How women of faith deploy religious resources in conflict and peacebuilding

by Jackie Ogega

This piece is based in four years of research with Gusii and Maasai women in Kenya, examining how they deploy their religious resources as an identity, motivation, and legitimating moral authority and voice to promote peacebuilding. The author, Jackie Ogega, concludes that without civic engagement and political participation of women of faith, it would be difficult for peacebuilding in the region to address historical, systemic and structural factors of violence.

This case study is based on an empirical study carried out in the period between 2010 and 2014 to examine how women of faith deploy religious resources in peacebuilding in the conflict between the Gusii and Maasai of southwestern Kenya.

Background of the conflict

The Gusii and Maasai ethnic communities of southwestern Kenya have had intermittent conflicts for decades, spanning the period prior to the establishment of the British Colony to the present independent political state. British colonial rule implemented major land reforms that displaced indigenous peoples, intensified agricultural activity and introduced land title deeds by removing traditional tenure where in the past land had been communally owned. The conflict trajectory between the Gusii and Maasai over the past two decades relates to land ownership, police brutality, political militancy and election and post-election violence. Accounts of violence experienced include violent raids of livestock; the “robbing” (abducting) and “spoiling” (raping) of women; the burning of houses; destruction of crops and other agricultural livelihoods; forceful evictions and displacement; attacks on groups opposed to the ruling party; and violent killings. Religion is not cited as a cause of the conflict; however, religious life pervades almost all activities of the communities in this context.

Gendered barriers

Gendered barriers in the conflict context affected the roles that Gusii and Maasai women of faith played in peacebuilding:

• Women generally had limited space, safety and voice to participate in peacebuilding relating to livestock, land or political participation, all of which were major sources of conflict and peace.
• Manhood identity formation (mainly through circumcision rites) institutionalized a culture of violence that excluded women from leadership roles in peacebuilding such as through village councils of elders and border peace committees. The visibility and status of women of faith in peacebuilding was therefore very limited.
• Rape and gender-based violence was a major security threat to women, which limited their mobility, as well as silenced, traumatized and intimidated them away from peacebuilding roles.
• Gender-based othering—the notion of constructing “otherness” on the basis of sex—led to perceptions of Maasai and Gusii women as subordinate insignificant others, which resulted in violence and their persistent lower status in peacebuilding.

How women of faith deploy religious resources for peacebuilding

Within such conditions of seemingly insurmountable barriers, faith offered some opportunities for Gusii and Maasai women to promote peace.

1. Deploying motherhood and faith identities in peacebuilding.

Gusii and Maasai women deployed both motherhood and faith identities as resources for legitimacy and moral authority in peacebuilding. As mothers, it was socially accepted that the women move around in public spaces during and after the fighting, to find food and water and to care for the injured and the infirm. Positioned as caregivers, the women linked motherhood with their faith identity to promote peace, performing various religious rituals, blessing warriors prior to the conflict, cleaning and storing war weapons and transforming adversarial relations. At the battlefield when feeding or supporting warriors in combat, the women led prayers over meals that dissuaded warriors from violence and provided moral, psychological and physical counsel against violence, a role that was not otherwise permitted for women in both societies.

Women also made claims to faith power—representing the divine, God or spirit—as the basis for how they understood, valued and established meaningful actions for peace. Faith offered them both voice and defence whenever they traversed conventional social norms on a woman’s place and relations within the family and society. One Maasai indigenous woman refused to be silenced by her husband by saying, “I am not speaking to you. I am stating the wisdom of Enkai [Maasai Indigenous God] and the beliefs of our ancestors on peace.”

2. Deploying prayer as spiritual action for peace.

Gusii and Maasai women deployed prayer as spiritual action for peace, defying social norms that limited their voice and participation. Their prayer as action served various functions as:

• A source of strength that mobilized their action and even ordained it as divine representation.
• A voice and means to lament prayerfully and draw attention to the realities of the conflict situation; the different forms of violence and the wounding, suffering and indignity the fighting had caused to everyone in the community.
• Language for reconciliation focused on confession and forgiveness as a relational dynamic. Recognizing the wrongdoings, the suffering and failures to contain violence, the women expressed sorrow and then sought forgiveness from the divine or transcendent and from those who had been wronged.
• Emotional petitions and psychological appeals for peace through a re-focus on much-needed practical needs (such as food, shelter and safety).
• Strategic visioning, enabling them to present shared visions and hopes for peace, and an end to the events of war and human suffering. Prayer would encompass multiple functions, as seen in funeral prayers.

The structure of women’s prayer for peace was often open and innovative, unlike the more strictly structured religious services and formal prayer led by male religious clergy or spiritual elders (which was often not possible when violence escalated). Their prayer fostered ethnic identities of the Maasai and Gusii peoples and their way of life, cultural values, forms of speech, dance patterns and artefacts.

3. Mourning and burial rituals of reconciliation

Gusii and Maasai women of faith played significant roles in promoting mourning and burial rituals of healing and reconciliation. Given the trauma that conflict-related deaths caused, burials could easily become the means to deepen the conflict, open new wounds and renew hatred toward the enemy. Besides, formal institutions and social order collapsed during violent conflict, making it impossible for clergy and other religious leaders to interact with the communities before normalcy returned. For these reasons, Maasai and Gusii women took on more visible leadership roles during conflict-related burial and funeral ceremonies.

• The women used religion to serve as bridges to ethnic or clan differences. Hence they created alternative rituals engaging their own spiritual and interpersonal networks and relations as they performed cleansing and healing rituals to reconcile the dead with the living.
• Aware of their limitations in advocating for restitution and/or socio-economic structuring including land right, the women privileged religious language and action, and focused their rituals on human dignity and the intangible, non-material things like feelings, thoughts and emotions.
• The burial ceremonies that the women created were not just a one-day event, but also rather a methodical process of healing with integrated steps such as represented in figure 2 below. Rather than focus on one-time events at the burial, the rituals were repetitious actions that were replicable as ways of life in the aftermath of violence.

Women of faith were said to courageously take up leadership roles in organizing and leading pre-funeral visits, burial ceremonies and healing visitations despite the security risks during burial ceremonies where mourners are often charged with hatred for the enemy and flaring vengeances.

Having laid the ground for friendships to develop, the women continue visitations and sharing day-to-day roles such as shared labour and ceremonies for harvest in the aftermath of violence.

The women’s approach is emotive (broken hearts) and powerful. In sharp contrast to hegemonic masculinity and gender-based othering—which is built on violent protection, combativeness and a desire to retaliate, women’s rituals draw on sober-mindedness on the realities of war—which focuses on truth telling on killing, being killed, rape, and displacement, and fearlessly condemns such acts as falling short of humanity and spiritual proscriptions against violence.

By advocating for a code of conduct based on values such as sobriety, hope, moderation, temperance, quietness, reflectiveness, sharing, and honesty (rather than material and ideological contestations such as land and political power), the women cultivate in warriors, elders, family and youth inner awareness, moral responsibility, and spiritual accountability for current life and future life for peace.

Dr. Jacqueline Ogega is an international development and peacebuilding professional with over 20 years’ experience designing, implementing and managing large, complex projects and research in developing countries. Dr. Ogega has strong leadership, technical skills and management expertise in gender responsive programming, women’s empowerment, child safeguarding and protection, systems strengthening, capacity building, training and policy development. Dr. Ogega is the Co-Founder and President of Mpanzi Empowering Women and Girls.