Special Articles Acts of Agency and Acts of God

At the beginning of this decade, newspapers the world over reported the UN general assembly's declaration of the last segment of the 20th century as the International Decade of Natural Disaster Reduction (IDNDR), beginning January 1, 1990. There are, broadly speaking, two categories of disaster - the natural (floods, fires, earthquakes) and the manmade (riots, wars, industrial accidents). Both types result in considerable violence against 'the people especially in an environment that is impoverished, post-colonial, and served by an entrenched bureaucracy. This paper, which partly addresses the subalternist historiographer's problematic of how 'the moment' of people's suffering is to be captured in the writing of history,