African Genocide Research Articles

The Postcolonial African Genocide Novel: Quests for Meaningfulness by Chigbo Arthur Anyaduba

The Postcolonial African Genocide Novel: Quests for Meaningfulness by Chigbo Arthur Anyaduba

Book Review: The Postcolonial African Genocide Novel: Quests for Meaningfulness

Book Review: The Postcolonial African Genocide Novel: Quests for Meaningfulness

“Conservation, Tradition and Popular Iconoclasm in North America”

ABSTRACT Throughout North America, contentious debates and protests are occurring over the existence of historic monuments that represent racial hatred. As post-colonial countries, the United States and Canada, are only now grappling with managing historic statues, buildings, and landscapes associated with African American racism and cultural genocide among aboriginal people. The “negative heritage” embedded in these monuments was created by acts of tradition. In this context, tradition is a series of acts and rituals intended to embed cultural values on a place or an object. As North Americans acknowledge the injustice that was done to African Americans and aboriginal people, an iconoclastic movement is underway, resulting in the removal of monuments and buildings. This paper proposes that the role of tradition and iconography should be re-examined in conserving and managing North American built patrimony. Tradition, by its nature, is an intangible heritage and new traditions can transform people’s perceptions of historic monuments. Using the “Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red” installation at the Tower of London as a case study, this article will explore how using tradition can redefine a historic monument within the context of contemporary time and place.

Genocide and Postcolonial African Literature

This essay provides a critical review of the field of postcolonial African genocide writing. The review makes a case for scholarly recognition of the discourse of African genocide literature. The essay advances some broad claims, among which include the following: that genocidal atrocities in Africa have provoked a body of imaginative literature, which, among other things, has attempted to imagine the conditions giving rise to African genocides, and that this body of literature underlines a confluence of sensibilities shaping atrocity writings and their critical receptions in Africa since the mid-twentieth century. The review provides a critical overview of fictional narratives as well as their scholarly receptions bordering on genocidal atrocities in the Nigerian and Rwandan contexts.

Genocide Survivor as Witness and Archive: Rupert Bazambanza’s book, Smile through the Tears: The Story of the Rwandan Genocide (2005).

Scholarship on African genocide by African scholars is still in its infancy. Spurred by studies on the Holocaust, African creative writers are slowly but increasingly rendering narratives of African genocide through their fiction. Steadily, new insights are being generated about the banality and evil that surround genocide in an African context and about the harms it causes. However, the original arguments that once made writing about genocide and the pain it inflicts a taboo, appear to continue to haunt the discipline of writing. First, there is the tendency to look down upon the act of writing about genocide experiences, the pretext being that it is in the nature of narrative to distort the density implied in the existential threat to humanity that genocide poses. Second, some literature of atrocity scholars are convinced that human beings who have not experienced genocide first hand are unable to live or even vicariously recreate the agony that genocide survivors experienced and might be able to relate. From this perspective, a genocide canon seems to have been authorised in which it is suggested that only survivors of genocide can produce authentic accounts of the pain that those who died went through. In recent times, critics and creative writers, some of whom are survivors, have challenged the idea of an absolute narrative of genocide by a survivor as the only true bearer of genocide pain and resistance to it. This article explores the panoply of meanings that a genocide survivor, Rupert Bazambanza, gives formal composition to through the genre of cartoon. The article argues that a genocide survivor is an embodiment of a witness and an archive of the experiences of someone who has survived and can tell the stories of the self and also of others who perished.

Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century South Africa: A “usable past”?

Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century South Africa:A “usable past”? Poppy Fry Imagining the Cape Colony: History, literature, and the South African nation. By David Johnson. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011. Settler Colonialism and Land Rights in South Africa: Possession and dispossession on the Orange River. By Edward Cavanagh. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Anatomy of a South African Genocide: The extermination of the Cape San people. By Mohamed Adhikari. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2011. The Farmerfield Mission: A Christian community in South Africa, 1838-2008. By Fiona Vernal. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Thomas Pringle: South African pioneer, poet and abolitionist. By Randolph Vigne. Woodbridge, Suffolk: David Currey, 2012. The Borders of Race in Colonial South Africa: The Kat River Settlement, 1829-1856. By Robert Ross. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. The rise of African history as a distinct academic discipline coincided with a shift away from formal colonial control and towards independent African nation states. It is not surprising, then, that the first generation of historians of Africa took very seriously the potential for historical narratives and analyses to produce and shape political change. The writing of Africans’ history was, to many of them, an explicitly anti-colonial act—asserting the complexity and humanity of the continents’ residents against an image of Africa as “without history.” In the early 1970s, Terence Ranger distilled this approach to two commitments: “firstly, to African agency in… historical analysis, and, secondly, to the production of ‘usable history’ for the newly independent nation states of Africa.”1 Although the imbrication of historical scholarship and nationalism proved problematic in some cases, Ranger’s invocation of a “usable past” continues to resonate, and historians of Africa continue to operate with the “added urgency” that their work must speak to the continent’s pressing concerns.2 In South Africa, in particular, it seemed obvious that historians needed to engage with the political present. The apartheid state justified its legitimacy through a particular historical narrative—the production of alternative histories was, by definition, anti-apartheid activism. Julian Cobbing’s 1988 article “The Mfecane as Abili: Thoughts on Dithakong and Mbolompo” is one of the more extreme—and influential—examples of South African historians addressing themselves as much to the contemporary political landscape as to historical events. In it, Cobbing argued that British missionaries and officials’ claims of having rescued refugees following an 1833 battle masked their actual purpose—slave raiding. He further suggested that violence in the early nineteenth-century South African interior originated not from the conquests of the Zulu kingdom (as earlier historians had argued), but from the labor-hungry machinations of Europeans—machinations which were hidden in the colonial record.3 This theory of secret interests driving conflict amongst Africans was influenced by and ultimately directed towards so-called “third force” violence in late 1980s and early 1990s South Africa, in which the apartheid state secretly funded and fomented brutal hostilities between African National Congress supporters and other black South Africans. In the end, “The Mfecane as Abili” proved to be trenchant political commentary but problematic history. In the bloody context of late-apartheid South Africa, this may be understandable. Cobbing’s account of events has not held up to scrutiny, but more than a few scholars defend, if not the specific argument of the article, the idea that political usefulness might outweigh historiographical or methodological concerns. Twenty years into the “new South Africa,” historians might be expected to take a somewhat more clear-eyed approach. Yet the question of how, if at all, the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century history of the region speaks to its twenty-first-century present and future remains a contentious one. Clifton Crais, for example, has offered increasingly explicit political critiques in his work, but he has done so by shifting his focus towards the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, examining events and trends wherein the chain of contingency and causality to the present can be more easily demonstrated. Norman Etherington, on the other hand, has argued for a “struggle history” of the early nineteenth century, framed but not determined by South Africa’s post-apartheid political and social needs.4 For better or worse...

Synecdoche and Allegory in the Filmic Record of the Memory of African Genocide in John le Carré's The Constant Gardener

SummaryThis article shows that the filmic depiction of the death of Tessa Quayle, a social activist portrayed by Rachel Weisz, is a memorialised historical allegory of genocide caused by deliberate and lethal clinical trials of drugs conducted throughout Africa. Although the film is set in Kenya, it tells the real story of the clinical genocide committed in Nigeria. The authors of this article do not delve into the academically naïve question of whether or not the film (released in 2005) is a faithful representation of the 2001 novel, for the discrepancies – whether glaringly obvious or tastefully subtle – follow Fernando Mireilles's style and interpretative variorum as a director who is capable of signature adjustments to the face of death. In this case, the death of one white woman (Tessa Quayle) is a synecdoche of the multitudinous African deaths caused by genocide. It is in this sense that the setting (Kenya and not Nigeria) lends credence to the paradoxical representation of the silent genocide in other parts of Africa, beyond Nigeria, through allegorical memorialisation. The authors conclude that the discovery of Tessa Quayle's death is, therefore, a discovery of continental genocide revealed through allegorical representation.

The methodological crisis of theorising genocide in Africa: thinking with Agamben and Butler

Theorising African genocide has reached a methodological crisis. This crisis is not only due to the poor understanding of contexts of genocide in Africa. Nor is it only caused by the continual theoretical reliance on Jewish Holocaust studies. This crisis is also due to the lack of analytical attention to how epistemological and theoretical frames might frame theorising African genocide. In response, I argue that it is essential to examine what frames approaches to theorising African genocide before we debate which approaches can be used. Put simply, we need to think through our approaches before we put them to analytical use. I develop my argument across two sites of analysis. I analyse Giorgio Agamben's statement about the Jewish Holocaust camp as being everywhere by unpacking the context of this statement, and the methodology behind it. I also examine the use of framing theory in contemporary explanations of African genocide by evaluating the degree to which this theory is effective in light of Judith Butler's recent work on political vulnerability and war. I conclude by exploring what Agamben's and Butler's works can do for developing ‘an archaeology of genocidal thinking’ as means of offering a more nuanced theorising of contexts of genocide in Africa.

Racializing ethnicity and ethnicizing racism: rethinking the epistemic conditions of genocide in Africa

This article examines and critiques current scholarship on African genocide. It begins by considering the theoretical approaches to the study of genocide and outlines some of the pitfalls that should be avoided. The discussion then moves to an analysis of the work of Mahmood Mamdani, the highly respected Ugandan author who has written extensively on the genocides in Rwanda and in Darfur, Sudan. His two books Citizen and Subject (1996) and When Victims become Killers (2001) and his essays on Darfur have been extensively reviewed by African and international scholars and his work has gained considerable renown. This makes them useful sounding boards in an investigation of whether current genocide studies are theoretically sound. It is argued that certain theoretical flaws can be identified in Mahmood's work and that scholars of genocide can learn from these and other existing studies to improve our understanding of African genocide. Finally, the paper puts forward some suggestions on a historico-dialectical approach towards a better understanding of genocide in Africa.

Theatre and the Rwandan Genocide

Theatre and the Rwandan Genocide Chantal Kalisa (bio) When I wrote this article in 2006, I was fascinated by the number of artists, writers, filmmakers, and photographers who were interested in exploring the Genocide of Rwandan Tutsi through their own artistic expressions. I focused on theatre because I knew from my own personal experience that this form had been used by Rwandans in exile as a way to express loss of land and identity. Writers and performers such as Kalisa Rugano, Jean-Marie Vianney Rurangwa, and Jean-Marie Kayishema were writing and performing stories to denounce their conditions as perpetual refugees and most importantly to ensure cultural survival by invoking history, "umuco kinyarwanda," through dances, music, rituals incorporated in their plays. My original question for this essay was to ask whether theatre existed in postconflict Rwanda. When I recently addressed the same question to a Canadian theatre Director working with Rwandan artists, she responded by saying "what theatre?. . . but there is no culture in Rwanda." What she meant by her answer was that artistic expression is not a priority in Rwanda, echoing Cynthia Cohen's idea that states that "(i)n addressing painful historical legacies, trials and tribunals are likely to claim far more resources than theater, poetry or exchange programs for artists."1 As I showed in this article, however, theatre is not absent in Rwanda. First of all, it presents itself in unfamiliar ways to Western audiences. Like in most oral-based societies, Rwandan forms combine art (dance, music, etc.) with culture and rituals. The word "umuco" translated as "culture" means both art and culture. In other words, rituals performed in Rwandan daily practices as well as major life events are both cultural and artistic expressions. Since 2006, the number of formal theatrical productions on postconflict Rwanda continues to grow and these can be found in Africa, Europe, and North America. What has since intensified is the transnational nature of this theatre. As I mention in the essay, the Genocide of Rwandan Tutsi brings together a number of global actors, compelling artists around the world to explore its causes, effects, [End Page 159] and possible preventive solutions. Whether in Rwanda or not, artists feel the responsibility to intervene with their craft for the sake of reconciliation, healing, and violence prevention. A play on genocide is a representation of and not the "true" story, as Jean-Pierre Karegeye explains. "[T]o paint, to film and to write genocide is to recreate . . . a drama shared by humanity at a smaller scale, without site and time contingency."2 This universality is well-illustrated in the words of the Senegalese writer Boubacar Boris Diop, who goes as far as saying, "I do not live in Rwanda, Rwanda lives in me."3 Thus, the existence of a transnational theatre can be explained by this universality, by non-Rwandan artists feeling inhabited by Rwanda and its history. Many of the productions are collaborative and a veritable mix of languages, cultures, and nations. The contexts vary and are flexible. The work of multitalented artist Koulsy Lamko, discussed below, shows him as the initiator of this transnational trend that currently dominates artistic responses to conflict in Rwanda. It should also be noted that for the last few years, Lamko has continued his interventions in Mexico, proving once again that geography is no hindrance to art projects. In 1994, Rwanda was the scene of genocide, or more precisely in French le théâtre du génocide (theatre of genocide). Perpetrators and victims played their role while the rest of the world watched the "spectacle" live on television. Perhaps because of its spectacular aspect, the Rwandan genocide has inspired a number of artistic materials. In the last decade, we have indeed witnessed the growth of literary and artistic expression in relation to the Rwandan genocide. Survivors and witnesses have told their stories in books and songs, and journalists as well as other travelers "to the end of Rwanda," to use Véronique Tadjo's words, have borne witness to the genocide.4 Artists who were not there have also attempted to represent the "African genocide" and have cast themselves as participating in the process of reconciliation. I am...