Body-Mapping in Liberia: West African Workshop (March 2010)

How can remembering conflict inspire reconciliation? At the first regional workshop in West Africa, the International Coalition and Center for Good Governance (CGG) brought together participants from Sierra Leone, Liberia, Senegal, Kenya and Uganda to share how their memorialization efforts build public engagement in Truth and Reconciliation processes in post-conflict societies.

As workshop participants, including Liberia’s Civic Initiative and CGG, presented their various memorialization efforts in the region, they identified common strategies for how to activate places of memory as centers for dialogue and reconciliation in post-conflict democracies.

“Yesterday the process we went through served as a wake-up call emotionally as I was able to reflect on the healing process in my life and Liberia as a nation.”

- Francis Greaves, Liberian body-mapping participant, reflecting on the experience

In April 2010, Liberian civil society organizations Civic Initiative and Liberia Media Center, with the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience and the Human Rights Media Center (S. Africa),  launched a pioneering initiative to “WITNESS – REMEMBER – CREATE” personal and public histories of Liberia’s recent conflict.  Using the “body-mapping” technique where participants use life-size images of human bodies to illustrate their painful histories and to reflect on how they see themselves, Liberians across generations and genders began memorializing the country’s 14-year civil war.

The program opened with a traveling version of Breaking the Silence: A Luta Continua, the award-winning exhibit of drawings, paintings, body-maps, photographs, memory cloths, and more created by survivors of Apartheid.  The exhibit depicts the oppression of black South Africans during Apartheid, their struggle for justice and finally, their transition to a “new” South Africa where they continue to face new challenges.

Against the backdrop of this exhibit, Liberians from different communities – including widows and amputees from the war, as well as those who were children (aged 1-5) during the conflict – came together to share their diverse experiences of the war and create a visual public record through each of their stories, depicted by individual body-maps. These body-maps and other artwork created by the Liberians were added to the Breaking the Silence exhibit in a section the Liberians titled Breaking the Silence: The Liberian Story Begins.

The project was hailed by former Truth Commissioners and the media as a critical first step in implementing the Liberian Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s recommendation for memorialization. As BBC’s Jonathan Paye-Layleh said,“… if what started as an exhibition on campus at the University of Liberia is nationalized, it will certainly go a long way in fulfilling a key recommendation in the TRC report.”

Building from this success, civil society groups in Sierra Leone and Kenya are now developing projects using body-mapping as a way to engage people in dialogue and sharing with the goal of creating public memories of painful chapters of history.