A Good Fight: Violence and Female Excellence in Northern Chad

Abstract

ABSTRACT In Faya in northern Chad, women frequently and ordinarily fight each other in public, using knives and swords and seeking to inflict serious wounds; they are generally proud of their martial prowess. This simple observation sits uneasily with an older ethnography on northern Chad and the Sahara more generally. It is also only partially encompassed by conceptualisations of violence, and in particular female violence, current in anthropological analysis. This paper argues that violence in this context needs to be seen not as the result of a breakdown of social relations, but rather as intrinsic to them. Nor is it simply a means to an end (‘conflict-resolution’), but rather part and parcel of aspirations towards a particular kind of gendered personhood, in a context where the management of local affairs tends to be in the hand of women, and is dependent on but not necessarily encompassed by male spheres of activity.