Bonfires for Peace? What Northern Ireland can learn from Sierra Leone

In the heart of Sierra Leone, community bonfires are transforming societies, while in Northern Ireland, similar traditions can deepen divisions.

In Sierra Leone, the organisation Fambul Tok (“Family Talk” in Krio) uses traditional bonfire ceremonies for community healing. Initially, meetings around the bonfire focused on addressing grievances from the brutal civil war (1991–2002), such as dealing with stolen property, exile of community members, or even more serious issues, such as integrating former child soldiers or even murder. These carefully planned and facilitated gatherings, sometimes taking months to prepare, provided spaces for confession, apology, and forgiveness.

But today, as I learned during a recent visit, these bonfire ceremonies have evolved. As the war recedes into history, these ceremonies now address contemporary local conflicts, from disputes over development priorities to family and community disagreements that threaten community cohesion. Fambul Tok sees such dispute resolution as essential to a healthy community and economic progress.

The irony isn’t lost on those of us living in Northern Ireland, where bonfires serve as annual flashpoints of tension. While we can’t directly compare the societies, Sierra Leone’s experience offers two crucial insights for Northern Ireland.

Bonfire Ceremony in Sierra Leone, photo by Libby Hoffman

 

First, it shows that bonfires need not be instruments of division. While we cannot simply transplant their model into our different historical context, it challenges us to reimagine how traditions might evolve. Perhaps we need to carefully reconsider Northern Ireland’s bonfires within the framework of a long-term peace plan not as symbols of division but as potential touchstones for peace and reconciliation.

Second, Sierra Leone illustrates a truth Northern Ireland has long ignored: no meaningful development can occur without first mending broken relationships. As Fambul Tok aptly stated, putting resources into a community with unresolved conflicts is like pouring water into a bucket full of holes. The view in Sierra Leone is that sustainable development can only take root after repairing these holes — through relationship-building and reconciliation work at all levels of society.

This insight exposes a critical blind spot in Northern Ireland’s approach to development. The recently released draft Programme for Government speaks optimistically of building “a globally competitive, sustainable, and inclusive economy which benefits everyone.” Yet, it largely ignores how deeply communal divisions undermine these aspirations.

Community and economic development in Northern Ireland is messy. Basic infrastructure projects become proxy battles over which community will “really” benefit, whether we are talking roads, bridges or stadiums. The inability to transcend these divisions leads to absurd inefficiencies: duplicate community centres built in close proximity to service Catholic and Protestant communities respectively, a catalogue of shelved projects due to political differences after spending millions on initial consultations, under-populated schools within walking distance of each other because educational integration is opposed, and segregated housing developments that force people to travel great distances to access services.

Northern Ireland faces a clear choice. We can continue pretending that economic development alone, peppered with nominal “sharing” initiatives, will heal divisions, while watching as resources drain through the holes in our communal fabric. Or we can learn from Sierra Leone’s example, acknowledging that genuine progress requires us to actively and continuously mend relationships.

The path forward isn’t easy. Unlike Sierra Leone’s bonfires, which serve as catalysts for healing, Northern Ireland’s traditions remain stubbornly divisive. There’s also a deep fear that linking ongoing political division and economic development will paralyse progress. Yet that’s precisely why we need to heed Sierra Leone’s lesson: transformative change begins not with grand economic plans and platitudes about peace through prosperity but with the patient, deliberate work of rebuilding trust within and between communities and at the political level.

Development isn’t just about building new roads, attracting investment, or constructing schools and hospitals — it’s dependent on building bridges within and between communities and moving forward together. Until we commit to that harder task, we will continue to pour our resources into a fundamentally leaky bucket.

Published by Brandon Hamber in the Derry Journal, 29 November 2024.

Resilience Focused Workshop in Sierra Leone

Project Participants in Sierra Leone

With partners Fambul Tok (Sierra Leone), Catalyst for Peace (US), Refugee Law Project (Uganda), Green String Network (Kenya), and the Research and Advocacy Unit and African University (Zimbabwe), I am managed to secure a seed grant to develop a Global Challenges Research Fund project to bring together partners to consider: "What are the internal-external framework and relationships that genuinely, in practice, support the creation of resilient communities facing ongoing and dynamic peace and development challenges, and how can communities, local organisations and international donors help to grow these?" A large inter-country meeting took place in Freetown in 22-26 January 2018. A range of new initiatives will now flow from the meeting including joint research and proposals.

Sierra Leone People's Planning Process

The Sierra Leone Delegation

In March 2017 a delegation from Sierra Leone including the Minister of Local Government and Rural Development, Maya Kai Kai, visited Belfast. The visit was the result of my visit to Sierra Leone in February 2016 on invitation of Catalyst for Peace (operational US Foundation) and Fambul Tok a local NGO. The trip focused on observing the work of Fambul Tok. Fambul Tok (meaning "family talk") is a community ritual process that takes place at bonfires in which reconciliation between victims and perpetrators of political violence takes place (see http://www.fambultok.org).  When the Ebola crisis hit, the same networks were used for post-war reconciliation were transformed into health prevention networks. Then in the last two years the networks have continued to develop, and have morphed into a local governance processes called the “People’s Planning Process”. Fambul Tok have run this new peace and development process in 3 regions. Through the trip I was invited to be an advisor to and Fambul Tok, as they set out to mainstream the process with government. As part of this process, funded and supported by Catalyst for Peace, Ulster University hosted a delegation from Sierra Leone including the Minister of Land and Rural Development, MPs, a major, local council members and various civil society representatives in Belfast in April 2017 to discuss the inclusive local governance and peacebuilding process unfolding in Sierra Leone.