Links to other sites on the Web
For the paper on The Holocaust, The Shoah
I would like to recommend the following article
for deeper consideration of
the "particle, wave, and field" theories
that flow from Tagmemic Invention
(see the link on Tagmemics, below).
The following passage is excerpted from:
In the Name of Fraternity -- by Olivier Barlet
http://www.africultures.com/anglais/Edito%20anglais/Edito7.htm
The Modernity of Genocide
A burning question remains : why the horror ?
A Genealogy of Genocide
The mediatization of the genocide and its effects has caused terrible ambiguities in peoples' minds. These ambiguities lie in questions of vocabulary, and give rise to reductive images.
"Speaking about casts, ethnic groups or tribes is by no means innocent when groups attack one another. We draw on the ineptitudes transposed from one written source to another for a century whose source can rarely be verified, whose ideological origin is rarely measured. If everybody says so, it must be true. And in an oral civilization subjected to colonization, the written ends up being taken as law."
Describing genocide as a tribal or ethnic war is serious : it amounts to confirming the logic of its initiators, an ethnic, racist logic. In Rwanda, over a million human beings were massacred (1) because they were thought to belong to or to support a race or ethnic group. Lists were drawn up in advance. The genocide was planned.
Let's leave the notion of race aside. Who would still dare to talk about the Jewish race ? People still do, however, when they are referring to the Africans. The notion of an ethnic group is just as problematic :
"It is a specific concept produced by the Western intellectual tradition to interpret African reality", esteems the historian Elikia M'Bokolo, "in order to establish a clear hierarchy between the "nations" of the rest of the world and the "ethnic groups" of the African continent". (2) One ethnic group is differentiated from another by opposing language, culture, religion, territory. In Rwanda, just as in Burundi, the Hutu, Tutsi and Twa lineages share all of these. They claim to descend from the same mythical ancestor Kigwa or Gihanga.
Who, then, are the Hutu and the Tutsi ?
We sometimes speak about castes, a term which cannot be applied outside the Indian continent as it connotes a purity/impurity opposition which is perfectly absent from Rwandan social relations. Moreover, these groups could intermarry, or move from one to the other.
We speak about the Hutu farmers and the Tutsi herders, but the Tutsi did not own cattle, unlike the Hutu who owned large herds in the North. The epizootic which decimated herds at the end of the nineteenth century reinforced the Tutsi chiefs' position as cattle owners, but cattle rearing was practiced by the two groups.
Hutu and Tutsi are not even social classes : each group's possessions varied according to the regions.
In fact, the Hutu, Tutsi or Twa categories were only one element in a more complex social identity summed up by the bwoko, a Kinyarwanda word which describes regional belonging as much as it does that of a profession, or clan.
Indeed, the oppositions in Rwanda at the beginning of the century, when the colonizers arrived, were experienced more in terms of geographic zone, that is, grosso modo, between the North and the South. The Tutsi chiefs recognized the authority of the mwami (the king) and, served by the Hutu and the Twa, were opposed to the Hutu, Tutsi and Twa of the east, west and, above all, the north of the country who refuted this authority. In short, this constituted a rivalry between the Bakiga, the people of the North, and the Banyanduga, those of the South.
How did this lead to the programmed elimination of a race, or ethnic group ? Due to the imposition on Rwandan and Burundi society of a racist schema of interpretation. By whom ? The colonizers.
The war of the races
Stanley abandoned all hope of entering Rwanda after he was shot at with arrows. With the search for the mythical sources of the Nile as a backdrop, explorers and missionaries alike conveyed a fantastical vision of this region.
Speke, in his "Journal of the discovery of the sources of the Nile" (1863), describes the Tutsi as the members of a conquering Hamito-Semitic race from Ethiopia. He offers no proof of what he advances as a theory. Who, then, were these Hamites ? They were qualified as "white negroes", conferring on them a distant white ascendency.
In Genesis, after the flood, Ham, Noah's son, mocks his father, whom he finds drunk and naked in his tent. Noah curses his son, Canaan, condemning him to be the slave of Japheth and Shem, Ham's brothers. A handy myth indeed ! When the Westerners enslaved the Black people, they likened them with Ham's cursed son... and so justified the slave trade, colonialism and apartheid. And when they sought to divide them, they discovered that some of them belonged to another of Ham's lineage, Shem, who was not cursed, the famous Hamites, or Hamito-Semites.
Whilst a number of texts blithely refer to these approximately fifteenth century migrations from the North, the only linguistic and archaeological traces of migratory movements researchers have managed to find go back to over 2000 years. Furthermore, the oral tradition bears no trace of these alleged migrations. But what could be more convenient than this myth of the Hamite from the North, a superior race, to legitimize the power of one group, who could be used to better enslave the rest ?
The remarkable organization of the country discovered on the arrival of the Whites had to be explained. What ? Were negroes capable of this ? The Hamites were thus supposed to have brought civilization to the Bantous who lived in the heart of "deepest darkest Africa". The Hutu and Tutsi were differentiated in order to support these fabrications : the interpretation of the Bible and a highly debatable anthropometry would serve as the scientific basis. The Tutsi from the North would be refined and slender, as opposed to the "indigenous" small, stocky and vulgar Hutu. It was not taken into account that some Tutsi are small and stocky, and some Hutu tall and slender... other than by several missionaries who made note of their doubts and consternation in their diaries. (3)
There was nothing particularly astonishing in this : they were simply applying the concept of "national duality", as it was first described by the historian Jean-Pierre Chr?ien, which was in vogue in France between the Franks and the Gauls. French nobles readily saw themselves as descending from the Germanic Franks, thereby appropriating the spirit of conquest, and a convenient difference used to exclude the masses and the bourgeoisie from power. The Revolution came as a form of vengeance, turning the nobles' proclaimed foreignness against them. With the Hamitic myth, however, this war of the races retained all its vitality in Rwanda. . . .
. . . What is behind the genocides of the twentieth century if it is not the egocentrism and insecurity accompanying the affirmation of the individual's autonomy which characterizes modernity ? The temptation to project onto the other what is ours is strong. And a Rwandan proverb tells us : "Nta wiyanga nk'uwanga undi (Nobody hates himself more than he who hates others)".
In their quest to surpass, artists open themselves up to all influences and facilitate the removal of projections. They thus explore a fraternity in which the identities of each and everyone are no longer the centre of human identities : not a fraternity of blood, but a fraternity of sharing.
=======
If the above excerpt speaks to your heart,
I sincerely recommend you read the whole article
at the link below.
Links to other sites on the Web
In the Name of Fraternity
Holocaust (disambiguation)
Genocide: The Global Human Rights Challenge
The Maafa: A Holocaust of Greed
American Indian Peoples
Tagmemics
Midterm Guidelines... Moon Tahn il
Citing References... MLA Style
8th Wave Ivy / Home