Discourse
and the creation of the Other: Understanding
the Rwandan Genocide
Tebogo Gantsa
October 2016
 |
| ©2008 Jon Warren/World Vision |
There are few ways anyone can make sense
of the soul-gouging events that happened between April and June 1994 in Rwanda.
It is in reflecting, in hindsight, that it was the end of an exceptionally
violent century. The twentieth century was the century of the horrors of Sharpeville,
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Auschwitz, Belgian Congo, Vietnam, Palestine, apartheid
and many others. It gives no comfort to know that there were many repetitions
of similar horrors across the globe, with each instance etching soul-gouging
memories on fresh victims and possibly through multiple generations. The
century was not just about brutality and violence. It was about brutality and
violence visited on the Other.
Because of the significance of
commentary on events such as the Rwandan genocide, the conversations are
necessarily broad and wide-ranging. In
this discussion the attempt is to put a few benign strictures to avoid being
led to temptation. This means our conversation will be in three parts. The
first will be a treatment of discourse and society. In the second part we will deal
with conceptual issues that limit understanding of the third world and possible
remedies to that problem. In the last part and by way of conclusion we will
knit the two previous parts and show why they help us understand the Rwandan
genocide. Throughout the discussion we will use assistance from the work of
Michel Foucault, Archie Mafeje and Mahmood Mamdani respectively.
I
Society is a construct. Discourse
features in this construct in that it allows for society to account for its
existence. Everything about it presents itself through discourse such that without
it (discourse), no society could have knowledge of itself. Here it is crucial
that we make a distinction between discursive events (human-human or
human-universe) and discourse. The first difference is that discursive events
are boundless by space and time. The second is that, while discursive events
could be ‘meaning-creating’, the radioactive nature of those meanings
disqualifies them from being regarded as knowledge in the normative sense.
Discourse on the other hand begins where the epistemological project of what
constitutes knowledge begins. This distinction is important. It means that at
the point where there is a break away from discursive events to discourse there
is corresponding knowledge that can be construed as a reference point. In this
way it is possible to locate discourse both spatially and historically.
We now need to explore how the interplay
between society and discourse unfolds. In his inaugural lecture at College de
France in 1970 Michel Foucault proposes that “in every society the production
of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organised and redistributed by a
certain number of procedures”(Young,1981:52). In this sense society and
discourse do not appear due to some fortuitous coincidence. What he suggests is
that at every moment there is a consciousness involved in the efforts expended
by a given society in what it wants to be known, particularly about itself.
This makes the production of discourse a serious undertaking. In the same
passage he goes on to quip that the entire process of control, selection and
redistribution of discourse is calculated “to to ward off its dangers and
powers, to gain mastery over its chance events”. The use of the word redistribution is important. What it
alludes to is that the production of discourse is purpose driven. He ties this
to the exercise of social control by society through its institutions. His
point is that discourse is in many ways an exercise of power, especially the
power to exclude, limit, repress, etc. If one uses his proposed archaeological
method of discourse analysis, one discovers a genealogy that traces changes in discourse through history and the
related changes in the exercise of power(Foucault, 1980).
This unmasking of the discourse-power
relationship assists us in making sense of the violence that is visited on the
Other. An example that comes to mind is how a political philosopher such as
John Stuart Mill can preach melodiously about freedom in On Liberty and still
be able to conjure a rationale for the colonial violence in India in his works
on representative government. Because the production of discourse is conscious,
the creation of the Other is deliberate. Think for instance of how slavery,
colonialism and racism were undergirded by volume upon volume of discourse that
rationalize them which passed as acceptable and credible knowledge. What we
have here is discourse that creates and recreates the Other and a perpetual
state alterity. This is what Edward Said refers to as colonial discourse. The
Other is possible only through a violent discourse-power dynamic that strips
away what is human. What remains is then “fixed” and “redistributed” as
normative. Homi Bhabha tells us that “fixity, as the sign of
cultural/historical/racial difference in the discourse of colonialism, is a
paradoxical mode of representation: it connotes rigidity and an unchanging
order as well as disorder, degeneracy and daemonic repetition”(BhaBha, 1994:66).
In fact Foucault makes a passing remark, in an interview prior to his Debate on
Human Nature with Noam Chomsky, akin to saying that it seems as if the
cultures, histories and livelihoods of other peoples have to be destroyed
before the Other can be known.
II
In the previous part of our discussion
we said the discourse-power dynamic is expressed through social institutions.
In this part we explore the global community as an arena where such power is
exercised. What we seek to do primarily, is to grapple with the notion of
“global confusion” which is sometimes used in describing the international
response to the Rwandan genocide. Here we concern ourselves with some aspects
of discourse in this arena which might have led to limitations in
understanding.
The proposition being made here is that
global institutions are not only wound up but also trapped in a closed
discourse-power cycle that reproduces itself. Although this reproduction’s role
is, according to Foucault, to ward off dangers and powers that uncontrolled
discourse poses to the establishment, it does not give global institutions
mastery over the world’s ‘chance events’. Not least those in the third world.
The reason for this is that there is reluctance, at a conceptual level, to
abandon knowledge about the third world produced through the lens of Western
discourse - the colonial gaze. Any conceptual project dogmatically committed to
this discourse cannot aspire to producing new knowledge. It is stuck at an
interpretative level where, according to Jacques Derrida, one “cannot utter a
single destructive proposition which has not already slipped into the form, the
logic, and the implicit postulations of precisely what it seeks to contest”
(Derrida,1970:2).
While Derrida locates a break with the
limitations of discourse with rupture, scholars like Adesina look to the work
of Archie Mafeje because of their practical extirpation of the discourse of
alterity(Adesina,2008:138). To shift from this Adesina emphasises the need for
scholarship that is “able to decode local ‘vernaculars’: the encoded local
ontology and modes of comprehension”. (ibid, 2008:146). The paper by Adesina
titled Archie Mafeje and the Pursuit of
Endogeny: Against Alterity and Extroversion discusses the subject at
length. There are two important points he makes about endogeneity. The first is
that “being an outsider does not disqualify a scholar from producing works of
profound endogeny”. (ibid, 2008). The
second is that it is not necessary for a scholar to de-link from non-endogenous
systems of knowledge. What should be avoided is the “tyranny of received
paradigms that often obscures the ability to ‘see’ and comprehend social
processes unfolding before us on their own terms”. (ibid, 2008:146).
Perhaps this is what Mahmood Mamdani
does when he explains the validity of political economy in helping to to
“historicize the construction of colonial markets and thereby of market-based
identities”. (Mamdani, 2005:2). Mamdani’s insight is important here. Class
contradictions and other related problems of global capitalism do not suddenly
disappear. According to Mamdani the shortcoming of political economy is that it
can only explain violence when it is a clash between these market-based
identities. From this standpoint
“violence animated mainly by distinctions crafted in colonial law rather than
sprouting from the soil of a commodity economy—explanations rooted in political
economy offered less and less analytical clarity”. (ibid.2005:2).
Many of the issues touched on in this
part of the conversation lay bare two things. The first are conceptual
limitations that often pass unnoticed by institutions that disseminate
information to the public. The second is that if the efforts at remedying the
situation were taken seriously and applied we might not at have to grapple with
notions such as “global confusion”. That is why to a large extent it can be
validly asserted that global institutions are well informed and take deliberate
decisions. This is so even in the case of Rwanda.
III
At the beginning of this conversation we
explored discourse and society. What emerged was that there always exists a
discourse-power complex which finds expression in social institutions. What we
then arrived at is that this complex can and in fact does create the Other who
is the site for dehumanization.
In the case of Rwanda’s recent history Mamdani
speaks of three pivotal moments that contribute to the genocide: Belgian
colonization and racialization of the state in 1920, nationalism and the 1959
revolution and the civil war in 1920(Mamdani,2002:17). All of these moments are
important because they gave a new lease of life to institutions. In other words
they give form to the two dimensions of discourse – history and a locale. . In
this discussion and others Mamdani tells us about three related themes which
form part of the discourse on Rwanda.
Colonial anthropology, the first one, was
instrumental in formalising Tutsi and Hutu as distinct identities which the
state is committed to perpetuate.
According to Mamdani this is in contrast to what had been the case.
“For the
first time in the history of Rwanda, the terms Hutu and Tutsi came to identify
two groups, one branded indigenous, the other exalted as alien. For the first
time, Tutsi privilege claimed to be the privilege of an alien group, a group
identified as Hamitic, as racially alien”. (ibid, 2002:14)
This is in contrast to what he refers to as the
processes of ritual ennoblement where a prosperous Hutu shed his Hutuness and
when impoverished Tutsi families lost their status, processes termed kwihutura
and gucupira respectively.
The second is the purportedly tribal nature of the
conflict in Rwanda. This of course is what prompted the international community
to take no serious action to prevent the conflict. The problem here is that had
the international community been receptive to scholarship that is endogenous
this appreciation of the conflict would not have occurred. In fact Mafeje
points out that the deconstruction of colonial anthropology which showed that
the concept of ‘tribe’ had no basis in African social formations began in the
late 1960’s. Only selective ignorance, which unfortunately continues to this
day, could allow for the perception of the conflict being tribal strife and
nothing more to continue.
The third theme relates to the media and the
international press response to the conflict and genocide in Rwanda. What the
propaganda of the government did was nothing new. It was in keeping with
established discourse, flowing smoothly from 1920. Mamdani says “as the
revolutionaries built Rwanda into a ‘Hutu nation’, they embarked on a program
of justice: justice for Hutu, a reckoning for Tutsi. And in doing so they confirmed
Hutu and Tutsi as political identities.”(ibid, 2002: 15).
By insisting on treating the conflict as civil
strife where there were two neat sides contesting for state power the
international media added to the complexity of the problem. If the local media
in Rwanda was reproducing the old discourse of Hutu-Tutsi antagonisms; the
international press gave credence to it by accepting the reversal of a Hutu
majority government as a democracy uncritically. The church is culpable of the
same too in their simple switching of sides in 1959. Of course this was for the
sake of expediency on its part, but that does not absolve them nonetheless.
Mamdani says international media in Rwanda was
guilty of giving a “premordialist account that tends to explain contemporary conflicts
as replays of timeless antagonisms”. (ibid, 2002: 13). The other difficulty he
says the press finds itself in is that of giving a simple account of
perpetrator and victim that is not reflective of the history. This is indeed a
real difficulty because the press certainly seems to find it difficult to
report in instances where erstwhile victims have become perpetrators. Think for
instance of the state of Israel and how its aggression and apartheid policies
towards Palestine are treated mildly because of the fact of the Holocaust.
Because the media and the press are woven within
discourse in society we should always countenance that it will be used to as an
extension of the establishment to reinforce its control on society. That the
media was used to incite the Hutu population to genocide should appal but not
surprise us. The media should never be an instrument used in the creation of
the other.
References
Adesina,
J. O., 2008,’ Archie Mafeje and
the Pursuit of Endogeny: Against Alterity and Extroversion’, Africa Development,33(4), 133-152
Bhabha,
H. K., 1994, ‘The Location of Culture’, Routledge, New York
Foucault,
M,. 1976, ‘Lecture One: June 1976’, in Gordin, C.(ed), nd, ‘Selected Interviews and Other Writings
1972-1977’,
Pantheon Books, New York
Foucault,
M., 1970, 'The Order of Discourse', in Young, R.(ed), Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist
Reader , pp.51 -78, Boston, Massachusetts.
Foucault,
M., 1980, ‘Power/Knowledge: Selected
Interviews and Other Writings 1972-77’, Pantheon Books, New York
Mamdani,
M., 2002, ‘Making Sense of Political Violence in Postcolonial Africa’, Identity, Culture and Politics, 3(2),
1-24
Mamdani, M.,
2005, ‘Political Identity, Citizenship and Ethnicity in Post-Colonial Africa’,
viewed 29 September 2016, from
http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTRANETSOCIALDEVELOPMENT/Resources/revisedMamdani.pdf
