Conclusion: Searching for a Reconciling Ending …
Ladies and gentlemen, don’t be angry! Please! We know the play is still in need of mending. A golden legend floated on the breeze, the breeze dropped, and we got a bitter ending. […] The way out of the calamity you must find yourselves. There must, there must, be some end that would fit. Ladies and gentlemen, help us look for it! brecht 1974 [1943]: 106, italics in original
With these famous closing words of the play The Good Person of Szechwan, Ber- tolt Brecht attempted to establish a different actor–audience relationship in theatre. The parable of Shen Te and her alter ego Shui Ta being at once good and bad is not resolved for the audience. Instead the director, who is on stage to discourage the audience from identifying with the characters, demands the audience’s pardon for this ‘not quite satisfying ending […] We’re disappointed too. With consternation we see the curtain closed, the plot unended’ (Brecht 1974 [1943]: 106, italics in original). History in the plural might have the same dissatisfactory effects as Brecht’s parable that refuses a final interpretation. As my analysis of the processing of histories of independence in Côte d’Ivoire has shown, this does not necessarily mean that people do not strive to find a reconciling ending to the plot of Ivo- rian independence. More than two years after the contested elections and the severe political crisis that followed, Venance Konan, the new director of the state newspaper Fraternité Matin, argued in one of his editorials that Ivorians had to make peace with their collective history in order to reunite:
It would be good if we knew our history. I do not say true history, because often history is constructed from myths. But what is important is that there is one history, not two. We are in need of landmarks. […] As an Ivo- rian I have to know where the names Bété, Baoulé, Abengourou, Abidjan, originate from, because it is this: the history of my nation, my people. Our children are in need of being rooted in one history. It is the task of histo- rians to provide us with one unique version of our history, of the history of the different peoples who live in this country. We have to teach our children and make them understand that this history, the history of Ivo- rians from the south, the north, the west and the east, is the history of all Ivorians. Yes, I ask the historians to give me the history of the peoples of the north, the south, the east and the west of this country, so that I may teach it my children. […] The history of the Bété, the Yacouba, the Baoulé, the Sénoufo, the Malinké, the Lobi, the Attié, the Agni, the Kroumen, the
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Gouro, […] it is their history too because they are Ivorians. To tell the truth, it is when we are reconciled with our collective history, when we have reappropriated our history, when our children have understood that together they compose one people, that they share the same history, it is then that we will finally be reconciled with ourselves. venance konan, Fraternité Matin, 12 December 2012
His appeal was a reply to the reconciliation process after the 2010/2011 crises, which at that time had to be regarded as an apparent failure. By the time I was revising these final thoughts, July 2019, Gbagbo and Charles Blé Goudé (responsible for the mobilization of violent youth for the defence of Gbagbo after his electoral defeat) had both been acquitted of all charges of crimes against humanity allegedly committed in Côte d’Ivoire in 2010 and 2011 through Trial Chamber i of the International Criminal Court (icc) in The Hague. Laurent Gbagbo had been in icc custody since November 2011, Charles Blé Goudé since March 2014. The 2015 charges against Gbagbo and Blé Goudé had been joint, each of them accused of four charges against humanity: mur- der, rape, other inhumane acts or attempted murder, and persecution. Both pleaded not guilty. The trial had opened in January 2016. Several demands for provisional liberty had been rejected, until – to the surprise of many – Trial Chamber i acquitted the defendants in January 2019. Six months later, on 16 July 2019, the three judges published their detailed report giving the reasons for the decision. Today, Laurent Gbagbo lives in Belgium, which – as a condi- tion of release set by the icc – had accepted him in its territory. Charles Blé Goudé is still in The Hague, but no longer in detention. The icc prosecutor had also requested the extradition of Simone Gbagbo, but the Ivorian government refused to surrender the former first lady, and in March 2015 she was sentenced to twenty years in prison. Other actors of the post-electoral crisis, notably high- ranking officers of the military but also numerous young perpetrators of vio- lence during the post-electoral crisis, have also been sentenced to prison. Along with 800 others, Simone Gbagbo was granted amnesty through a presi- dential act of grace on independence day, 2018. It was not the first official par- don. Already on the occasion of independence day in 2013 and 2015, a number of those who had been arrested after Gbagbo’s defeat had been provisionally released or officially pardoned by a presidential act of grace. In the course of these decisions, numerous pro-Gbagbo exiles returned from Ghana, Benin or Niger.1
1 On the pitfalls of transitional justice in Côte d’Ivoire see also the publications of the Interna- tional Centre for Transitional Justice (e.g. ictj 2016), the Commission Dialogue, Vérité et Reconciliation (cdvr 2014), McGovern (2012a) and Rosenberg (2017).