Artistic Imaginaries of War in East Africa

“Worlding” as an Agency of Peace Culture

Abstract

This article explores the idea of “worlding” as a form of agency in war-intervention imaginaries in East Africa. The article argues that these imaginaries draw their materiality from experiences of war and in return attempt to provide these “worlds” of wars with new and alternative meanings and possibilities. It is these new alternative meanings and possibilities that indeed constitute peace culture. The agency of (re)imagining a peace culture is what constitutes “worlding.” That is, the power of the imaginary to transform lived realities as found in the worlds of these artists as they know and experience them, and in return, the worlds their imaginations (en)vision. Thus, “worldings” in these war imaginaries are construed as a means of devising a world by choosing its chaotic and dysfunctional present while similarly aiming at its transformative future. “Worlding” in a work of art is the process of bringing into being or “setting up” a world or worlds; it is therefore the process of defamiliarizing the world as we know it, investing it with new meanings, and opening it to new possibilities. In demonstrating how “worlding” manifests as an agency of peace culture, the following imaginaries of war are the key subjects of analysis: Ni Sisi, a film for community development; the play Thirty Years of Bananas, by Alex Mukulu; and the novel Murambi, the Book of Bones, by Boubacar Boris Diop.