A lot of people in Mozambique believe in ghosts. They are convinced that we are being guided by seen and unseen forces.
And ghosts have played a singular role in events of the recent past: During the civil war between 1977 to 1993, a million people were killed in Mozambique. The line between friend and foe was not clear and many families had members fighting on both sides. But there was a purification ritual, part of the traditional religion here, that helped locals to deal with the crimes committed during this time.
Men who may have taken part in war crimes returned to their villages. It was believed that when they did these terrible things, the men were not themselves: They had been possessed by ghosts. The spirits were driven out of the humans and community life could go on. On a local scale, this purification ritual really worked in the villages because people believed in it. But we still need to find something similarly useful at the national level. I believe that literature can also help with this; Through our stories we invite people to deal consciously with those traumatic times.
After the genocide of 1994, there was no sense of community left in Rwanda. Gradually, we learned to live together again.
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A decade after Sri Lanka’s war came to an end, genuine power sharing between the two main communities, the Sinhalese and Tamils, remains illusive.
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Khaled Khalifa has penned a haunting novel about Syria before the civil war.
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The Syrian regime is a dictatorship like no other. Bashar al-Assad is trying to install a ruling dynasty and is exterminating his own people in the process. Meanwhile, the global community is looking the other way.
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Bjeen Alhassan, born in Qamishli, Syria, now lives in Germany. In her Facebook group “Learning with Bijin” she helps refugee women, earning her the German Integration Award.
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The German government recently published guidelines on conflict management. An excerpt from the official white paper and an analysis by the peace researcher.
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