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Mediating Violence from Africa

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George S. MacLeod explores the violent histories of post-Cold War Francophone Africa. Trauma, memory, and Africa’s global standing are key themes.

Image courtesy of interviewee. December 7, 2023

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The speaker reflects on their journey that led to writing a book, which began with their experiences studying abroad in Senegal from 2003 to 2004. They observed the day-to-day life in Africa, emphasizing themes of hospitality, friendship, and community, contrasting it with stereotypical media portrayals. Upon returning to the U.S., the speaker explored literature on the 1994 Rwandan genocide, leading to a central question: how to ethically represent Africa's diverse experiences, including its traumatic histories, without reinforcing harmful stereotypes.

The speaker's PhD dissertation expanded this investigation beyond Rwanda to other contexts, such as child soldiers and Islamist terrorism in Africa. They sought to understand how these figures were represented in literature and media, influenced by changing political dynamics since the Cold War. The book includes close readings of various texts, including films and survivor narratives, examining how authors respond to politically charged representations of violence.

The speaker critiques the representation of African experiences as overly simplistic or sensationalized, advocating for a more nuanced understanding that recognizes both the realities of violence and the richness of cultural contexts. They argue for an engagement with these narratives that acknowledges readers' emotional responses while encouraging critical thought about historical and political contexts.

Overall, the speaker hopes readers will develop a critical awareness of how stories from Africa are presented and engage empathetically yet thoughtfully with these narratives, moving beyond mere sympathy to a deeper understanding of the complexities involved.

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X-TIMESTAMP-MAP:LOCAL=00:00:00.000,MPEGTS=900000

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And a lot of ways this book,

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started when I studied abroad in Senegal.

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When I was an undergraduate in 2003

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and 2004, I was studying Francophone literature at

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a Senegalese University.

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I was, living in a dorm with a Senegalese roommate.

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I was often the only,

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non Senegalese person in my classes.

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Um, and I was really struck by my experience

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of living in Africa day to day,

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which was really a lot about hospitality

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and friendship and community.

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Um, and then the vision of Africa I had had before I came

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and the way Africa Africa's often portrayed in the media.

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Um, and so I returned to the United States wanting to,

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as a undergraduate, work some more on Africa.

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And it was then that I discovered,

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fictional literature about the 1994 genocide against the

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Tutsi in Rwanda, which was vastly different event

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and cultural context from what I had experienced.

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Uh, and so there's a fundamental question

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that I think runs through the entire book.

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That was when I started, that was

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that I started formulating at that time,

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which was essentially how to balance the

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day-to-day lived experience of, of Africa

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for the thousands, hundreds of thousands

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of cult cultural contexts that exist,

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which are often very different from the

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stereotype portrayals.

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How to balance that with also making visible very real

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traumatic, tragic events like the 1994 genocide against the

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Tutsi, and doing so in a way that was thoughtful

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and that was ethical and was not reproducing

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these kind of stereotypes.

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Um, and so I was still very much motivated by this question

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of how to ethically represent,

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violence from Africa when I started on my PhD dissertation.

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Uh, but I wanted to broaden,

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the scope from the genocide in Rwanda

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to look at some other cultural context.

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And so that's where I started looking,

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not just at literature

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and first person testimony from, survivors

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of the 19 94 2 T genocide,

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but at, novels, first person, literature,

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about child soldiers or narrated by child soldiers,

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and then also at representations of the Islamist,

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terrorist, which, sadly in Africa, there has been,

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over the last decades violence done in the name

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of Islam similar to what we associate war say

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with Afghanistan or, Iraq

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or places in the, in the Middle East.

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Um, and, as I was doing that, I began to see

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how a lot of these figures, like the child soldier,

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and the Islamist terrorist

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and the TSI Rwandan survivor,

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that the way they were talked about in media often had a

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very, clear, political, purpose

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and that this political purpose could be,

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usefully situated

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with the way international relations had changed,

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following the Cold War.

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Um, so I, I think I'll get into that a little bit,

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later in the interview.

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But I would say the genesis of this,

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this book really emerged

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with my own firsthand experience in Africa,

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and then reconciling that with the very different,

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experience and event of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi,

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which I learned about upon my return from Senegal.

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There were, multiple strands, or

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Multiple threads of research that went into this.

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Uh, on the one hand, the book itself,

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is not an exhaustive, sort of encyclopedic chronicle

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of all the authors or filmmakers

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who have written about violent events in Africa.

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Uh, it's close readings of,

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and viewings of a number of texts.

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And so on the one hand, there are simply a lot of very,

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close reading of, the, the work.

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Ella is not obliged Johnny Mad Dog, the film,

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and then the film Timbuktu, tootsy survivor memoirs,

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including those by Esri Muo and, Venus Ka Maha

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and Elise Mus Mandera, which I really engaged with,

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and read, very, very closely, in terms of

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figuring out how I was gonna situate my arguments within the

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larger discussions that were happening at the time.

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Um, what I found was that there was a lot

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of interest in representations of violence from Africa,

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and there was a lot of interest with how, from scholars

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with the ways in which political violence like the Tutsi

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genocide, child soldiers,

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and, Islamist terrorists

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and their victims were being represented.

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There's also much more, broader, occurring

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of thought emerging from,

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in large part from Holocaust studies called trauma studies

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that was looking not just at, in the African context,

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but in a broader context about the ethics, responding

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to traumatic stories about the politi, politicizing

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of memory and things like that.

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And while, there had been some work on, say,

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post-colonial trauma studies, in the specific context

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of Africa and what it meant to mediate violence from Africa,

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specifically, through the lens of these theories

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of ethical ways to represent trauma, that there had not been

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as much, connecting those two strands.

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And so I became very motivated, motivated, motivated

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to find new ways to talk about

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and think about representing trauma from Africa in part,

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and formed by theories of the witness, theories

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of the relationship between the witness and the person

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and the person listening, and things like that.

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And then, the final piece, in addition to engaging

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with the primary texts

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and engaging with these theoretical texts on,

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on trauma theory and post-colonial studies, was to look at,

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just contemporary,

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or I should say, contemporary in the last 20, 30 years,

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political accounts, how were child

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soldiers represented in newspapers?

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How were they talked about by politicians?

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How were they talked about, you know, by,

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by people in the un And then trying to,

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situate the specific works I was talking about,

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about child soldiers, about terrorists,

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about Tutsi survivors.

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Um, not just within the context of other literary works,

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other films about these figures,

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but in the broader context of

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how these figures were discussed,

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in mainstream media and political discourse.

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And to see ways in which the authors

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or filmmakers themselves might actually be responding

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to the very politicized in some ways semantically,

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overdetermined, nature

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of the figures they were writing about.

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So, I, I should say, this post called where framework is,

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is certainly not one that I've invented.

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It's one that I came

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Across a lot in reading, political,

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political science,

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articles in political science articles in anthropology

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and in sociology, talking about changes in political

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organization in Africa, changes in sociopolitical

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organization in Africa.

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And I was struck by, in the domain of literary film

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and cultural studies in the Frankfort African context,

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that this specific framework wasn't really being used.

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People were still using post-colonial,

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or critiquing post-colonial, but not offering replacements.

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Um, and it, and I began to realize that

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although of course, like any framework, it's limiting

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and it leaves things out and it needs to be interrogated,

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that it actually could be very useful to understand

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why figures like child soldiers,

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why figures like Tootsy genocide survivors,

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why figures like terrorists

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and figures like celebrity humanitarians were all

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of a sudden popping up pretty much everywhere

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that you looked, in the 1990s.

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And I think the child soldiers probably the best,

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maybe the clearest example, that I can give, which is

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that, there certainly were child soldiers combatants

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under the age of 18 that were participating in armed

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conflicts in Africa during the Cold War.

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And this has been documented by historian,

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by anthropologists like David Rosen.

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Um, but the West seemed relatively indifferent to that

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because they were fighting against communism,

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which was the big priority of the international community

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with the fall of the Soviet Union,

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and with, the quote unquote international community

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looking for new, kind of organizing principles

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to justify their work together.

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Um, all of a sudden defending,

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children's rights became this big priority.

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And so you can actually trace a through line between,

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un statements and reports

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and meetings about the rights of children

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and fighting, child, and,

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and fighting, child, combatants, child soldiers

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to then articles in the media presenting this as all

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of a sudden this brand new phenomenon in Africa.

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And then novels, both francophone Anglo

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and Anglophone with child soldier protagonists.

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But every time I read people speaking about these books in

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the context of Francophone African literature,

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nowhere was anyone mentioning about this new focus on child

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soldiers, how there was some, contradiction

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or hypocrisy in, you know,

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ignoring the phenomenon when it suited the west,

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and then all of a sudden rallying around the prevention of,

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of child soldiering when it seemed politically expedient.

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And that, to me, felt like a very important, thing

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to acknowledge, because if an author is not somehow

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acknowledging that when writing a story of a child soldier,

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they themselves, one could argue are complicit in,

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in making the child soldier seem like an object of empathy,

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which would then justify western intervention, et cetera.

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Um, and I found that this lens opened up a whole new reading

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of this book called Ali is Not Obliged by Amadou Carma,

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where in fact, rather than being a first person account

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of a child soldier that mimics an oral testimony,

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the book almost seems to mock the notion,

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that we can actually get to know

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and feel something akin to,

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Uh, a certain kind of real empathy

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by reading a first person narration.

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And, and so without the context of knowing

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how the child soldier was being,

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I think politically manipulated, you didn't get, I think,

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the full meaning of what this author was trying to do.

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So every chapter has variations on what I just described on

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how this framework offers a new reading,

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but I, I think the Child Soldier chapter is,

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perhaps the most succinct, example of that in the book.

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This is in part, you know, I draw in work from Susan Sontag,

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Dominic La Capra, Dory Loeb and Shoshana Felman,

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and Michael Rothberg, among others who've written on

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multi-directional memory.

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Um, and, I think a, a large part of,

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what this book is looking at is dealing with

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that double bind that I mentioned in the beginning, which is

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how do you both acknowledge

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that Africa is too often stereotyped as a place

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of violence and lawlessness?

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How do you balance that with a moral obligation

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to make people aware of very real, atrocities

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that are taking place there?

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Um, and so I've given the example of the Child Soldier

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to look at, to look at the second chapter,

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which talks about the film Timbuktu from the, from the,

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Ian Filmmaker Abdurahman Sisko, this book in in particular,

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which is about, the violence

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of Islamist terrorists in West Africa.

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Um, this filmmaker, who was inspired

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by real world events in Timbuktu, including a family

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or including a couple, an adulterous

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couple that was stoned to death.

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He makes a very deliberate choice to not show, acts

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of graphic violence against human beings.

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And he's much more focused on the trauma

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of anticipation on the way in which living under occupation,

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affects every, moment of people's lives.

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So it's very much a symbolic violence rather than

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a graphic violence.

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Um, and my argument,

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and also to get back to the Post called War idea, is

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that he draws our attention in with the promise, perhaps,

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of spectacular violence of the terrorist figure.

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You have terrorists at the opening of the film,

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shooting at, statues.

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And, but he subverts this expectation

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and instead turns our attention towards the much more

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difficult to grasp notion of what it might be like

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to live under military occupation.

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So the book is, is very interested in the specific

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strategies, filmmaking strategies, editorial strategies

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that are being used

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to present this violence in an ethical way.

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Um, and, and the last very brief example I'll give is

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Rwandan Tutsi survivor, testimony,

11:20.725 --> 11:24.605
where often in the media they, we have survivors from Wanda

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who have forgiven their neighbors or who are resilient

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and are shown as examples

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models that we're supposed to follow.

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And I specifically look at texts that question,

11:33.115 --> 11:34.605
this presentation of survivors

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and say, well, what if we looked not at

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what the survivor can teach us,

11:38.185 --> 11:40.525
but rather what our obligations are towards survivors?

11:40.625 --> 11:43.845
How might we, even as an act of reading, think

11:43.845 --> 11:45.285
of reading as an act of accompaniment

11:45.285 --> 11:48.245
and an act of hospitality, rather than the ethnic,

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the ethically questionable stance

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of reading a survivor testimony

11:51.545 --> 11:53.485
for our own betterment or inspiration?

11:53.595 --> 11:55.925
What I hope they take from the book is, is related to what,

11:55.945 --> 11:58.965
I was just saying in terms of thinking of new ways

11:59.065 --> 12:02.245
of reading, and engaging with stories from Africa.

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Um, I think in particular, bombarded all the time,

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especially with recent events in the Middle East,

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I think like never before, very harrowing graphic images

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of other people's suffering that are often devoid

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of any kind of, political context.

12:18.625 --> 12:21.925
And so I hope overall they would, I would be able

12:21.925 --> 12:24.405
to impress upon them the importance of a great deal

12:24.405 --> 12:27.165
of critical distance when being confronted with, graphic

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and violent images from Africa

12:28.785 --> 12:31.045
or other places in the world, a curiosity

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to learn more about the historical context as well,

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with, of course, some critical distance in terms of

12:37.205 --> 12:38.685
what sources they consult for that.

12:39.405 --> 12:41.065
But at the same time,

12:41.265 --> 12:43.665
I think there's a danger in a critical distance

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that shuts out any kind of emotional reaction as somehow

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that, we're being manipulated,

12:48.125 --> 12:50.465
or that's preventing us from, from thinking clearly.

12:51.085 --> 12:53.985
And that it's not, it's not as if there's not a place for us

12:54.005 --> 12:57.665
to be moved, by seeing distant images of suffering,

12:58.085 --> 13:01.705
but it's really a question of who, how are we being moved?

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For what reasons are we having a reaction?

13:03.925 --> 13:06.945
Um, and I give the example, just to give a concrete example

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of something I'd hope,

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the reader would take away is the difference between empathy

13:11.245 --> 13:12.665
and empathic unsettlement,

13:12.915 --> 13:14.865
which is a term from Dominic La Capra.

13:15.125 --> 13:17.185
And he defines empathic unsettlement

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as when you're reading about the history

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and event, you have an emotional reaction,

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you feel somewhat unsettled,

13:22.605 --> 13:25.025
but it's not that fast reaction of thinking,

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it's as if I was there.

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Oh, it's as if I'm in that person's shoes.

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Which in some ways is a very sort of narcissistic and,

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and not very helpful reaction to have.

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So if I can help readers in the context

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of stories from Africa or elsewhere, think critically,

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both about historical context,

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but also the emotional context with which they engage

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with these kind of stories, I would be,

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I would be quite pleased if readers, came away with

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that notion.

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