’clock camped for the night, the men
being exhausted. Jumbi, and Malwa, the head-man of the
Wa’kamba, did not come in with the others. Inquiries elicited the fact
that, owing to either Jumbi’s or Malwa’s carelessness, the five
camels had strayed on the road and were lost. El Hakim was very
much annoyed, as he had always been very proud of his camels,
nursing them tenderly, and taking great pains to ensure their health
and comfort.
The next morning the camels had not turned up, neither had Jumbi
nor Malwa. El Hakim, being eager to reach the Rendili encampment,
pushed on with nothing but his tent and a little food, leaving George
and me behind with the bulk of the safari to send search parties out
after the camels. At eleven o’clock Jumbi and Malwa came into
camp without the camels. They were very frightened, rightly dreading
El Hakim’s anger, and were considerably relieved when they found
only George and me in camp. At that moment some of the men,
whom we had despatched earlier in the morning in search of the
missing animals, came in and reported that they had seen the tracks
of the camels leading away to the south straight towards the hills,
some days’ journey distant, which proved to be the extreme north-
eastern end of the Jombeni range, inhabited by our bêtes noires the
Wa’embe. I immediately despatched Jumbi and Malwa, together with
the men who had seen the tracks, to follow them up, instructing them
to find the camels if possible, but if not, to return and follow me, as I
was going on after El Hakim. After they had rested awhile they
departed on their errand, and at two o’clock in the afternoon, George
and I, having forded the river—which was quite easily done, as it
was very broad and came no higher than one’s middle—marched
steadily and rapidly down the north bank of the river in El Hakim’s
wake. We marched for four hours, passing the falls discovered by
and named after Mr. Chanler, an hour after starting. The vegetation
was now somewhat more dense, the wait-a-bit thorn becoming quite
inconveniently frequent; the country also tended to become gravelly
underfoot, and the very reverse of level.
Late in the afternoon we arrived at a range of rocky hills some
three or four hundred feet in height, which extended for some miles
at right angles to the river, and consequently right across our path.
So far we had seen no signs of El Hakim, so I decided to push on at
all costs, and with great difficulty we climbed to the summit of the
range.
When we reached the top a beautiful and welcome sight met our
weary eyes. Away to the right, curving round the end of the range,
ran the dark green line of the Waso Nyiro. A day’s march further on it
branched out into numerous broad shallow channels, spreading over
a tract of country perhaps ten miles long and four miles wide.
Innumerable Doum palms covered this tract with a beautiful mass of
greenery, interspersed with patches of pure white sand. Immediately
outside the palm region the country changed sharply to desert again,
which stretched dazzlingly white and perfectly level to the encircling
horizon. I had no doubt but that we should find the Rendili encamped
near the palms. The river emerged from the other side of this fertile
tract, and winding round the southern spur of a vast and lofty
tableland, which showed dimly in the distance, disappeared from
view on its way to the mysterious and unexplored “Lorian.” The
plateau I recognized as the Marisi el Lugwazambo. It can be
imagined with what joyful emotions we gazed on the mass of vivid
green spread at our feet, after so many scorching days of brown
earth and bare rock. I could quite realize the sensations of Moses as
he gazed on the “Promised Land” from the summit of Mount Pisgah.
 It was almost time, too, that we reached our long-desired goal. Our
men had not enjoyed a full meal since El Hakim shot the rhinoceros
four days before, and they were almost famished. We ourselves
were little better off, having tasted nothing for two days but a few
miserable M’wele cakes, no larger than a five-shilling piece. We
could not stop on the summit of the hill for an indefinite period,
however, much as we admired the view—our needs were too
imperative; so with a last long look at the beautiful scene, we turned
and cast about for a path by which to descend to the plain below. To
our dismay, we discovered that the cliff dropped sheer down for two
hundred feet without foothold enough for a goat. After trying two or
three places without success, we were eventually compelled to force
our way along the crest of the ridge, in the hope of finding some sort
of path nearer the river. It was a terrible scramble, and I should think
it very unlikely that even natives had ever been on to the top before
—certainly no white man ever had. The wait-a-bit thorns grew
together in an almost impenetrable wall, necessitating constant work
with our knives to free ourselves. Great boulders barred our
progress, and gravel and pebbles slipped under our feet, so that by
the time we had covered a mile we were tired out.
 PALMS ON THE WASO NYIRO.

Just before sunset George spotted a possibly likely place for the
descent. It certainly looked desperate enough, but by this time we
were beyond counting the risks. We scrambled down, therefore,
leaping from boulder to boulder, and every few moments having to
stop in order to cut ourselves free with our knives from the clinging
embrace of the ubiquitous “wait-a-bit.” Our clothes and skin suffered
terribly, but we were determined to reach the bottom somehow, and
plunged and scrambled downwards, regardless of minor personal
injuries. Halfway down we heard a shot from among the greenery
near the river, which I recognized as El Hakim’s ·450. I answered it
with another shot in order to apprize him of our presence, and
continued the descent. Finally we reached the bottom, breathless
and bleeding, our clothes literally in ribbons. The donkeys and cattle
followed us, scrambling down in some remarkable manner, though
how I could not stop to inquire. Most probably they, like ourselves,
were induced by the sight of the green vegetation and the smell of
water to attempt a descent which at any other time they would never
have faced.
Another three-quarters of an hour over the flat brought us to the
spot where El Hakim was already camped. The report we had heard
had been the death-knell of a Waller’s gazelle (Lithocranius Walleri),
which was at once divided among the men, so that they had at least
a taste of meat to go on with—we ourselves dining on two guinea-
fowl, one of which I had shot on the road, the other having been
secured by El Hakim. We were all tired out, and turned in
immediately we had finished eating. The tents were not needed, the
climate being so mild. Indeed, from now onwards, till we were once
more at this point on our way back to Kenia, we did not need to use
the tents at all, except for the sake of privacy.

FOOTNOTES:
[13] The rinderpest has all but exterminated the buffalo and the
eland in British East Africa, as elsewhere on the African continent.
 CHAPTER XII.
IN THE RENDILI ENCAMPMENT.

Narrow escape from a python—Arrival among the Burkeneji and

Rendili—No ivory—Buying fat-tailed sheep instead—Massacre of
the Somalis’ porters by the Wa’embe—Consternation of Ismail
Robli—His letters to Nairobi.
At sunrise next morning we were awakened by the twittering of
innumerable song-birds, and by the raucous screams of the guinea-
fowl and francolins calling to their mates. It was a perfect morning,
the bright, clear sunshine and soft balmy atmosphere reminding one
of a summer morning in the Mediterranean. Our spirits responded
instantly to the cheering influence of the soft sunshine, which quickly
dispelled the gloomy spectres of famine and desolation which had
haunted us for so long. We resumed our journey with a cheeriness
and sprightliness to which we had long been strangers.
On the road I had a good time among the guinea-fowl, which here
were of the Vulturine variety. They were exceedingly plentiful, and I
managed to bag five in a very few minutes, all large and very
handsome birds, with long tails and beautiful light blue breast
feathers. They are at times most difficult birds to shoot, as they will
very seldom rise, but run over the sand at a great rate, keeping just
out of effective range. In the absence of a dog, the only way to shoot
them is to run after them at full speed, till, by gaining on them—no
easy task—they are compelled to rise. The moment they get up, one
has to stop instantly and let drive at them. Even then they will not
always rise together, but in groups of two or three, necessitating very
accurate shooting if a bag is to be obtained; which is not always
possible when one is puffed by a two hundred yards’ sprint, and
consequently panting heavily.
Yellow-throated francolins were fairly plentiful. They dodged in and
out of the roots of the shrubbery with great agility, and were
correspondingly difficult to hit. Pigeons also were very numerous.
While following the guinea-fowl I had rather a narrow escape. I
was crossing a patch of long, dry, coarse grass, which grew in a
small depression. As I forced my way through, my eyes upon the
birds, I heard a rustle at my feet. I instantly looked down, and, quick
as a flash, jumped back three or four feet, shivering violently. A large
bright yellow snake, mottled with gamboge, about ten feet in length
and as thick as my arm, glided away into the tangled grass and
disappeared. I supposed it was a python, though I did not see much
of it, nor was I anxious to investigate.
We halted for breakfast at ten o’clock. At half-past twelve El Hakim
went on ahead with four men and his tent, as we were only one
march from the Rendili, and he was anxious to meet them. George
and I were to stay behind with the men and animals and start later,
as they were not sufficiently rested. We waited till half-past two, and
then followed him.
Soon after starting we lost his tracks, but pushed on nevertheless,
following the course of the river. We soon reached the point where
the Waso Nyiro divided into the numerous channels we had
observed from the hilltop the previous evening, and there we first
met the Burkeneji. We had temporarily lost sight of the river, and,
striving to regain it, we struggled through a dense belt of Doum
palms, eventually emerging to find ourselves in the bed of a sand
river. We followed its course, and in a few minutes reached one of
the channels of the Waso Nyiro. It was not more than a foot deep at
this place, flowing smoothly over a soft bed of sand. We stopped to
drink, and while in the act were confronted by a few natives, who
suddenly emerged from the bush on the other side. I put on my most
amiable smile, and walked into the river a little way. After a moment’s
hesitation one or two of the Burkeneji—for it was indeed they—did
likewise, and we met in midstream. I held out my hand and said
“yambo,” on the chance that it would be understood. My vis-a-vis
answered immediately “serian” (peace), shaking my hand vigorously.
I repeated the word after him in a very hearty manner, not at all
assumed. This appeared to be precisely the right thing to do, as
other natives now came across the river and fraternized with our
men. They were fine, clean, wholesome-looking negroes, very much
resembling the Masai in appearance, but, unlike them, were habited
in cloth instead of skins. A chorus of “serian” resounded on all sides.
One of our Wakamba named Mumbo could speak a little Masai,
and through him we learned that El Hakim had passed near there an
hour or two before. We left our new-found friends, and departed
amid another chorus of “serian,” well pleased at our first meeting
with the tribes we had braved so much to find.
We went on in the direction pointed out to us by the Burkeneji as
the path taken by El Hakim, but saw no traces of him. Keeping to the
river as being the best possible guide, we travelled another eight or
nine miles. Just before sundown we reached an acacia thicket,
where I decided to camp, continuing the search for El Hakim on the
morrow. The donkeys were off-loaded, and Ramathani busied
himself in preparing a meal. George strolled out of camp, and while
“fossicking” round discovered a Burkeneji village in the acacia forest
about three hundred yards away. Taking Mumbo with us as
interpreter, George and I went over to the village. No one appeared
to meet us, as the men were out bringing in the cattle and sheep for
the night. Two or three young women stood about with empty milk-
vessels, evidently waiting for the herds to come in. They were quite
fearless, and approached us, laughing merrily at the curious figures
George and I must have cut in our tattered shirts and trousers and
clumsy boots covered with zebra-skin. They were well built, plump,
very pretty, and undeniably saucy, and were clothed with a small,
very small, piece of cloth about their middles, and numerous small
bead necklaces and brass wire armlets. They stood a yard or so
away, and discussed our personal appearance with great freedom
and animation, now and then pointing out to one another some new
item in our make-up not previously noticed, and breaking into a
hearty laugh. George came in for more than a fair share of their
attention. He is a fine, big chap, and the girls always do pay him
more attention than he deserves; both white and black, though, to do
him justice, he was never conceited in consequence.
As we stood there waiting for the return of the Burkeneji men, the
description of the Anglo-Saxon as the “heir of all the ages” occurred
to me, and I chuckled inwardly at the spectacle of two ragged “heirs
of all the ages” standing outside a little negro village, the helpless
butts of the saucy tongues of a group of little negresses of a tribe
who have no ambitions beyond their daily wants, and no ideas
beyond supplying them; and who, as far as I know, are not yet
definitely classified by ethnologists.
Presently a tall, dignified native strode up, followed by several
others. He was certainly not less than six feet in height, and proved
to be the chief of the village. At his approach the women ran away—
not very far, however, but remaining in the background, they
continued their frivolous remarks. The chief did not seem at all
respectful either; in fact, he appeared rather bored than otherwise.
We exchanged the usual “serian,” and then, through the medium of
the interpreter, I inquired the location of the Somalis’ camp. The reply
was that it was “quite near.” I suggested that the chief should guide
us thither. He acquiesced, and returning to the camp we loaded up
the donkeys again, much to their disgust, and followed our new-
found guide.
In half an hour, when it was quite dark, the guide halted, and said
that we had better camp, as the Somalis’ camp was “quite far.” I was
very annoyed at this turn of affairs, and expressed my intention of
going on whether it was dark or not. We started once more, but I
could see that the guide was very unwilling and sulky. Presently I
heard the bleating of sheep and goats in the darkness to the left, and
ascertained from the guide that the sound came from a Rendili
village. I resolved to camp there; but he objected. I insisted,
however, and finally he reluctantly led the way. I pitched the camp
just outside the village, so that I might be sure of obtaining a guide in
the morning.
The Rendili in the village then came out to us, and offered fresh
goat’s milk for sale. We bought about a gallon for a few red beads,
and in exchange for five yards of merikani I also procured two sheep,
which were immediately slaughtered for the men, who raised a
hearty cheer thereat, as, with the exception of the tiny portion of
Waller’s gazelle the night before, it was their first regular meal for
four days. The milk we boiled, and George and I partook freely of it,