Muchativugwa Liberty Hove

North-West University

muchativugwahv@gmail.com 22055215@nwu.ac.za

Re-victimising the victim; glamourising tragedy

Abstract

This article unpacks both the textual and visual vocabulary of war and genocide and, in the

process, seeks to understand how successive generations interpret these memories in Africa

through literary historiography. Re-victimising the victim; glamourising tragedy interrogates

therefore whether or not absolute truth about the experiences can ever be possible, or even

desirable. Wars in Africa, and genocide in particular, have been characterised by specific

stages, including, among others, classification, symbolisation, dehumanisation, organisation,

extermination and, finally, denial. Three inter-related discourses have exerted a palpable

influence in shaping the perceptions of and about war and genocide: juridical, cinematic and

literary historiography. In the uncanny packaging and distribution of these tropes of tragedy,

devastation and loss, it is vital to ask whether or not graphic images of war and genocide

provide insights into the causal factors for such strife. Exhibitions of horror are, like other

mass communication strategies, frequently charged with purveying compassion fatigue rather

than the truthful confrontations, past and present. Juridical and museological attention to the

aftermaths may, ultimately, be no guarantors that the facts of war and genocide will be

understood more fully; rather, they re-victimise victims and (un)intentionally glamourise

tragedy.

Key words: Re-victimising, memorialisation, torture narratives, symbolisation, cinematic

and literary packaging, peripatetic search

Introduction

Wars in Africa, and genocide in particular, have been characterised by specific stages,

including, among others, classification, symbolisation, dehumanisation, organisation,

extermination and, finally, denial. Three inter-related discourses have exerted a palpable

influence in shaping the perceptions of and about war and genocide: juridical, cinematic and

literary historiography. In the uncanny packaging and distribution of these tropes of tragedy,

devastation and loss, it is vital to ask whether or not graphic images of war and genocide

provide insights into the causal factors for such strife. Exhibitions of horror are, like other

mass communication strategies, frequently charged with purveying compassion fatigue rather

than the truthful confrontations, past and present. Juridical, narratological and museological

attention to the aftermaths may, ultimately, be no guarantors that the facts of war and

genocide will be understood more fully; rather they re-victimise the victims and

(un)intentionally glamourise tragedy. Re-victimising the victim; glamourising tragedy

unpacks and interrogates whether or not absolute truths about military and genocidal

experiences can ever be possible, or even desirable.

This article also engages with what it perceives to be a pernicious practice: atrocity tourism.

Atrocity tourism privileges difference. It exploits images and murals in order to package and

distribute them primarily to a privileged consumerist audience who can access the packaged

versions and, secondarily to victims of persecution and genocidal experiences. Atrocity

tourism selectively depicts and projects profiles of victimage where the emotional contagion

is re-inscribed in the psyche of survivors. Murals and collages of pictured violences have a

profoundly disturbing effect that arguably falls short of representing and historying the

totality of experiences of genocidal wars. A narcissistic propensity is evident in this

packaging of grossly mutilated bodies of victims and often, their inadvertent deformations in

the military encounters, as if to confirm the indisputable barbarity of the purveyors of such

violence.

Richard Dowden (2008) argues that the long-run effects of the 1884–5 Berlin Congress are

marked in its mission statement that created rules on how to “peacefully” divide Africa

among European nations for aggressive colonisation and exploitation of Africa’s human and

natural resources. In Altered states, ordinary miracles, Dowden (2008:13) makes three

pertinent observations about the scramble for Africa:

Border drawing was arbitrary and essentially artificialised homogeneity;

Border design partitioned ethnic cleavages and these ethnic partitions have continued to

suffer devastating civil, and often genocidal wars; and

Consequent upon Berlin, causal negative effects, such as patronage politics, have

contributed to country and ethnic-family fissures where the dominant lexicon has become

war, horror, victimage and re-victimisation.

“Imagined” states, such as Ethiopia, Central African Republic (CAR), Congo, Rwanda,

Somalia and the secessionist Biafra have been driven by conflict and strife as part of the long-

run effects that Dowden observes in the architecture of documents crafted at Berlin. Berlin

artificially “homogenised” inherently different ethnicities in its cartography and,

consequently, set aflame rivalries that, in the postcolony, have been stoked by an agenda-

setting hybrid of loyalties. Michalopoulous and Papaioannou (2011:10) also point out that

since 1970, in Africa, there have been 49 civil wars; seven, including Rwanda, are classified

as “international internal”, with 42 classified as internal armed conflicts. The conflict that

flared into genocide in Rwanda lasted a hundred days, from 6 April 1994 to 18 July 1994.

The elimination of Tutsi loyalists was intent on destroying, in whole or part, a national, ethnic

or religious people perceived as “vermin”. International responses, particularly from America

and other Western nations, could have taken the following forms:

● Presidential statements, White House and Downing Street correspondences and press

interviews that condemned genocide;

● State Department diplomatic visits to sites of genocide;

● American, French and British military interventions, soft and hard;

●American, French and British public protests, letters to the editors, articles and opinion

polls.

None of these anticipated responses was evident. There seems to be a surreptitious agenda in

such silences, an agenda that seeks to “narcotise” sceptics who perceive deliberate non-action

when the “subaltern” and the “other” are both agent and victim.

Almost 120 years after Berlin, the International Criminal Court of Justice (ICC) was set up in

The Hague, the Netherlands, in order to deal with “mass atrocities”, genocide, war crimes and

crimes against humanity. The ICC is generally defined as a permanent, treaty-based,

international criminal court. It was established to promote rule of law, and to ensure that the

gravest crimes do not go unpunished. The ICC is currently under attack for being perceived

as the citadel of neocolonialism, principally because from 2007 to 2010, the following cases

have been prepared and brought before the office of the prosecutor at The Hague:

2007 – The first accused was Thomas Lubanga, former commander-in-chief of the Patriotic

Forces for the Liberation of Congo (FLPC). The second was Bosco Ntaganda, also of FLPC.

2009 – Germain Katanga and Mathieu Ngudjolo Chui were charged of crimes against

humanity and war crimes, both from the DRC.

Omar Hassam al-Bashir, the sitting Sudanese president, was charged for crimes in Darfur,

Sudan.

Bahr Idriss Abu Garda, also from Sudan, was charged for killing 12 UN peace-keepers in

Darfur.

2010 – Jean Pierre Gombo was charged for crimes against humanity and war crimes.

On the court’s wanted list are Joseph Kony, Vincent Otti, Dominic Ongweni and Okot

Odhiambo, all from Uganda, Africa. Joseph Kony, according to A poisoned chalice (2011:1)

for instance, “abducted and abused children, carried out atrocities of the most appalling

nature, and had a cultish aura that seemed to negate any rational political agenda”. The

perceived trouble with the selectivity of the ICC is that perpetrators of war, crimes against

humanity and genocide are African – Charles Taylor of Liberia (transferred to the UK in

order to serve a 56-year sentence, October 2013), Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto

(presidential incumbents in Kenya; President and Vice President) – the Western accomplices

and perpetrators have been left untouched. Selective targeting of “overpoliticised” individuals

by Western governments in Syria (Asad), Libya (Moummar Qaddafi), Iraq (Saddam Hussein

and Tariq Aziz) and Palestine (Yasser Arafat and Ali Halimeh) are justified as targets for

“sanitised interventions” that proffer democratic processes and peace, none of which has been

established so far. This way, the ICC’s formidable mandate of ending impunity for the worst

crimes in the world through “justicing the victims” has been characterised by tensions and

divisive engagements. African Union (AU) member states, in October 2013, just fell short of

unanimously resigning en-masse from the protocols of the ICC.

The crimes for which all génocidaires have been charged constitute a tenuous legal

framework that has been called “situational gravity”. Recalcitrant African states targeted for

such juridical inquiry into and prosecutions for mass atrocities perceive the ICC as an

international legal system that cannot effectively and efficiently reach or prosecute the

perpetrators of many atrocities. Britain, France and America have been cited as hypocritical

because of their participation in Iraq, Egypt and Syria and the ways in which they have

manipulated domestic (dis)order and international governance and opinion. African

genocidaires therefore perceive themselves as “othered” by a “globalising” judicial system

that seeks, theoretically, “rule of law,” justice and impartiality.

Mass atrocities and “situational gravity” imply three volatile elements:

Harms evoking “human alarm” and, therefore, “global concern”,

Systematicity in the execution of the crimes, and

The contention that state-sanctioned crime is graver than the crimes of rebel groups.

Perhaps because of the tenuous legal terms here, the ICC is increasingly perceived as a court

that can only symbolically express outrage and condemnation – an impotent legal and global

institution. Partisan considerations, extraneous to the law, downplay “other crimes” while

highlighting others, a phenomenon that has been called “the CNN and al-Jazeera effect”

where even the mass media selectively highlights certain international events over others. A

facetious cognitive heuristics leads to mass media focusing on the most visibly palpable of

crimes. The argument here is that criminal law is not only about deterring future wrongs or

exacting retribution. Rather, criminal law is understood as forming, and periodically

reinforcing, a moral consensus among the law-abiding. This way, criminal law enhances

social solidarity.

There are a number of questionable insertions in the documentation of the charter of the ICC,

for instance. Article 98 confers immunity from prosecution of all American servicemen.

Article 16 of the ICC court statute also allows the UN Security Council to block ICC

indictments by majority vote. The skewedness of such proclamations and promulgations

allows sceptics to decipher the impunity of the United States, and the ways in which such a

state parades its professed exceptionalism. The argument in this segment of the article is

more succinctly conveyed by Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2009:182) who observes that

“systems of governance that emerged in pre-colonial Africa and [after Berlin] were

underpinned by complex ideologies involving an intricate interplay of authoritarianism,

militarism, populism... patriarchal tendencies, kinship and communalism”. Indeed, the

articulation of power and governance was permeated and mediated by these crucial

ambiguities and contradictions.

Without condoning the massacres and genocide perpetrated by those charged by the ICC so

far, it is crucial to understand the mental health problems that are a result of war and strife.

Munashe, the protagonist in Alexander Kanengoni’s novel, Pawns (1997), eventually

commits suicide at the end of the war in Zimbabwe because of the horrors that are indelibly

printed on his mind. Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), the most invisible ogre created by

genocidal wars, hounds Munashe till he takes his life. After the CNN, Al-Jazeera and BBC

cameras have left the war-torn regions, tears are the most profound expression of deep pain

and trauma. Grief in those affected by war is evident in sad eyes, internal and often

psychological crises, harrowing memories, emotional wheals, invisible voices and frequent

gunshots, explosions and delimbed body parts. Indeed, when “tears become a language” there

is urgent need for scholarship to seek an epistemological understanding of re-victimisation,

an engaged and enraged scholarship that examines evolving histories, emerging marginalities

and the unstated agenda of visual representations.

Biafra: The tempestuous template of There was a country

One of the principal tensions that courses through the experiences of Biafra (1966–1970)

relates to the efficacy of visual media as a representative field of this episode. Put simply, do

visual media have more successes in representing and historying the genocidal experiences

that unfolded in Biafra?

Genocide is derived from Latin roots, genos (race/tribe) and cide (killing). Genocide

therefore, quite often, is social, political and perhaps much more “everyday” and permanent

in its effects, rather than just an ungraspable and unspeakable, accidental moment of

madness, implicating “them” instead of “us.” Patriarchal loyalties, ethnic cleavages and

resource-plunder/manipulation often compellingly drive genocidal agendas.

Biafra, between 1966 and 1970, witnessed atrocity, “Igbo cleansing”, torture, mass starvation

by death and lasting psychological scars that drove many an Igbo, like Munashe, to suicide.

In There was a country, Chinua Achebe (2013) captures these horrors in the entire

autobiography and, more succinctly, two poems, Refugee mother and child and Vultures.

Writing of the media war, Achebe (2013:199) clarifies his position relative to the impact of

televisual images:

In the televised Biafran War, blood, guts, severed limbs from the war front flooded

into homes around the world… in real time. Television invaded without mercy the

sanctity of people’s living rooms with horrifying scenes of children immiserated by

war… Biafra became synonymous with tear-gutting imagery of starving babies…

blown out bellies, skulls without subcutaneous fat…(my emphasis).

In connecting to my thesis of televisual re-victimisation, Achebe confesses that “for those of

us on the ground in Biafra, where this tragedy continued to unfold, we used a different

language… the language of memory, of death, of despair, suffering and bitterness” (Achebe,

2013:199). For Achebe, the images conveyed through television de-sanctified the privacy of

home and their impact was invariably to wrench tears and compassion fatigue from the

viewers. Thus, in place of pictures, Achebe resorts to words and the language of desperation

and suffering in Refugee mother and child. He writes of

a mother’s tenderness

for a son she soon will have to forget

…she held

a ghost smile between her teeth

and in her eyes the ghost of a mother’s

pride as she combed the rust-coloured

hair left on his skull…

she did it like putting flowers

on a tiny grave.

Achebe manages to invite readers to smell the heavy odours of diarrhoea, visualise the

washed out ribs and dried up bottoms. Each reader emerges with a different tapestry of

pictures rather than the selectively manufactured images of photojournalism. There is a

certain currency and fidelity in this language of memory, layered with the genuine bitterness

over the futility of life that seems absent in still and motion pictures. Achebe privileges and

indexes the entire autobiographical text in order to re-inscribe both his history and identity as

simultaneously Igbo and Nigerian. The strife and war in Biafra is already known and

recognised from the photojournalistic displays, but Achebe’s public signature and

participation can only be clearly hearkened in the repetition of words that carve his record of

restrictions and choices, nomadism and dislocation, words replete with nuances of

solitariness and solidarity. The circumstances surrounding There was a country are about

being both Igbo and Nigerian, a panoply of identities that is rhizomatic with the world since

Achebe’s nomadic experiences are saturated with and propelled by a despotic, Nigerian

political and military machinery. As a selfing discourse, written 43 years after the Biafra

War, There was a country becomes a “retrospective contemplativeness” (Assman, 1995:129)

where the ambivalent processes of deterritoriliasation and reterritorialisation of the

Biafran/Nigerian spaces compel a reconceptualisation of home and becoming.

This article has already argued that genocide is characterised by six seminal steps:

classification, symbolisation, dehumanisation, organisation, extermination and, finally,

denial. At the end of the Biafran War, with over a million Igbos gouged by vultures and

gunfire and rudimentary machetes at the hands of Obafemi Awolowo, the last stage in

genocide, denial, takes on a sinister form. Biafra is not a subject open to discussion; Biafra

has not been taught as part of the bitter Nigerian experience; Biafra has been de-historicised.

Yet, ironically, Biafra remains, in spite of all excuses, a stubborn, ineradicable episode. There

was a country is therefore read as an important addition to the conversations about genocide

and the reflective insights and experiences afforded to both victims and perpetrators alike.

Witnessing and picturing violence: Photojournalism and glamourising tragedy

In 1994, Kevin Carter, a South African photojournalist, published a disturbing photograph of

a child being stalked by a vulture in the conflict in Sudan. That same year, Kevin Carter

committed suicide. Whereas Susie Linfield (2010) argues that viewing photographs of

torture, mutilation and death is not exploitative but rather a necessary step in alleviating

political violence, this segment of Re-victimising the victim; glamourising tragedy contests

that photographs are exploitative, deceitful, pornographic and voyeuristic. The drones, the

pangas, the machetes and landmines that are made in the US, the UK, France and other states

are not pictured in the violent furore dramatised on African spaces. Such weaponry is made

and supplied on the immoral and mercantilist understanding that they would be used to kill

and maim.

I enlist the voice of Dona DeCesare (2013:1), who asks pertinent questions related to

photojournalism:

How do you stay safe, stay ethical and tell good stories when you are covering

violence, and dealing with [women] and children, and foreign cultures…Why do

words so often fail to express the impact of terror, tragedy and disaster? What does it

take for survivors to tell their stories?...What role do journalists play in the process of

finding narratives, meaning, and justice in the face of atrocity?

In witnessing and picturing violence, genocide, and massacre, the photojournalistic becomes

a participant in the strife, taking angles of victimage and, in the process, re-victimises the

victim. Pictures of war are constituted of atrocity, bloodshed and tears. Nothing but injustice

emerges from such narratives, hence the subtitle of this article, “glamourising tragedy”. The

spectacle of violence verges on the gross and narcissistic. Photojournalism, for instance,

becomes complicit in tragic scenes, both as record and display in the public necklacing of the

“burning [Mozambican] man” in South Africa’s xenophobic chapter in 2008. Like

pornography, photojournalism has come to mean “the violation of dignity, exploitation,

objectification, putting misery and horror on display, moral and political perversion… a

practice in excesses” (Campbell, 2012:6).

Modernity’s culture of spectatorship, coupled with its incessant exposure to harrowing

images, maps photojournalism’s preoccupation with crisis coverage and this, we argue, abets

and ratchets a cultural meme where international responses to crises are overtly insufficient,

indifferent, or, arguably, avoided. The political economy of disturbing “international

conflicts” that are bereft of oil, diamonds and other exploitable natural resources is that they

apparently are not compelling enough to galvanise concerted “international” responses.

Campbell (2012:20), however, perceives the particular individual image as a stimulus to

responsiveness, arguing that

A single individual is viewed as a psychologically coherent unity, whereas a group is not;

Identifiable victims are more “vivid” and hence more compelling;

Identifiable victims are actual.

He argues that “emotional contagion” produced by particular individual shots of powerless

victimhood consolidates the efficacy of photojournalism’s peripatetic search for “good

stories”. What Campbell observes here is quite related to Walter Lippmann’s (1986) “agenda

setting theory” which analysed the impact of media on audiences’ perceptions of and

responses to events that etch pictures on our minds. The selectivity of the media, and

especially photojournalism, functions in a deterministic way principally in priming, vivid

presentation and positioning of specifically volatile projections of horror.

The agency of performative and ideological prisms

Two films on genocide, Hotel Rwanda and Sometimes in April are examined in this segment

both as performative and ideological prisms through which mass participation in genocide

was disseminated. Ethnicity is fore grounded in both films, emphasising a routinised

demonisation of “the other” and the bloody reprisals who became a consequence of this

invocation. Juvenal Habyarimana, then president of Rwanda and a Hutu himself, set in

motion an incendiary agenda against the Tutsi minority as part of a legitimising protocol,

rubanda nyamwinshi (majority rule) for his stay in power. The Tutsi minority was

delegitimised, specifically through classification as inyenzi intokanyi, the cockroaches.

Political power, which at the end of the colonial reign had been passed over to a Tutsi

“aristocracy”, was being re-invented by the Hutu under Habyarimana. The radio became a

key site for the articulation and broadcasting of a stilted propaganda that resonated with the

virtuoso of the Hutu grouping. For instance, Simon Bikindi, a Hutu singer, composed anti-

Tutsi songs that were repeatedly played on RTLM in order to bolster their dehumanisation.

In a review of the film Hotel Rwanda, and the compassion fatigue that it generates, David

Campbell (2012:6) argues that this film tackles “one of the most horrifically ugly events

[displaying] a terrifying campaign of genocide… while the rest of the world looked and did

nothing”. Paul Rusesabagina, a Hutu himself, stars as the hotel manager at Les Milles

Collines in Kigali. He is a successful businessman, and wields massive political capital

because he is well-connected. But his wife, Tatiana, is a Tutsi. As the violence escalates, Paul

Rusesabagina’s hotel soon becomes a “refugee camp”, and his “guests” (the Tutsi minority)

grow more precarious each day as the Hutu siege becomes a ubiquitous menace at

roadblocks, in churches and every conceivable space in Rwanda.

Sometimes in April is another cinematic exploration of vexed and polarised ethnicities, the

Hutu and Tutsi. In the real and the reel, one Hutu family is torn apart by the genocidaires and

Idris Elba stars in his role as he defies Hutu hegemony and tries to move his Tutsi wife to

safety. Honore, Augustin Elba’s brother has been arrested and is awaiting trial in Arusha,

Tanzania, for the bloodless role that he and other journalists played in the Rwanda genocide.

A United States Deputy Assistant Secretary of State, Prudence Bushnell, is cast in a role in

order to convey her frustration and sadness since she fails to persuade the US to intervene in

the genocidal crisis in Rwanda. The reason proffered in the rejection to intervene is cold: to

avoid “another Mogadishu” where 18 American soldiers were killed in active combat in

Somalia.

In both films, the unbending critical view remains that as the genocide unfolds, the

“international” world looks askance. Journalistic figures range from 620 000 to 800 000 Tutsi

killed during 2004 alone in Rwanda (United Human Rights Council, June 2014). Both reels

and the photographs shot and disseminated during the conflict constitute an intertextual

narrative linking the political situation in Rwanda to the “consumption matrix” where viewers

reacted vicariously to both cinematic and visual displays of horror. In tandem, these tropes of

representation (un)intentionally glamourise tragedy and call upon the world to react in

specifically packaged ways. Nicholas Sarkozy, the French president, encountered the

Rwandan genocide at the Memorial of the Rwandan Genocide during a state visit in Kigali on

25 February, 2010. He remarked that “France and the international community had failed to

act during the genocide because [they] suffered a kind of blindness.” His public remarks

came after the event. What remains incorrigibly evident is the fact that the largely faceless

victims of this genocidal episode, as depicted in the mural, died and are forever beyond the

reach of the filmic and photographic displays. Equally, the survivors have their memories of

departed ones endlessly stoked in revisiting the scenes of horror and re-looking at the

perpetrators. Such experiences re-victimise the victims. When “the good story” of genocidal

crime is told, it is the victim’s narrative that is remembered. Such painful stories are,

ironically, tremendously important in the memorialisation and reconstructive processes; they

represent a difficult equilibrium between ethics and reconstruction, torture, hurt and memory.

Injustice indeed becomes a verb in the systematic catalogue of rape and forced impregnation

and de-limbing of genocidal victims.

Literary historiography and autobiographical dimensions

Sarah Prett (2009: ii) suggests that literature has the potential to act as both a laboratory for

the testing of limitations of narrative identity and the resilience of ethical mores. She adds

that the representation of trauma and torture has an important part to play in the readership’s

attempts at rehabilitation. This segment of the paper selectively analyses three narratives of

genocide: Dee Brown (1971) Bury my heart at Wounded Knee, Richard Wright (1964) Native

Son and Alex la Guma (1978) In the fog of the season’s end. As a set, these narratives

provide an alternative and complementary ethnography of the vexed realities and experiences

of marginalised bodies and their societies in a world of interconnecting local and global

hierarchies. The principal connection among them is the biographical mode, an artistic act of

camouflage amenable to the storying of nomadic experiences in spaces that are characterised

by being banned and confined to designated areas. The ever-shifting plateaus of experience in

which the political exerts monumental presence allow the inscription of re-membered

archival versions of injustice.

Bury my heart at Wounded Knee reconstructs the decimation of the Dakota, Pinca, Cheyenne,

Apache, Aztec and Cochise natives in the American episode of opening frontiers for white

settlement. Through the voices of women, children and the chief spokespersons, Dee Brown

demonstrates that the violence unleashed on the American natives constitutes genocidal

tragedy: they were ruthlessly murdered and the perpetrators of this genocide, the white

militia, were given medals and accolades for “distinguished service”. The social, cultural and

political rights of Native Americans are violated by white militia and military commanders

while the political masters of this wave of brutality validate their atrocities. Thus, to the

victims, the Indians, “it seemed that these Europeans hated everything in nature – the living

forests and their birds and beasts, the grassy glades, the water, the soil, the air itself” (Brown,

1971:48). In an even more poignant observation, Black Elk and Chief Seattle state that “they

[Europeans] made us many promises, more than I can remember, but they never kept but one;

they promised to take the land; they took it” (Dee Brown, 1971:67).

The Wounded Knee Massacre, as it has come to be called in American history, demonstrates

the sheer brutality of white soldiers as they shot women and infants at point-blank range. The

grief and mourning, the palpable anger of the Native Americans are inestimable, particularly

in the book more than in the filmic version.

In the fog of the season’s end is read as a national allegory, a novel that demonstrates that the

conscience of apartheid’s operational ethos verges on violence. Elias Tekwane, Isaac and

Beukes and other black marginalia are the panopticon who gaze at several historical

antecedents in the apartheid-triggered purposeful decimation of a people through brutal

repression and military tactics that verge on genocide. The extermination and enslavement of

the Khoisan peoples post Vasco da Gama’s 1642 cursed landing at the Cape of Good Hope,

the routing of Mzilikazi’s impi by Voortrekkers at Mosega in 1837, Dingane’s invasion at

Blood River in 1883 and Cetshwayo’s valiant stand at Isandlwana in 1879 are artistically

choreographed in La Guma’s narrative in order to give the novel a historicist dimension that

unpacks art’s aesthetic capacity and commitment to a liberatory cause. Such a matrix teases

out the interface between art and society and history; this interdisciplinary matrix is an

enduring trope that deals with the deepest human laws, problems and contradictions of the

apartheid epoch in the South African imaginary. Indeed, as Olu Obafemi (1997:7) avers in

“Literature and society on the border of discourse”, “[In the fog of the season’s end] reflects,

represents and refracts the reality of the world across… time.”

The qualities that make In the fog of the season’s end a national allegory emerge most

significantly in the positioning of the writer relative to the liberation struggle. La Guma’s

aesthetic demonstrates an enduring mediation of a writer’s responsibilities in apartheid’s

moral and political siege against black subjectivities. When the novel garners revolution as an

anaesthetic to the systematic purge of blacks, the narrative has invoked both the Sharpeville

Massacre and the Soweto students’ uprising, charged moments in South African

historiography that are emblematic of the only possibility towards reconciling a history of

violence and brute force with a primed consciousness. La Guma insists that the state of being

too poor, too miserable, too hunted and scared, and too debased inevitably directs a subjected

people into a mobilised front that seeks redress and change to a chromatic configuration that

privileges whiteness over blackness.

In a very incisive introduction aptly entitled “Mending wounds: Healing, working through, or

staying in trauma,” Masterson, Watson and Williams (2013:1) argue that “trauma disrupts the

ordinary mechanisms and representations of consciousness and memory”. I concur with their

observation that “trauma is a shattering experience that disrupts and distorts memory,

rendering it thereby vulnerable and fallible in reporting events” (2013:1). Trauma

testimonies, such as the burdened versions of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of

South Africa (TRC), are authenticated and validated through the tears and wounds of the

victims. The regaling of violence and torture and rape and hopelessness constitute what I

perceive to be a process towards closure, a prolonged moment of inscripting novel identities

by the victim, especially as the same victim attempts to integrate the present “other” that was

lost during the remembered episode of victimage. I also perceive, in the victims, an agonised

denial of loss, a denial that enlists the past because the present is ineluctably linked to that

past and its history. Since the “history” of the future is privileged in consciousness as

possibility, healing and redemption are prioritised in the process of reconstructing both the

scarred body and the traumatised psyche.

La Guma therefore emerges with the narrative of Elias Tekwane as a narrative that

disentangles bodies and words from the experiences of trauma under apartheid. Where words

and bodies were trapped, truncated and deformed, La Guma voices the multi-layered

conundrum of woundedness. The scarred body and its disorienting traumatised experiences

challenges videographic, filmic and juridical projections and versions to the extent that

apartheid and the massacres at Sharpeville call for a more nuanced literary hieroglyph, a

tapestry that invents mimicry of the perpetrators of violence. Wounded Knee, Mogadishu,

Rwanda, Sharpeville and Soweto publicly proclaim to the world, “I kill, therefore I am”,

while the victims attempt to reconstruct identities that escape criminalising and criminalised

vocabulary. The wounded body, raped and disfigured, maimed and mutilated are indexical,

disturbing images that almost defy mending and reconstruction. Perverse photographs and

filmic projections apparently flounder in their “search for good stories”, especially when the

hiatus of the viewer and the viewed becomes compounded with hegemonic silencing and

perverse practices.

In the civilisational paradox that tampers discursive practices on genocide, this paper

contends that there are irreducible tensions and contradictions that, ironically, plague and

enrich photojournalism relative to literary imaginaries. These tensions, invariably, surround

the representation of the victim, the “other”. I contend that photojournalism harbours an

ethnographic impulse, approaching the victim from an overblown mission of “salvation”,

rescue, rehabilitation and marketing both the debased subject/object and the image. An

inherent ethnographic proximity to scenes of victimage, an intimacy with the victim, a

focusing and re-focusing of the lens all collude to project both compassion and glee. I am

aware of the ire that arises from such a viewpoint, but this project is also aware that the

incompatibilities between the visual and the written cannot be simplistically dichotomised

nor rationalised away as though they were generative or enabling contraries.

Heidi Holland (2010) and Peter Godwin (2009), in the tradition of Michel Leiris and Claude

Levi-Strauss, take on a dual position as informants to a largely European audience and

detached photographers/ethnographers about the implosion of a state called Zimbabwe. In

their performances for both roles, there emerges what I perceive as a burgeoning dichotomy

between photojournalism and literary qua literary representation. I add that the verifiable

subjectivities captured through the camera lens lack the representation of thoughts and

feelings, experiences and phenomena that can only be accessed through a literary lens; hence

photojournalistic projection transfers these to the viewer. Further, photojournalism is

obfuscated by the particular choices made: close shot, angle, zoom, narrowing and other

specific decisions that anchor the picturing practice. Literary narrative, on the other hand,

strives to occupy the intimate interior of subjectivities and experiences that it explores.

Massacres, such as Chimoio (Mozambique, 1977), Wounded Knee and genocidal experiences

such as Auschwitz and Rwanda, all in all become pejorative stereotypes, enhanced in

globalised crusades that harp on human rights, democracy and the rule of law. One of the

most significant ironies lies in the fact that photojournalists jet in from violence-free zones in

order to capture what I perceive as “tautologies”, articulations of the grotesque whose

negative depictions of horror, barbarism and savagery confirm the postcolonial dialectic

between civilisation (resident in the West) and barbarism (resident in the East).

In the dialectic of the juridical and the literary, one perceives again a Calibansque response:

“you taught me language, and my profit on’t is I know how to swear”. Genocide has gained a

notorious relativity, an unfixed meaning as long as CNN/BBC and Al Jazeera remain

oppositional perspectival media houses that transmit hermeneutically positive or negative

valences of the same experiences through the image. These ideologically oppositional

channels have become tools of apodioxis – that refusal of all argumentation or refutation –

because of the “real, the reel, the visual” that each channel selectively adopts to project to

premeditated audiences. Each projection of mass murder, I argue, conveys a standpoint, a

politicised statement, an (in)adequate index of authorial intentions. As hinted at earlier in the

French president’s response to Rwanda’s genocide memorial, there is an evident ambivalence

between condemnation and exhortation, a quaver between commercialism and energetic

denunciation or intervention. Representational problems, I argue, are endemic to the

ethnographic gaze: the dynamics of colonialism’s gaze often resort to a negritudinal

apodioxis that capitulates to stereotypes.

Trayvon Martin, shot in cold blood in the US in 2013, is only one of millions of Bigger

Thomases profiled and targeted for their blackness in America. On the occasion of the jury

finding Zimmerman, the murderer innocent, President Barack Obama spoke emotionally

about “the fact of blackness,” a la Frantz Fanon:

When Trayvon Martin was first shot I said that this could have been my son. Another

way of saying that is Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago. And when

you think about why, in the American community at least, there’s a lot of pain around

what happened here, I think it’s important to recognize that the African-American

community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and a history that

doesn’t go away (Remarks by the president on Trayvon Martin,19 July, 2013).

This set of experiences that Obama alludes to is a history of genocide. It does not go away as

victims are re-victimised in memoric re-enactment.

Obama addressed why emotions over the Zimmerman verdict were running so high. He

explained the lens through which many black Americans see the case…and how their own

experiences and America’s history inform their perception:

There are very few African American men in this country who haven’t had the

experience of being followed when they were shopping in a department store. That

includes me. There are very few African American men who haven’t had the

experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of

cars. That happens to me… at least before I was a senator. There are very few African

Americans who haven’t had the experience of getting on an elevator and a woman

clutching her purse nervously and holding her breath until she had a chance to get off.

That happens often (Remarks by the president on Trayvon Martin, 19 July, 2013).

What Barack Obama testifies to, and speaks about in such an impassioned fashion,

constitutes the very fabric of genocide: classification, symbolisation, dehumanisation,

organisation, extermination and, finally, denial as evidenced by the acquittal of Zimmerman.

“Secondary victimisation” is indeed a misnomer for the experiences that survivors of

genocide and massacre go through as cinematic reels and legal procedures investigate, probe

and arrive at “conclusive” judgments over the perpetrators. Suicide (recorded and

unrecorded), post-traumatic stress disorders, emotional re-scarring are all pre-eminent

signatures of what this paper calls re-victimisation, a re-engagement with the sordid details of

experiences that victims of military and civilian episodes would rather efface than see

replayed and re-enacted.

Bigger Thomas, in Richard Wright’s Native Son, smothers a white girl, Mary Dalton, in the

blind gaze of Mrs Dalton. Mrs Dalton is immensely rich and Bigger is aware that the drunken

girl he is carrying into the house might scream rape. Such an incipient and imagined crime

portends death by hanging for Bigger Thomas, simply because he is black. Bigger therefore

knows that his only escape is through practically smothering Mary so that he could be hanged

for a crime that he verily committed, rather than one he would be perceived as having

committed. The alarm that Richard Wright set as the wake-up call for Bigger Thomas at the

beginning of the novel is, metaphorically, a wake-up call for all America to hearken to the

issues of race and the systematic erasure of black lives in their midst.

At the end of the novel, Bigger Thomas awaits execution and is confined to a solitary cell. In

this respect, Wright sets out to explore the interfaces of racial profiling and the criminal

justice system in America. Wright magnifies law’s ultimate violence and collusion with race-

based police stop-and-search practices targeted at black citizens, the (un)fairness of the

justice system (especially prosecutions that are led by an all-white jury) and the frustrations

of black subjectivities where institutional penology sanctions retributive punishment relative

to the chromatic configurations of the perceived criminal. Read in this way, Bigger Thomas’

crime is the crossing of societal and legal boundaries; his crime is “trespass on the property

interest in whiteness” as Bennett Capers (2006:8) amply demonstrates. In fact, I read the

novel as a text that focuses on the interplay between legal cases and oppositional story-

telling, a novel that bridges a vision of justice and the social, legal and political enactment of

that vision. The tripartite division of the novel into “Fear”, “Flight” and “Fate” suggests also

the antipodes that generate an indispensable lens for the reading of Native Son: black male set

against white female and black male set against black female. Rape and murder, inadvertent

and premeditated, and the disposal of murdered bodies into a furnace and air-shaft are critical

incidents that allow Wright to explore American genocidal profiling.

Cesare Lombroso, editor of the daily newspaper that reports Bigger’s trial and conviction,

provides a startling revelation about America’s construction of race, and its ultimate

complicity and culpability in the targeting and extermination of African American criminal

phenotypes:

Overwhelmed by the sight of his accusers, Bigger Thomas, Negro sex-slayer, fainted

dramatically this morning at the inquest of Mary Dalton, millionaire Chicago

heiress…

“He looks exactly like an ape!” exclaimed a terrified young white girl who watched

the black slayer being loaded onto a stretcher after he had fainted.

Though the Negro killer’s body does not seem compactly built, he gives the

impression of possessing abnormal physical strength… His jaw protrudes

obnoxiously, reminding one of a jungle beast… It is easy to imagine how this man, in

the grip of a brain-numbing sex passion, overpowered little Mary Dalton, raped her,

murdered her, beheaded her, then stuffed her body into a roaring furnace to destroy

the evidence of his crime… All in all, he seems a beast utterly untouched by the

softening influences of modern civilisation (Wright, 1940/1998:127).

The media here exacerbates the profiling: it is a strategic mechanism for the inscription and

dissemination of certain images that ultimately facilitate the legal framing of Bigger. Mary is

“little Mary Dalton” while Bigger is a “Negro sex-slayer”. Bigger is a “jungle beast”, “out of

place” while Mary is a “millionaire Chicago heiress”. The media colludes and serves as an

institutional discursive mouthpiece that participates in reproducing and representing the

“other”. In wording and publicity, the newspaper sets an agenda and promulgates an acutely

efficient “grammar” of racialising, stereotyping and magnifying black criminality. A

symbiotic relationship emerges between the media and the police and the law in their drive to

police, monitor and eliminate transgression against “societal” normative practices.

Bigger is one in a lineage that upon landing at Charlestown in 1676 became criminalised,

profiled and targeted for systematic servility and extermination. Such prototypes engage

writers and are depicted in Alex Haley’s Roots (1976), Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man

(1952), Maya Angelou’s Caged Bird (1969) and even in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mocking Bird

(1961). Ellison was later to express the mirage of equality and freedom in the US in the most

poignant way:

The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience

alive in one’s aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not

by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic

lyricism. As a form, the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe

expressed lyrically (quoted in Olderman, OR, 1966:143).

Literature, like the blues in Ellison, approximates the “autobiographical chronicle of personal

catastrophe”. Thus, Alex Haley’s Roots fits perfectly into this template. Roots, over and

above everything else, is the monumental two-century drama of Kunta Kinte and the six

generations who came after him. By tracing back his own roots, Haley tells the story of 39

million Americans of African descent (Laist, 2013:3). It speaks to all races everywhere, it is a

story of classification, symbolisation, dehumanisation, organisation, extermination and,

finally, denial. The narrative in Roots is one of the most eloquent testimonials ever written to

the indomitability of the African American spirit (Laist, 2013:4) and the experiences of an

unacknowledged centuries-long genocide.

Conclusions

This paper has argued that genocide involves specific stages: classification, symbolisation,

targeting, dehumanisation, organisation and finally, denial. Chromatic classifications, and

later branding, on the shores of Charlestown, become specific instances for the

dehumanisation and killing of black subjectivities in America. To the extent that Barack

Obama spoke to the world about the horror-packed murder of Trayvon Marin in 2013, it is

clear that genocide does not have to be measured in years, as in Auschwitz, the Central

African Republic (CAR), Kenya and Rwanda. Language, race, gender, sex and xenophobic

episodes have all constituted markers of identity that have spurred genocide. As repertoires

and toolkits of identity, these are marked by their absences in photojournalistic and juridical

records of genocide. Manufactured and conveniently contextualised identities, including

ascribed markers, have been marshalled to organise genocidal crusades. In America,

systematic genocide has been enacted on black subjects since the Black Atlantic, to borrow

from Paul Gilroy (1993).

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