“There is no Justice in Guinea-Bissau” Strategies of Preventing, Handling, and Aggravating Conflicts in Local Dispute Settlement

Abstract

“We are sitting here on a powder keg”, an interviewee tells me during fieldwork in a little town in eastern Guinea-Bissau, West Africa1, referring to unresolved local disputes and controversial national politics that threaten to provoke social turmoil. In this contribution I discuss which concrete forms of interaction between disputing parties and dispute settlers the metaphor of the powder keg conveys and how the sensation of sitting on a powder keg can possibly be mitigated. At first sight, no powder keg is visible in Gabú. It is a rural little town in eastern Guinea-Bissau, and it is the area’s economic and political hub, a historically important site where ethnic groups fought for political and economic domination, where the Portuguese nominated traditional rulers and where there is now hope on decentralized political structures. In this town, most roads are made of sand, and buildings are mainly single-floored. Donkeys pass by, sometimes dragging a trailer loaded with charcoal or firewood behind them, heading for the town’s central market. A group of young men is hanging around in a backyard, chatting and preparing green tea as jobs are rare. During early afternoon Gabú’s streets are deserted, and many people enjoy lunch or a nap in the shadow, and the local radio broadcasts a discussion on “why people say that GuineaBissau is nice” (ke ku manda djintis fala kuma Guiné-Bissau sabi)2 while some listeners shake their heads saying blankly that there is nothing nice about Guinea-Bissau. Less visible is, evidently, Gabú’s other face: people threaten to kill others in disputes over land; guns rest under beds for use in defense or attack; drug dealers traffick cocaine in Gabú’s neighborhoods; stories abound about the police beating suspects at night; people carry out ritual washings in order to protect themselves against evil and misfortune. Political and societal turbulences in Guinea-Bissau are now more frequent than ever in the country’s history. Accordingly, “the pressures on 01. Fieldwork in eastern Guinea-Bissau was carried out during 9 months between 2007 and 2009. Empirical data includes predominantly transcribed interviews (mainly aggrieved parties’ narratives on cases and dispute settlers’ accounts on their strategies of dispute settlement) and varied observations related to local dispute settlement, written down in a comprehensive field diary. This contribution is based on arguments developed in my PhD thesis (Borszik 2013a).