Critical Perspectives on African Genocide: Memory, Silence, and Anti-Black Political Violence

139 Pages·2021·3.322 MB·English

by  Alfred Frankowski, Jeanine Ntihirageza, Chielozona Eze

Critical Perspectives on
African Genocide

Critical Perspectives on
African Genocide
Memory, Silence, and Anti-Black
Political Violence
Edited by
Alfred Frankowski, Jeanine Ntihirageza,
and Chielozona Eze
ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD
Lanham • Boulder • New York • London
Published by Rowman & Littlefield
An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
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Copyright © 2021 by Alfred Frankowski, Jeanine Ntihirageza, and Chielozona Eze
Copyright in individual chapters is held by the respective chapter authors.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any
electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems,
without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote
passages in a review.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Frankowski, Alfred, editor. | Ntihirageza, Jeanine, 1961– editor. |
Eze, Chielozona, editor.
Title: Critical perspectives on African genocide : memory, silence, and anti-Black
political violence / edited by Alfred Frankowski, Jeanine Ntihirageza,
Chielozona Eze.
Description: Lanham : Rowman & Littlefield, [2021] | Includes bibliographical
references and index. | Summary: “This text explores critical perspectives on the
intersections between colonialism, political violence, and environmentalism to
deepen our understanding of genocide and genocidal violence.”—Provided by
publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020045779 (print) | LCCN 2020045780 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781538147030 (cloth) | ISBN 9781538150016 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Genocide—Africa—History. | Political violence—Africa—History. |
Genocide survivors—Africa—Social conditions.
Classification: LCC DT30.5 .C76 2021 (print) | LCC DT30.5 (ebook) |
DDC 364.151096—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020045779
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020045780
∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American
National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library
Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction ix
Alfred Frankowski, Jeanine Ntihirageza, and Chielozona Eze
1 Burundi 1972: Remembering a Forgotten Genocide 1
René Lemarchand
2 Repenser pour mieux panser (Remembering for Better Healing):
A Survivor’s Account of the 1972 Burundi Genocide 13
Jeanine Ntihirageza
3 Anti-Imperialist Rhetoric and Patterns of Genocide Denial in
Zimbabwe 27
Chielozona Eze
4 American Slavery, the New Jim Crow, and Genocide 39
Lissa Skitolsky
5 The “Post-Conflict State” in Africa: Challenging the Continued
Normalization of Genocidal Violence 55
Patricia Daley
6 Hermeneutical Aesthetics, Commemoration, and Mourning
in Post-Genocide Rwanda 75
Alfred Frankowski
7 Environmental Racism as Genocide: A Case Study of Shell
Bluff, Georgia 95
Milanika S. Turner
v
vi Contents
Index 111
List of Contributors 117
Acknowledgments
This book came out of the Rethinking Genocide in Africa and the African
Diaspora symposia, held at Northeastern Illinois University from 2014 to
2017. During those years, the Genocide Research Group, a collective of
interdisciplinary genocide scholars, held symposia that focused on genocide
within Africa and genocide as a category of violence against peoples of the
African diaspora. Our symposia focused on remembrance and silence, gender
and violence, and intervention, culture and morality, and always contained
much more.
We want to extend a special thank you to the Northeastern Illinois
University (NEIU) community. First, we would like to acknowledge the
support of Dr. Larry Frank, for his unwavering support of African teaching
and research at NEIU. Second, we owe our gratitude to Dr. Wamucii Njogu
for her considerable encouragement and wholehearted guidance. Third, we
would like to thank the faculty at Northeastern Illinois University in the
departments of Anthropology, English, English Language Program, Teaching
English to Speakers of Other Languages, Philosophy, Justice Studies, and
especially to African and African American Studies. In particular, we would
like to thank Teddy Bofman, John Casey, Courtney Francis, Stacey Gougen,
Sarah Hoagland, Tim Libretti, Dan Milsky, Sophia Mihic, Kristen Over, TK
Okoson, Ryan Poll, William Stone, Cris Tofolo, and Gina Wells among so
many others. We would like to acknowledge the work of Sarah Travis and all
of the students who attended the symposiums over the years. The real legacy
of this work lies with how they will generate the next generation of questions
for the field of genocide studies.
We would like to the editors at Rowman & Littlefield International, espe-
cially Frankie Mace, for supporting this project from the start, and Scarlet
Furness, for providing guidance and support throughout the editorial and
vii
viii Acknowledgments
production process. We would like to thank Kristen Hedberg, Elisa von
Joeden Forgey, Donald Bloxham, Anne O’Byrne, Martin Schuster, George
Yancy, Falguni Sheth, Marianna Ortega, Kris Sealy, Kenneth Stikkers, and
Anthony Steinbock for their support, advice, and mentorship. We would also
like to thank the work of the anonymous reviewers for this project. Last but
not least, we want to acknowledge our family and friends, both near and far,
past and present.
Introduction
Alfred Frankowski,
Jeanine Ntihirageza, and Chielozona Eze
Every continent has some experience with genocide. The word itself pro-
vokes one to think of the extreme horrors of political violence from the past,
or to imagine conditions under which a state of war has broken into a brute
state of mass killing, or consider where extremist ideology has been carried
over to the extremes of ethnic cleansing. What is missing in this way of think-
ing about genocide is that it is part of, and continuous with, the actions of
nations. It is something that happens in the building and governing of states
and nations, rather than what happens only in the breakdown of a society or
the abnormal condition of politics. As historian and genocide scholar, Mark
Levene has stated, “Genocide is not fixed in the make-up of regimes. But it is
something that different types of regimes do.”1 Whether genocide takes place
in Germany, Bosnia, or Rwanda, it describes the action of putting the politi-
cal violence experienced by citizens within a context where its realization is
also its legitimation. What we think of as a break with, or breaking down of
society through the employment of genocidal violence, is a nation proceeding
in contradiction with itself.
The contradiction that genocidal violence lays bare is already always
apparent in the limits of genocide discourse. These limits should concern us
at a global level because of how they naturalize this form of contradiction
against the legibility of lives and deaths as a result of this political violence.
Indeed, what makes something legible as genocide matters as much as the
way we problematize (or fail to problematize) the contradictions of a nation’s
violence.2 In all cases where genocide is an open question for analysis, we see
the tactics of the denial, erasure, and forgetting employed as explicit meth-
ods of silencing. Beyond this, however, within genocide discourse itself, the
context of the analysis is usually shifted to two pragmatic questions: what do
we do now to reconcile the conflict and how do we prevent it from happening
ix