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

Derrida, J., 1970, ‘Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’ viewed 29 September 2015, from http://www.csudh.edu/ccauthen/576f13/DrrdaSSP.pdf

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