CONTESTING HISTORICAL NARRATIVES: THE LEGACY OF HERDERS–FARMERS CONFLICTS IN SELECTED COMMUNITIES OF ADAMAWA STATE, NIGERIA

Abstract

Few conflicts in Nigeria have proved as resistant to resolution as the recurring clashes between Herders and farmers. Commentary on the crisis usually settles on land scarcity, climate stress, and the collapse of traditional grazing corridors, and these pressures are real. But something less visible sits underneath them, and arguably does more damage: the slow distortion of historical memory within and between the two communities. That distortion is what this study set out to examine - its shape, its causes, and what it costs the people living with it - in a set of conflict-affected localities across Adamawa State. The research was qualitative, built around a phenomenological design that put participants' own remembered experience of the conflict at the centre of the inquiry. Data came from in-depth interviews and focus group discussions with 240 men and women drawn from herders and farming communities in four local government areas, along with traditional rulers, religious leaders, teachers, civil society workers, and local historians. Documentary sources gave a further layer of evidence against which the oral material could be checked. What came out of the analysis was a picture of two historical narratives that no longer fit together. Each community remembers itself as the wronged party, and each has let the more cooperative parts of the shared history fade from view. This is not simply what trauma does to memory on its own; politicians, preachers, journalists, and teachers all have a hand in keeping the adversarial version of events alive, because it serves them to do so. The study argues that rebuilding some shared historical ground is not an optional extra but something closer to a precondition for any peace that actually holds, and it ends with a set of specific proposals for how that work could start.