SHARED FATE.

You are certain they have misunderstood you.

They are equally certain you have misunderstood them.

This is where most conflicts begin to harden. Not at the point of disagreement, but at the point where each person becomes convinced that the other person’s version of events is not merely different, but dishonest. A deliberate refusal to see. A convenient blindness. A story arranged to make them innocent and you unreasonable.

So you rehearse the conversation again. Not the real conversation, of course. The imagined one. The one where your sentences arrive perfectly formed, where they finally hear the thing they have been avoiding, where their face changes because the truth has reached them at last.

Somewhere else, perhaps at the same time, they are rehearsing their own version.

Conflict has a strange generosity. It gives everyone a private theatre in which they are always the one who finally makes sense.

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On one side, you have the grievance.

It is not imaginary. Something happened. Someone said something they should not have said. Someone took more than their share of the credit, or the inheritance, or the attention, or the mercy. Someone made a decision and left you to live inside its consequences. It would be unkind, even false, to ask you to pretend that the wound is small just because the relationship is large.

On the other side, there is another grievance.

It may not cancel yours. It may not even be equal to yours. But it exists. They remember a different beginning. They have their own evidence, their own sentence they cannot forget, their own version of the day everything shifted. They are not experiencing themselves as the obstacle in your life. They are experiencing you as the obstacle in theirs.

This is the first cruelty of conflict: it narrows the imagination. It makes another person’s interior life feel excessive, almost offensive. Why should they have reasons? Why should they have context? Why should they get to be complicated when the harm is so clear?

So the story splits.

A brother tells the family that he is the only one being realistic. His sister tells her friends that realism has always been the name he gives to selfishness. A colleague says she is protecting the standard of the work. Another says she is protecting herself from being erased again. A nation says it is defending its way of life. Another says it is trying to survive the way of life imposed on it.

Both sides gather witnesses. Both sides develop language. Both sides become fluent in the failures of the other.

The opposite of your enemy is rarely your future. More often, it is another version of the same future, frightened of you from the other side.

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It can even feel clarifying. There is relief in choosing a side and staying there. Relief in knowing which door not to use, which table not to sit at, which name will make the room change temperature. A divided life can masquerade as an organised one because the boundaries are so clear.

For a while, the arrangement works.

You keep to your side of the family. They keep to theirs. You avoid the meeting when you know they will be present. They arrive late enough to miss you and leave early enough not to be accused of leaving because of you. The community reorganises itself around the fracture. The workplace learns which names not to mention in the same room. The old friendship survives as weather: present, atmospheric, never directly addressed.

There is a kind of peace in this. Not the good kind. The administrative kind. A peace made of avoidance, schedules, separate WhatsApp groups, different entrances, carefully managed seating plans. The conflict has not ended. It has become infrastructure.

Then something shared begins to suffer.

The mother whose children no longer speak has to celebrate birthdays in sections. The project loses its force because everyone is protecting territory instead of building the thing. The house becomes quieter, but not more peaceful. The community wins its arguments and loses its trust. The group chat remains active, yet nothing nourishing passes through it anymore.

This is the moment that is hardest to admit: your conflict with them has begun to cost something that belongs to both of you.

Not equally, perhaps. Not fairly. But truly.

Centuries ago, the Akan looked at this absurd, painful arrangement and drew two crocodiles sharing one stomach.

Funtumfunefu Denkyemfunefu is a long name for a situation most people recognise immediately: two heads, two appetites, two directions of attention, one belly between them. Each crocodile fights for food as though victory could belong to one mouth alone. But whatever either one eats enters the same body. Whatever either one denies, the same body goes without.

The brilliance of the image is that it does not sentimentalise the crocodiles. It does not make them gentle. It does not ask them to become one head, or one opinion, or one harmless creature. Their difference remains visible. Their teeth remain visible. Their conflict remains visible.

Only the stomach tells the truth neither head can afford to see.

Conflict becomes dangerous the moment each side mistakes the shared consequence for someone else’s problem.

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This is not a simple argument for unity. Unity is often the word people use when they are tired of the details. It can become a pressure applied to the wounded by those who prefer a quiet room to an honest one. There are conflicts that should not be smoothed over. There are distances that protect something essential. There are people whose access to you should remain limited, because the shared stomach does not mean the same mouth must be trusted again.

The symbol is not asking for softness where clarity is required.

It is asking for accuracy.

Accuracy says: this person harmed me, and our lives remain entangled.

Accuracy says: I may need distance, but I should not confuse distance with independence.

Accuracy says: my victory may not be a victory if the thing we both depend on collapses underneath it.

This is why the image unsettles us. It refuses the clean pleasure of being entirely separate from the people we oppose. It interrupts the private theatre. It asks what will happen to the body if the heads continue behaving as though hunger is a private matter.

You can see it everywhere once you notice it.

Two siblings waiting for the other to apologise while their father grows older in the middle. Two departments competing for influence while the organisation becomes less capable of doing the work both departments claim to value. Two former partners so committed to proving who failed whom that the child begins carrying messages between households. Two political sides each imagining that the other can be defeated without damage to the common ground beneath them.

The heads keep score.

The stomach keeps account.

And the stomach’s account is colder, less dramatic, more faithful to reality. It does not care who was sharper in the argument. It does not care whose friends agreed. It does not care which side produced the better thread, the better quote, the better evidence of betrayal. It records what was fed and what was starved.

The heads can survive on being right for a surprisingly long time. The stomach cannot.

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What would change if you stopped asking only, What did they do to me? and also asked, What is our conflict doing to the thing we both still need?

Not instead of the first question. The first may be necessary. It may be the only honest beginning. But without the second, the conflict can become a room with no windows. Everyone inside grows fluent in grievance and forgets to check the air.

The shared thing may be a family. A child. A friendship group. A workplace. A neighbourhood. A tradition. A country. A future neither side can enter alone, no matter how convincingly either side describes the failures of the other.

This is not the sentimental work of imagining the best of everyone. Sometimes the best is not available. Sometimes the other person has behaved badly, repeatedly, and without remorse. The shared stomach does not erase harm. It only prevents harm from being mistaken for a private event.

This does not solve the conflict. Seeing the stomach is not the same as knowing what to do next. Sometimes the next thing is a conversation. Sometimes it is a boundary. Sometimes it is mediation, apology, repair, distance, legal protection, shared custody, a new process, a long silence that stops pretending to be peace.

But it changes the quality of your seeing.

You begin to understand that the other head is not merely in your way. It is attached to a body you are also living from. Their hunger has consequences. So does yours. Their refusal costs something. So does yours. Their version is incomplete. So is yours.

This is the hard mercy of Funtumfunefu Denkyemfunefu. It does not flatter us by saying we are all the same. It honours reality by saying we are often more bound together than our anger permits us to admit.

Morning comes. One crocodile eats. The other refuses, because the first one ate. Then the first refuses, because the second refused. Somewhere beneath the performance of principle, the shared stomach waits.

It does not take sides.

It only grows hungry.

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