such a group. In validation of this Lewis Coser in his introduction to Halbwachs’ On the
Collective Memory explains further that “social classes, families, associations,
corporations, armies, and trade unions all have distinctive memories that their members
have constructed, often over long periods of time. It is of course individuals who
remember, not groups or institutions, but these individuals, being locatable within
specific group contexts, draw on those contexts to remember or recreate the past”.
Moreover, if as Richard Terdiman (1993: 8) argues that because of the overwhelming
interaction of the past with the present memory can as well be designated the “present
past”, the kind of governance the soldiers were to exercise upon taking over power was
not likely to be progressive. It is the more so since for them, “drawing on memory to
recreate the past” meant creating and reinventing the sordid experiences of imperialism,
which would please no one among the majority of the people who would be at the
receiving end. This is not however to say that the military could not have chosen to
invoke the memory of selfless service and sympathy with the masses as embodied in the
ideals of nationalist struggle. Thus much as the people constituting other social groups
would try to reinvent memories of the promises that nationalist struggle held in those
days of colonialism, such lacked the wherewithal for actualization. This is because of the
position the rest of the citizenry occupied in the structure of power. The situation is thus
illustrative of what Richard Werbner (1998:2) calls “the diversity of postcolonial memory
practice”. Put another way, because the situation in question involved power relations,
the position of the governed became that of handicap. At their best, they would be at the
mercy of the new military rulers for whom power meant more of advantage over the
people than demonstration of responsibility towards them. Michael Foucault (1994: 343)
argues in line with this position when he reveals that the whole idea of taking power or
subjecting a people to state control is usually for preservation of privilege of the group in
control. Where, however, the people choose to adopt confrontation in their relations to
power, there is the possibility of the adoption of “a winning strategy” to the advantage of
the state. The reason for this is traceable to the “ruthlessness” identified with the
powerful. But this is in fact the more so in the case of the military owing to their
exclusive access to arms and ammunition.
wang
(Wang)
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