Image: Eastern city limit of Ziguinchor

Mototaxis, also known as Jakarta’s and a “Sept-Places” (Seven-seater) taxi enter and leave town on the N6 connecting Ziguinchor and Kolda.

This research has been predominantly carried out using semi-structured interviews with young adults in the city of Ziguinchor as well as personal observations of daily activities throughout the city and during special occasions such as the electoral period in Senegal. In the scope of this research, young adults are defined as individuals between the ages of 18 and 30, who were born after the escalation of violence in the region after 1990. These people are in general old enough to have experienced the more violent periods of conflict but were too young to be involved in any violent actions, only serving as passive observers and eye-witnesses of the violence committed by the generation of their parents and grandparents. Understanding what this generation's thoughts are about the conflict is essential to understanding the Casamance’s current position in Senegalese society and governance as these people have started to contribute to the country’s society and will or have recently started a family of their own. 

It is interesting to analyse the role and views of young adults in the current conflict as the conflict may be considered taboo among the older generations in the Casamance and Senegal out of fear of persecution, while the younger generations are more willing to initiate dialogue (Fall, 2010). The role of young adults in such a setting as the Casamance conflict, which is known to experience cyclical violence, is also important to analyse in order to explore how the conflict has been transmitted from parents to their children. 

This idea of transmission has been inspired by the work of Eichelsheim, Berckmoes, Hola, Rutayisire & Richters (2019), who argue that the intergenerational transmission of trauma and violence can affect the way a parent raises their children and can affect the development of a child in terms of well-being, social behaviour and education among other factors. 

A previous study from Berckmoes, Eichelsheim, Rutayisire, Richters & Hola (2017) highlights two factors which should be taken into account when approaching intergenerational violence. This violence is spread out across broader in the conflict-affected society of Rwanda in a way that it can impact the family dynamics and increases the risks of reproducing violence. This spread is due to the fact that violence is organised by state actors such as the authorities as well as non-state actors, such as insurgents or rebels. According to Berckmoes, et al. (2017), there are direct and indirect ways of transmittance, such as informing their children about it through conversations or inversely, keeping silent and moving on. This can lead to multiple challenges in the lives of the children of those who lived through the genocide but do not necessarily result in new physical violence. It is therefore interesting to see if the same would apply to the case of the Casamance conflict.

The second concept which has been used for this research is the concept of duress as explored by de Bruijn & Both (2018). This concept originates from the idea that people living in an area which has been subject to a prolonged conflict has a significant impact on the wellbeing of these people and that enduring these circumstances can lead to different hardships, where some of these hardships will actually be integrated into society. This is what de Bruijn & Both (2018) define as a society in “duress”, using three dimensions in order to measure this duress.

First of all, the dimension of “durée” (duration), refers to the period of time in which people have experienced hardships, which often trace back their roots to the colonial era as it brought major societal impacts, as will be seen as well in this research. The second dimension, which is the normalisation of hardship, can be seen through different factors such as violence from (non-)state actors, oppression, the threat of conflict and memories of past violence. This also ties back in with Eichelsheim et al. (2019) as the experience of parents can determine whether or not certain hardships are normalised within a family and broader society by extent. The third dimension is constrained agency, and even though agency is always constrained in daily lives, this manifests itself especially in societies under duress. Constrained agency in this form can take shape as for example, self-censorship or exile to avoid the hardships or joining a political organisation or militia to ensure security for themselves and their families.

Vigh (2008) analyses the lives of young adults in Bissau after the Guinea-Bissau Civil War (1998-1999) and following events. Instead of seeing crisis as an isolated period of time outside of the “normal” state of being and thus something temporary, the effects of a crisis are often long-lasting for many people, becoming a chronic event. Additionally, instead of seeing crises in such cases as extraordinary events with passive actors, these crises should be considered the context in which people act. Using Vigh’s research as a background is also interesting given the geographic proximity of Bissau to Ziguinchor, with Bissau being approximately 100 kilometres south-east of Ziguinchor. Additionally, the MFDC rebels from the Casamance have reportedly been involved in the Guinea-Bissau Civil War by supporting the military junta of Guinea-Bissau during the civil war (Massey, 2012). This does give more similarities to the case of Bissau and Ziguinchor as well.

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