Abstract
Struggles over belonging and identity are root causes of the Central African Republic's conflict. Every scholar from, and of, that country knows it. Yet, they are touched upon – including in my own work – only in passing, opening a flagrant gap in the literature. Here steps in Gino Vlavonou. With his book Belonging, Identity, and Conflict in the Central African Republic, he paints the first multifaceted depiction of this elephant in the room. As an ardent follower of Central African developments, my expectations are thus high as I turn the pages. Fortunately, the pages turn easily.
Autochthony is when one group was on a land first. Thus, it creates a distinction between first- and newcomers on a territory. This inherent difference allegedly often leads to conflict as studies on farmer against herder violence suggest, for instance. By questioning the widely held link between autochthony and land in the first chapter, Vlavonou rightly points out that autochthony is far from a fact. It is a claim. Thereby, it is an identity capital that people with an audience can use to shape forms of ordering. This narrated identity capital of autochthony gains in prominence when peace turns to conflict, even when dispossession of land is not a primary event, such as in the Central African Republic's civil war. However, Vlavonou seems to confound two theoretical debates here: first, the debate of who is part of the larger political entity of the Central African state – and thus a debate about nationalism – as opposed to, secondly, a debate about more locally rooted debates in land access and traditional symbolism – which is more commonly used in autochthony discourses.
Non-Muslims in the Central African Republic describe themselves as the hosts and relegate Muslims to the role of guests, Vlavonou explains. Guests that have shown their ingratitude by rebelling their way into a political sphere from which they have so long been excluded. In Chapter 2, the difficulty of the distinction comes to the fore. Who are the “Muslims,” the “real Central Africans” (“vrai Centrafricain”), and the “non-Muslims” in this conundrum? Especially considering that “Muslim” is translated into the (contested) national language Sango as “Arabo” (p. 76) – thus also holding ethnic and national connotation. Vlavonou shows how the narratives and counter-narratives are constructed but become enmeshed in inconsistencies that even we, as external observers, struggle to untangle. As he states, “religion mattered in the conflict but the conflict had not been caused by religious differences” (p. 77).
Whereas Chapter 2 is based on in-depth fieldwork in the post-crisis period (six months in 2017), Chapter 3 takes a step back to the pre-crisis era, based on former president Bozizé's speeches and actions. Here, the narrative gains nuance raising questions that remain unanswered: Is the foreigner against vrai Centrafricain really identical to the Muslim versus non-Muslim distinction? Is it the only, or at least main, distinction? What are overlapping narratives of identity and difference in Central African Republic?
Vlavonou – while taking great care to state that Muslims, in fact, do not equal foreigners – too readily conflates Muslim and foreigner from various speech acts. I contend that other interpretations are possible. Bozizé faced multiple rebellions, some of which (as Vlavonou himself argues) were distinctly non-foreign or non-Muslim. From Vlavonou's work, one can distil that Bozizé mobilised multiple identity capitals based on foreignness to protect and legitimise his regime: foreignness of ideas (the lazy, big mouth rebels that do not want development) and foreignness as neighbouring states’ influence (including from non-Muslim countries). Yet, there is one type of mobilised foreignness on which Vlavonou focusses: the alleged foreignness of Central Africans living in the country's northeastern region. This overlaps with religion (many there are Muslims) and with economic power in illicit trading networks, which Vlavonou shows was increasingly mobilised by the regime to delegitimise rebellion and to take control of economic resources (pp. 95–97).
The following two chapters then delve into this political economy of the conflict. Vlavonou shines a new light on the origin story of conflict found in the former president's decision to nationalise diamond buying offices, which was widely circulated in multiple reports from that era by the International Crisis Group and the International Peace Information Service among others. The common narrative that followed was that this decision disenfranchised traders with linkages to armed groups who, thus, mobilised for war. However, it was more than this. This move was based on an autochthony discourse, both in narrative and in policy, that attempted to link foreignness to influential diamond collectors and autochthony to the simple artisanal miner. Elite capture of lucrative goods was thus narrated as popular resistance against a foreign hold on the economy.
In Chapter 5, the most ethnographically in-depth of the book, the author shows how everyday struggles reverberate in the marketplace. Here, the perception grew that Muslims are dominating the economy and hindering Central Africans from taking their place and succeeding. Vlavonou engaged in impressive research in two main marketplaces and revisited numerous public documents. He shows how such distinctions and struggles emerged well before the most recent crisis crystallised these contentions, and the ensuing displacement reconfigured who had which, if any, market spaces.
Overall, Vlavonou's exceptional monograph has made two key contributions. Empirically, he has linked the creation of an anti-foreign narrative in the Central African Republic to both elite and popular circles through multiple areas and topics. Intriguingly, the overlaps were pursued with very different aims: the elites wanted to enrich themselves and extend their power. The populace, however, sought this narrative to explain their difficulties of making ends meet. Through these deep empirics, Vlavonou also taught me a valuable theoretical lesson: how the two concepts of nationalism on a state-level, and autochthony on a local level, are deliberately interlinked in the Central African Republic. This might be a core tenet of how he proves that “autochthony conflicts are not reducible to land” (p. 181). Autochthony scholars anywhere should, thus, take to heart from Vlavonou's book: that autochthony is an identity capital not (always) linked to land, and that its local rooting resonates in and can be manipulated by a nationalist discourse.
