Evropska zapuščina Afriki, afriška zapuščina Evropi: postkolonialno nasilje in pošast genocida
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| Title | Evropska zapuščina Afriki, afriška zapuščina Evropi: postkolonialno nasilje in pošast genocida |
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| Abstract | This article focuses on selected elements of the European legacy in Africa that frame the twentieth century in a crucial way. They mark the “Western” picture of the world during that period, and they contributed to the perpetration of major atrocities on the African continent on a scale that invites comparison with the Holocaust – that is, the genocide of Namibian Hereros at the beginning of the twentieth century and the genocide of the Rwandan Tutsis at its end. This paper also discusses elements of the African legacy in Europe – particularly the emergence and transfer of a new form of power that depends on the experience of imperialism as central to the “Western” worldview – and the question of how one can explain this. The Rwandan genocide in 1994 did not represent a repetition or even an approximation of the European Holocaust, just as the Herero genocide (1904–8) cannot be seen as its forerunner, although they all share many points in common. The Rwandan genocide is qualitatively different from both: it represents a new development in the nature of the atrocity, in which the victims become the killers. A better understanding of it could therefore also shed light on some related, but different, events, such as “humanitarian interventions” and the “war against terror.” This contribution draws on some recent historical studies and builds on the analysis of imperialism, race, and bureaucracy in Hannah Arendt’s work; it is also inspired by the works of some authors that adopted the Arendtian analysis of totalitarianism, such as Mahmood Mamdani. The article focuses on the organization of the colonial and postcolonial bureaucratic apparatus of rule, its special form of non-state power, and its connection with “race,” “tribe,” and “tradition” as crucial elements of post-totalitarian forms of government and new forms of identitarian collective violence. The main aim is not so much to analyze the Rwanda genocide as such as to counter some common notions about its significance, which maintain that it represents a phenomenon of “black Africa” and thus just “does not matter” in “our” regional context because it is “remote” or that it involved such cruelty that it defies comparison. The various subplots of postcolonial power, racism, and tribalism in the Great Lakes region and their specific potential to mobilize the masses are deeply interwoven with European and global narratives, especially the manner in which the group that faces the risk of extermination becomes politically marginalized. Not only were Western political forces participants in these events, but their underlying dynamics and consequences were all implicated in the Western post-totalitarian power structure. This article therefore stresses the crucial connectedness of the “African” and “European” structure of this new form of power, which is still termed a “state” but which in fact – in the time of transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century – assumed or indeed usurped the role of the modern nation-state. The processes that create the conditions for the new forms of domination and for the local and global undermining of politics and (political) responsibility can also be understood in the same way. |
| Publisher | Znanstvena založba Filozofske fakulte / Ljubljana University Press, Faculty of Arts |
| Date | 1970-01-01 |
| Source | Ars & Humanitas: Revija za umetnost in humanistiko Vol 3, No 1-2 (2009) |
| Rights | @ Univerza v Ljubljani, Filozofska fakulteta |