This blog post is part of the Seminar Reconceptualizing Warfare and Its Experience, April 10, 2025, funded by the WARFUN project.
The dominant discourse about war is that soldiers deployed and fighting in it dominate the landscape, and the animals which live in it. This paper focuses on the ways that Zimbabwean soldiers were made to understand the sacredness and spirituality of the Democratic Republic of Congo landscape: river water, swamps, snakes and ghosts by the local Congolese civilian people. The paper reveals that even though Zimbabwe soldiers believed in the mighty of their guns, they were challenged by the war landscape. In some way for soldiers to live in the grotesque terrain of war, they had to conform to the local people beliefs, that snakes are not killed, soldiers were not to bath in either swampy or rivers with soap. It was believed that the river and swampy water was mermaid water. It was believed that if snakes were killed then the few remaining will multiply and spiritually fight soldiers in their trenches. Soldiers were made to believe that snakes understand why men with guns were living in trenches. This was similar to ghosts which could move across the deployment areas, and sometimes close to trenches, were soldiers were dug in. The central analytical question on which this blog post is based has to do with the ways in which soldiers were made to believe in local people’s understanding of the landscape in which they were deployed in. In particular the post reveals the ways that soldier’s knowledge of being in war was challenged by the spirituality of the local Congolese people, an issue which they had never anticipated on going to war. So war is not only about the knowledge of knowing the guns, conventional warfare, terrain tactics, but it has also to do with being made to believe what it means to live in and within the war landscape itself known to the local people.
The Democratic Republic of Congo War has been referred to as the ‘Great War in Africa’, or ‘Africa’s World War’ (see Prunier, 2009; Reinjens, 2012). In August 1998, the Democratic Republic of Congo rebel formations backed by Rwanda and Uganda waged a war against the government of President Laurent Kabila. In response, the Southern African Development Community (SADC) deployed troops to rescue President Kabila and his government. This was so because DRC was a member state of the SADC, and as part of fulfilling their mandates, member states such as: Zimbabwe, Angola and Namibia, deployed their regular troops to quash the rebels. It was noted that, the DRC war caught these SADC forces unaware and unprepared for it (Maringira, 2015). In the case of Zimbabwe, this was evident in the ways in which soldiers were deployed, with very limited support and importantly without the approval of the parliament. The paper draws from the ethnography of being in war. Soldiers who fought in the DRC war were interviewed, in the aftermath of the war. While soldiers spoke about how they fought, they also talked about the landscape in which they functioned which they deemed a ‘spiritual landscape’.
Believing the invisible: Ghosts and snakes in deployments
One of the greatest challenges of soldiers is to fail to read and understand the landscape in which they are deployed in. On being deployed to the DRC, soldiers carried with them the conventional military understanding of the war landscape: how to read the landscape, to navigate, and how to locate and do obstacle crossing to attack rebels. The DRC landscape was somehow different from what the soldiers could imagine. It was a spiritual landscape, a sacred one. The soldiers’ areas of deployments were infested with ghosts and very big snakes. Soldiers, especially those on sentry duties could see ghosts in the night. As noted by one of the soldiers, Matanda:
It was another war, a war in which we were not trained in. Every night I could see ghosts, I could see a long and twisting flame of fire moving across the deployment. But I could not trigger the gun because that was not the target which I was taught in field craft lessons. This was an invisible target (interview with Matanda, 2017).
In some cases it was not only about seeing the flame of fire in the dark that made soldiers believe that they were seeing ghosts in and around the deployment area. Sometimes the soldiers on sentry duties could hear ‘people-like voices’. The voices were like people in a conversation. The soldiers on sentry duty could try to locate where the voices were coming from in the darkest hour, but they could not. If the soldiers advance to the sources of the voices, the voices will ‘move’ further ground. This made soldiers believe that the deployment area was imbued with ghosts as also Matanda explained while being interviewed.
You could hear some voices in the midnight. You try to pay attention to the voices; you could not make sense of what the voices were saying. I understood the local Congolese language, but you could not understand those voices.
However, on sentry, some soldiers opened gun fire and shot towards the voices in the night, but on the following day those soldiers got sick. What was surprising was that the sickness, which the soldiers suffered from, could not be diagnosed by army medics. The soldiers were weak, and unconscious. They later explained what happened in the previous night, that they opened fire on ghosts in the deployment area. The situation was helped by one of the seasoned soldiers who was in his late 40’s. He had fought in the Zimbabwe liberation struggle. He took them to a nearby village where they were told by the village head not to fight the ‘ghosts’, as these were the spirits of the land. The land was said to belong to the ‘spirits’, including the deployment area. Thus even though the spirits of the Congolese land were not related to the Zimbabwean soldiers, they were said to be working alongside the soldiers to protect the Congolese people from any harm. In some way, the ‘spirits of the land’ were made to be ‘friendly forces’ to the Zimbabwean soldiers.
During this visit to the village head the soldiers were told that they were not supposed to kill snakes in the deployment area. The village head emphasised that snakes in the deployment area were not just snakes as soldiers believed, but these were the spiritual symbols of the land. The village head stated that snakes in the deployment area had lived in the area since the birth of the Congolese land. The snakes were representing the spirits of the land which the soldiers could not see. Hence killing the snakes in the deployment area was synonymous to killing the spirits. The soldiers were told not to be aggressive towards any of these snakes, because if they retaliate this could lead to the death of many of the soldiers in the trenches. Realising the incident which had happened after the soldiers had opened fire on the ghosts, the officer commanding (OC) briefed soldiers to pay attention to the local community ‘rules’ on how soldiers were to live in the trenches. What was astonishing was that the ways that soldiers were to live with snakes and ghosts was not part of the Operation Standing Procedures (OSP’s) i.e. the rules and regulations to be followed by soldiers deployed in war. However, the soldiers lived alongside with snakes without the army headquarters being informed. Snakes could move-in and coil-in the trenches and in particular in the roll beds, i.e. soldiers wartime blankets, and sleep alongside soldiers, but none of the soldiers was bitten by these snakes. Often when soldiers felt and saw the snake inside their blankets, they laughed-off and say, “today I have a girlfriend with me”. The ways that snakes were viewed as “girlfriends” is interesting because it provides us with a vantage point in which we can begin to theorise the landscape of snakes in deployments as spiritualised. Again the snakes as spirits of the land were humanised, i.e. seen as ‘girlfriends’. In a way the local Congolese people made soldiers to begin to view snakes as spirits, but soldiers incorporate this understanding to see them ‘girlfriends’. They were ‘girlfriends’ in the sense that the snake type, such as kraits, cobra and mambas could take a ‘nap’ alongside soldiers in the trenches. As symbols of spirits of the land, snakes were also viewed as having the capacity to ‘fight’ in the war, as was noted by the Congolese village head where the soldiers were deployed.
The belief helped soldiers: none of the soldiers were ever bitten by the snakes. This is despite the fact that soldiers could sleep along with these snakes. The snakes could overnight coil around the AK rifle, but at dawn, they would uncoil by themselves. For the local people, snakes in the deployment were said to be very cooperative and understanding of the soldiers’ operations. In a way the soldiers’ belief in snakes as spirits and as ‘girlfriends’ had helped the local Congolese to establish social relationship with soldiers. The belief in snakes as spirits, had transformed soldiers from mere foreign fighters to local believers of and in the war landscape. Soldiers could not dominate the landscape as they had envisaged at the time of deployment, but they had to depend on the local people’s beliefs to be able to live in and operate in the landscape. This speaks to Woodward’s (2014) writing of and about the landscape as a text. It is a text in the sense that the soldiers were made to believe in the landscape spirits. Thus while Woodward (ibid) asserts that military landscapes are dominated by the imprint of military activities, were soldiers exercise their tactical knowledge, the local spiritual beliefs of and about snakes, made soldiers mere dwellers rather than conquerors of the land. The deployment area and the lines of axis belonged to the ghosts: the spirits of the land.
River mermaids as a threat to soldiering
Soldiers deployed along rivers mainly for tactical reasons. However, at a time of deployment, neither the commanders nor the foot soldiers had any detailed knowledge of the area, especially the rivers. It was the village head who told soldiers that they were not supposed to bath in the rivers with soap, instead they only had to bath with water. In addition soldiers were told not to swim in the rivers because that would anger the mermaids. However, even though soldiers were told to refrain from swimming, they went against the village head ‘orders’. On one Saturday afternoon, while other soldiers were bathing, of course without using soap, one of the soldiers swam, and in the blink of an eye, he was seen floating on water. The other soldiers could not retrieve his body and fearing for their lives they ran to the Officer Commanding who called for the local village head. The village head then came to the river and spoke to the river waters and retrieved the body. The village head insisted that the waters in which the soldier had swum was one of the most dangerous places in the area, where it was believed that the greatest mermaid of the river lived. This instilled fear in soldiers, as they found it difficult to bath in rivers for fear of mermaid rivers. The Officer Commanding ordered that the river was now an out of bounds area. Instead of bathing in the river, the Officer Commanding instructed soldiers to carry water from shallow wells, and bath within the deployment area. On patrols, soldiers avoided rivers. They could not patrol beyond the river for fear of the mermaids. Therefore the spirituality of the river became an obstacle for the soldiers. It was foolhardy for the soldiers to then think of the river as a tactical area.
However, for the brigade commander and the Commanding Officer (CO): commanding from the rear, the river was withheld with utmost and tactical significance as a strategic position to mount an ambush to attack rebels. So, the challenge was that soldiers at the war front could not just withdraw from the rivers to deploy elsewhere, rather the deployment area was highly dictated by those at the rear: the commanding officer. The deployment area was decided upon on a map. Soldiers at the war front would then deploy and carry out patrols as ordered from the rear. Thus it was an initiative of the Officer Commanding at the war front to deal with the spirituality of the rivers: infested with mermaids. Even though the Officer commanding could send a signal briefing the rear commanders about the ways that the soldier was killed by mermaids, it was pretty hard for the brigade commanders to believe how a soldier could be killed in a river without providing evidence for it. Even if a board of inquiry was to be summoned, how would the question be fully responded to: how do we know the soldier who died while swimming was killed by a mermaid? Is there any evidence to substantiate the claim that a soldier was killed by a mermaid? Failure to respond to such questions would simply clarify that the soldier died due to negligence in the context of war.
The very fact that soldiers often could die due to an attack from the unseen, but things which those at the war front could believe in, positioned soldiers in a quandary position. The mermaids in rivers challenged soldiers’ operations for whom it seemed impossible to patrol across and beyond rivers. The ‘waterscape’ was itself imbued with spiritual power of the mermaids which soldiers failed to fight. Soldiers could only depend on the spiritual knowledge of the local Congolese people, that they should not bath in the rivers with soap, nor swim in the rivers. In a way this explains to us the ways the local populations dominated the area rather than the soldiers. While the literature on war and military landscape asserts that soldiers dominate and do violence on the landscape on which they operate (Woodward, 2013), the case of the mermaids’ active presence in Congolese rivers reveals to us soldiers who were rather dominated by the spirits and the local people within which they were deployed.
Map and landscape reading
For soldiers to live and patrol and be able to locate enemy positions, they first tried to utilise the maps, and the grid references, but that was a challenge. It was problematic in the sense that in the DRC it rained most parts of the year, and it was always wet. The features on the map could not easily be located on the ground. The prominent features could not be detected from the map to the ground. A tactical position to ambush enemies might be along the river, which soldiers feared: where mermaids live. Even though a map is a representation of the landscape to be read off (see also Woodward, 2004), the understanding and reading of the map was not synonymous and could not be easily applied on the ground. The ground had its own reading and understanding which was highly and often spiritual. In this regard we can refer to this form of landscape as “spiritualised landscape of war”, one which is understood through the lens of the spirit.
Often on debriefing platoon commanders highly depend on sand tables: using sand to draw the strategic areas to attack the enemy employing the best possible route. For a sand table to be used, it has to be drawn a day before on the ground. This was not possible in the DRC war because heavy rainfall would easily wash it away.
In addition, the DRC landscape was characterised by thick forest. It was difficult to utilise the map to read and understand the landscape to enable patrol route and even lay an ambush in such a forest. The local people insisted that trees belonged to the ancestors and were not supposed to be cut down. The trees were believed to be the ‘tree spirits’, i.e. the spirits lived in those trees. Soldiers were not supposed to cut down the ‘spiritualised trees’ for either tactical reasons and for use as firewood. There were also specific trees in the forest which the soldiers were not allowed to rest on. These trees were said to be ‘housing’ the ‘spirits of the forests’. If the soldiers went against the locals’ beliefs, it was stated that, either huge snakes of the forests, which were symbols of the spirit, would swallow soldiers or bite them which would result in soldiers developing untreatable wounds.
Thus considering the very fact that soldiers have had with the river mermaids, seeing one of their compatriot dying swimming in the river, living with snakes and ghosts in the deployment, none of the soldiers would have wanted to continue risking their lives by not believing in what the local people say about the ways in which the soldiers were to live in the war landscape. In as much as map reading was an important military practice in war, believing in the local people’s spiritual belief of the landscape was central in making soldiers live and ‘operate’ in and beyond the trench warfare.
Materialities of the landscape: Ghosts, snakes and mermaids
Here I want to engage with the military landscape which became spiritualised and was beyond conventional military reading and control. Thus if we are to understand military landscapes, in particular in the context of war: in an African setting were belief, rituals and spiritual practices forms the basis of social life, for example in the DRC war on which this paper is drawn, then we need to theorise ghosts, spiritual snakes, mermaids and trees to understand the ways that military landscape’s function. Ghosts, snakes and mermaids which spiritually emerge on soldiers’ deployment areas, are in themselves, ‘active agents of power and authority’ (Fontein, 2014:713). The ghosts, snakes and mermaids do things to soldiers: they exert power on the landscape by obstructing and disrupting soldiers’ tactics, i.e. ambushes and patrols. The ghosts, snakes and mermaids are ‘materialities of the landscape’, (Fontein, 2015: 12) i.e. they give ‘life’ to the landscape by establishing a relationship between civilians, soldiers and the physical landscape. Thus the ghosts, spiritual snakes and river mermaids all viewed as spiritual, evince the capacity to intrude and disrupt soldiers’ ways of understanding the landscape. Thus the active presence of ghosts, snakes and mermaids in the military deployment area actively re-define the military landscape. There is a co-existence of different materialities: the snakes, mermaids and ghosts which exert different forms of power and authority but all controlling the military landscape. The ‘material presence’ of the mermaids, snakes and ghosts produces evocative descriptions of the landscape as, e.g. mermaids of the river, ‘spirits of the land’. This in some way reveals the immanence of the past that has the capacity to disrupt military power on and over the landscape.
Thus while Woodward (2013) argues that the military do violence to landscapes on which they operate (which indeed is real), this paper reveals that, the materialities of the landscape: ghosts and mermaids, have enduring capacities to disrupt the violence that soldiers seek to do in varying ways and degrees. For Woodward (2014), landscapes are both a text and sites of experience. However, landscape as text reveals to us that there are different subjectivities which interface on landscapes: soldiers and ghosts and soldiers and mermaids and soldiers and snakes. The different subjectivities of soldiers and these spiritual objects is profound in shaping how the landscape is (re)defined. The experience of being in and on that landscape evince and invokes certain emotional and effective capacities.
Conclusion
The blog has revealed that the belief that snakes in the deployment areas were ‘spirits’ of the land, ghosts were protective, river mermaids were custodians of the rivers, and certain trees ‘housed’ the spirits, challenged the conventional soldiering practices, that of dominating the landscape. Instead of the soldiers violating the landscape on which they were deployed, the spirits of the land, water and trees dominated and dictated soldiers’ ways of life and understanding of the landscape. The spiritual beliefs changed soldiers’ tactics on patrol and ambush. Thus focusing on spiritual beliefs and landscape on soldiers’ operations in the context of war allows us to conceptualise the idea of military landscapes, in particular on the ways in which natural surroundings are read and understood as spiritualised. Hence this paper has revealed that military landscape is not only what we see, but also how what we see, and we do not see, in these landscapes interact with the soldiering practices and challenges them. In a way, when the military landscapes are said to be imbued with the ‘spirits’ of the land, it invokes the agency of the spirits which establishes the relationship between the soldier and the invisible world.
References and further reading
Fontein, J (2015) Remaking Mutirikwi: Landscape, water and belonging in Southern Zimbabwe, Woodbridge, James Currey
Makumbe, J, Mw. (2002) Zimbabwe’s hijacked election, Journal of Democracy, 13, 4: 87-101.
Maringira, G. (2017) Military corruption in war: stealing and connivance among Zimbabwean foot soldiers in the Democratic Republic of Congo (1998–2002), Review of African Political Economy, 44: 154, 611-623.
Maringira, G. (2016) Soldiering the terrain of war: Zimbabwean soldiers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (1998–2002), Defence Studies 16.3: 299-311.
Maringira, G. (2015) When the war de-professionalises soldiers: Wartime stories in exile, Journal of Southern African Studies 41.6: 1315-1329.
Rupiya, M. R. (2002) ‘A political and military review of Zimbabwe’s involvement in the second Congo war, 93-108. In J. F. Clark, The African stakes of the Congo war, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002).
Woodward, R. (2004) Military Geographies, Oxford: Blackwell.
Woodward, R. (2013). Military pastoral and the military sublime in British army training landscapes. War and Peat, 45-56.
Woodward, R. (2010) Military Landscapes/Militære Landskap: The Military Landscape Photography of Ingrid Book and Carina Hedén. In Pearson, D., Coates, P. and Cole, T. (Eds.) Militarised Landscapes: Comparative Histories and Geographies. Continuum, London, pp. 21-38
Woodward, R. (2005) From Military Geography to militarism’s geographies: disciplinary engagements with the geographies of militarism and military activities. Progress in Human Geography 29 (6), 718-740
Woodward R. (2014) Looking at Military Landscapes: Definitions and Approaches. In: Renaud Bellais and Josselin Droff, ed. The Evolving Boundaries of Defence: An Assessment of Recent Shifts in Defence Activities. Emerald Publishing UK, 2014, pp. 141-155.