Emerging perspectives on genocide and violence in Africa

In 2010, Kistner Ulrike of the University of South Africa wrote a provocative article titled ‘Commemoration and counter-memory: “the genocide series”’ that appeared in the South African Historical Journal. In this article, Kistner suggested that commemorating genocide in Africa was being ‘overtaken by the very commemorative passions that it set out to exorcise’ (2010, p. 620). Kistner’s worry, just as that of the critics of the Rwandan genocide such as Adhikari (2007), was that the African life that was lost during the genocide was being converted into an object of commerce. This perspective seems to be gaining some followers despite the fact that it is predicated on a problematic dichotomy that fails to recognise that the paradox to remember genocide is in fact the same process of memorialising it so that the process of remembering lives lost is itself not lost. Kistner’s essay does not seem to speak to the African masses, most of whom lost their relatives and families in genocidal contests; the article warns European tourists to back off from consuming displays of African pain at a time when we need more westerners to bear witness to some of the disastrous policies of their governments in Africa. The masses of people in Africa who remember and commemorate the loss of their humanity do not benefit in any financial way. In this issue of African Identities contributors have decided to respond to Kistner’s challenge but obliquely; the emphasis of this issue is to use case studies and the ideas of some of the foremost thinkers on the theme of genocide, violence and mass displacements in and outside Africa, only as points of departure in a conversation that seeks to reveal new perspectives of genocide in Africa. It is hoped that this academic enterprise can be done without minimising the pain of those who experienced it and lost relatives. The issue also attempts to create awareness of the kind that shows that genocide is a weighty subject that preoccupies the minds of Africans and that can also be elaborated from different political, philosophical and cultural sites. Kistner’s challenger remains a stern warning against turning genocide into an industry that produces commodities of affect. However, in this issue, rather than diverting researchers to ‘run after the rat that has come out of the burning hut’, the researchers chose to suggest ways of putting out the fire that is threatening to burn the hut; this, the articles do by proposing, debating and contesting previous approaches to understanding the phenomenon of genocide in Africa. For instance, in the article, ‘The Kaiser’s Holocaust: the coloniality of German’s forgotten genocide of the Nama and the Herero of Namibia’, Khatija Khan explores the German genocide of the Herero and Nama people of Namibia. Khan argues that those with the power to describe and name deaths that occur in violent contexts have tended to ‘diminish the pain of Africans’. Her point is that the refusal to describe the death of Africans under the cruel hands of colonialism as holocaust ‘is not accidental; it reveals the devious workings of the phenomena of the coloniality of power’. She