Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series -

Dear Moses & Ken,

I completely agree with the rejection of determinism, and agree with the notion of the chain as a simulacrum. In using the chain as a metaphor i had considered it as something all strung together, say like a string of beads around a neck. In other words, the cause in one instance is also a consequence in another instance.

 

Returning to Rwanda and Ivory Coast to a lesser extent; was it possible within the context of the entire history of the crisis, including the history of Hutu-Tutsi relations [mediated and refracted several times by the interraction of others, in particular euorpean colonisers, at some point]; within this context, given what we now know of what happened, and the possible lessons we can learn from it, was it possible back then in 1994 to have broken the chain and prevented or mitigated the genocidal outcome?

 

I think that if we were to conclude that it was not possible, if certain steps and actions had been taken, then we would accepting fatalism in human history, we would be saying that regardless of whatever was done, the genocide would have been inevitable. This would be determinism.

 

So unto Libya, was a massacre of historic proportions possible in Benghazi had the no-fly zone been enforced the way it was? Everything we know about Gadaffi leads us to conclude that such an outcome was possible.

 

So active agency is indeed important and historically significant in helping to shape the outcome of interractions of multiple pressures.

 

Regards,

Jaye

From: kenneth harrow <harrow@msu.edu>
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Sent: Tuesday, April 5, 2011 8:28 PM
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series -

thanks moses. i wrote too quickly (much more fun, but not nearly as nuanced)
i should have written "historians," "journalists," "political scientists."

each field has it own blind spots, and also its far-sighted figures.
really, the first few books on rwanda were guilty of what i wrote (and so was i in parroting their statements when giving amnesty's account). it took me a number of years to understand better what was needed to begin that understanding, and that's all i could claim, a beginning understanding.
my field is literature and cinema, but we engage in representations of the same material you historians, political scientists, and journalists cover, like all those texts on the genocide in rwanda that include film, literature, history etc.
so in the end we have to talk to each other; have to work through what happens when a Hotel Rwanda comes up with a particular take on the events, which is then amenable to analysis by all of us.

i didn't mean to say all historians believe in teleological explanations--just that the historical accounts that appeared shortly after the genocide took a definite form, stage one, stage two, stage three, etc., that got repeated over and over as the ineluctable truth of the event. that trajectory became the subject of critiques, also by historians, and i cited one that was outstanding, Re-imagining Rwanda. but by then it was too late: the ground that prunier and gourevitch first had laid overdetermined the field. the chapter samantha powers wrote, nicely written, but far too one-sided in its assessment depended on the same account. the great work of alison des forges, catherine newbury, timothy longman, filip reyntjens, needed time to make their impact. meanwhile i cannot count the number of films that present the distorted and simplified vision of the genocide that had been created at the outset, and that has become the official narrative of the kagame govt, films like Shake Hand with the Devil and Shooting Dogs, that truly did demonize the hutus.
no surprise that when it came to accounting for the slaughtering of congolese in the years that following, rwanda got off easy.

no doubt it was the failure of us non-historians to read the accounts with any sophistication that created what had become, and remains, the dominant narrative.
ken

On 4/5/11 11:07 AM, Moses Ebe Ochonu wrote:

Ken,

Caution about accusing historians--all historians--of the weakness of teleology, deterministic explanations, and causal teleologies. You clearly are not acquainted with the current state of the discipline, so tentativeness would be in order. In fact contrary to what you wrote, teleology is a bad word in history classrooms and in historical conversations and has become a standard, if cliched and overused, rhetoric of peer critique in the discipline. Yes, there were several strains of history writing that, for all kinds of purposes, privileged teleology. But teleological analysis is and has been a no go area at least in North American historical profession for a considerable amount of time. In African history, teleological nationalist historiography is today everyone's favorite whipping post. I am surprised that you invoked political science (with all its modeling of human political behavior) as providing a corrective to the problem of teleological causality. Why do you think historians value and constantly deploy the word "contingent"? It is precisely to reject the kind of teleological and "scientifically" modeled explanatory paradigms that some political scientists and other social scientists use to "determine" the cause of human political action (and reaction) and to predict or project the course of events. In fact to re-invoke your own Rwanda example, actually, in the historical literature, the teleological explanation of Hutus and Tutsis hating each other historically and being destined for a showdown is so passe that it can only be found in Eurocentric, racist historical polemics, mostly of wacky Right groups. I can't find that explanation in the professional historical literature on the crisis. 

On Tue, Apr 5, 2011 at 9:15 AM, kenneth harrow <harrow@msu.edu> wrote:

thanks jaye.
on history, i like your notion of a chain that we try to understand, and break.
i think historians have a weakness, which is to read the past teleologically, as if there were a clear cause effect. so for years, and still i suppose, the rwandan genocide was presented as a consequence of the history of hutu-tutsi relations, as though they inevitably let to the conflicts, and ultimately, the genocide. (and thus, the hutus and tutsis couldn't help hating each other and massacring each other.)
the journalists, whose knowledge of history usually was very thin, maybe a few decades max, tended to read the events in terms of the immediate circumstances. (and their explanations wound up stating, "and thus the hutus and tutsis couldn't help hating each other and massacring each other).
this is the same story that was told about the bosnians--"eternal conflict," more or less portraying the antagonists in the conflict as not being able to help hating each other.... in which case, it would be pointless to intervene.

finally, the political scientists pushed to explain the genocide due to the convergence of contemporary pressures.
very few like mamdani dared to claim that the hutus actually had a political agenda, rather than blind passion, that drove their decisions. and very few, like pottier in Re-imagining Rwanda, were able to make meaningful distinctions between tutsis who had left the country in the 19th c, the early 20th c, the middle 20th c, etc, all of which bore on the actual motives and actions of the people.

    i agree we need to understand the historical complex in order to understand the current events; i also agree we need to understand current pressures, etc.  But because the past and present pressures are multiple, and the further back one goes, the more pluralistic are the pressures, the more i resist determinism in historical explanations. we can understand some of the factors, today and yesterday, that account for a given situation, but can we say, THIS is why it happened, and if we do THAT it won't happen again? Never again?

the narratives we construct, in order to understand why something happened, change. just look at how africa was excluded from historical narratives written by europeans in the past. and the ones to be written tomorrow will also be different.
i agree with you that we have to view ourselves as having agency, not to be condemned to processes we don't understand, and thus we have to try to understand them; that's what i like about the chain metaphor.
i would go one step further, however; which is to imagine the chain as a simulacrum, not an actual causal set of links. we attempt to understand it not because we would then be able to control our fate, but because the narratives we construct about the past will determine the kind of future we create.
i think that is derrida's point about the archive; that in the construction of the archive what is at stake is not the past, but the future.
ken

On 4/5/11 7:26 AM, Jaye Gaskia wrote:

Dear Ken,

I am thinking that social processes will always develop their own dynamics, and that if it is possible after the event, to determine to some degree, the causal relationships embedded in a process; it should be possible to prevent similar situations happening in the future, if certain steps and not others are taken. It would never be perfect, but it is possible to move towards such a goal.

I think that a rigorous consideration of the history of every situation is important, but if we view history as a chain, it ought to be possible to break the chain at some point. Otherwise we would be condemned to destruction.

On violenve, i think that when those who control state power deploy violence against those who oppose them, and when those who oppose them represent the majority of the people in actual fact, then it is only a matter of time before state violence is met with the violence of those resisting the state. It will occur as a result of two primary impulses and reasons; as a response to defend the uprising against brutal repression; and as a response to promote the offensive thrust of the uprising.

It would be good indeed if all oppressors can simply step aside from history when they are challenged by those whom they exploit and surpress. However, this is not what happens in reality.

How do we proceed from here?

Warm Regards,

Jaye

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--  kenneth w. harrow distinguished professor of english michigan state university department of english east lansing, mi 48824-1036 ph. 517 803 8839 harrow@msu.edu

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--  kenneth w. harrow distinguished professor of english michigan state university department of english east lansing, mi 48824-1036 ph. 517 803 8839 harrow@msu.edu

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