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Martin Kimani & Clémentine Deliss | A Lowercase Condition of Humanity
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CD (Clémentine Deliss): Martin, in an article of yours you refer to how, as an adolescent in Nairobi, you developed an understanding of "alternate emotional universes" – from the messy one of parents and families, to the sentimental language of American sitcoms .[1] In your work as a conflict analyst, does your personal background still serve as a contrast medium, highlighting and outlining the different representations and interconnections between emotion and violence? How do you deal with the production of fantasy and the reality of your profession as a security specialist?
MK (Martin Kimani): I am curious about this use of contrast and opacity to illuminate or arrive at a truth since it prioritises distinguishing, seeking the points of difference, the boundaries between states and things as a way of finding out what is truthful about them. I think that transition – whether physical or between psychological states – may be where precious truths about us are located. In the text you refer to, I was trying to capture this movement from one context to another, and the immense impact that America had on so much that I learnt and experienced. I had to invent whole parts of myself to be able to react and cope with living and even, at times, surviving there. My accent, the words I used, even my body language changed. And I sometimes suspect that my moral universe is not quite the same in Kenya as a writer as it was in America as a student, or even as a worker in a financial institution in New York. I am not speaking of relativism but rather the spectre of almost complete persons in me each coming to the fore as the context demanded. The stress of newness or of the myriad challenges that we are thrown against is first emotional. But if Hume was correct to assert reason to be a slave of the passions, then it would mean that the alternate emotional universes I refer to are also intellectual ones. The common description of America as a melting pot captures quite precisely the violence of the changes that I underwent trying to fit in, to develop a self that could manage life from day to day while all the time having in me the boy who had travelled to New England from a middle class existence in Nairobi. I think this ability to exist in two or even more spaces eventually added to my curiosity about how a person becomes a genocidaire or kills very deliberately in order to contribute to a political goal. In the interviews I conducted in Rwandan prisons among confessed genocidaires, I would ask them about how the day they killed had unfolded.
Imagine a man in April 1994 who starts the day having breakfast with his family. His young children at the table begin to argue and come to blows. There is a good chance that their father will admonish them for being quarrelsome and violent. This same man after breakfast will bid them farewell, pick up his machete, which he usually uses in the garden, and walk over to the local roadblock to join other members of a militia looking for Tutsis to murder. How does one account for this ability to castigate a child for hitting a sibling, and then a few hours later have the parent outside hacking a person to death? How does one comprehend this transition? Is it
the same person? How can such radically opposed moral viewpoints exist in the same individual within hours of each other? These are not questions that I ever could answer with any degree of satisfaction. But it was my own transitions, which were of course far less dramatic than those of the killer in Rwanda that made me interested in the passage from peaceful moments to those of great violence.
Let me turn to fantasy and violence, and specifically to how these are evoked in the Hollywood genre of the alien invasion. These films are often driven by ideas that are quite loyal to the logic of the actual practice of genocide. The ordinary man on the street becomes in the eyes of his fellow man a monster, a threat to the very fabric of social life. He is revealed as an age-old foe, an alien with evil designs that spring from his very being. Like the Tutsi with their physical stereotypes, the Hollywood aliens’ difference is biological as much as it is moral: their bodies are misshapen or at least radically unusual. Their physical difference expresses their moral difference from the norm. This difference demands that the hero destroy their bodies if he has any hope of overcoming evil. Such films are only fantasy but then so much of genocide and other forms of political violence begin as projections of fantasy. The Rwandan genocidaires invested greatly in politics as a theatre of fantastical histories, a vast machine to generate passions, which extends back to the racialism of Europe’s authors of fantasy (and then science) such as Sir John Mandeville and his fourteenth century tales of Africa’s monstrosities, of inhabitants with heads of dogs atop human bodies, pygmies with such small mouths that they had to suck all their food through reeds, and even a race of one-eyed giants.
This is all to say that the production of fantasy – of a lowercase condition of humanity – is a very real part of what I must deal with in my work on security. After all, a reigning fantasy today is al Qaeda’s perception that the United States is to blame for the impoverishment and oppression of many millions of Muslims the world over. This led, for example, to the brutal murder of hundreds in 1998 during the U.S. Embassy bombings in Nairobi. In the interviews that I did with Rwandan genocidaires, there is a persistent sense of the apocalyptic, of a final showdown, a ‘war’, and of having no choice in whether to participate in the killing or not. And, of course, apocalypse – the end of an age or the earth – embraces fantasy in the classic sense of the word as the creation of a coherent setting anchored by the otherworldly. This weaving of history and fantasy into weapons of genocidal violence is a template that is very much in keeping with forms of conflict such as terrorism. Great violence needs historical justifications that are rarely forthcoming if they are limited to the realm of fact.
CD: The ‘underground’ still bears connotations of bunkers, cellars, and groups of activists. However today’s architectonic metaphor of the underground could be updated in terms of warfare. Perhaps it is more aligned to a landmine and a mechanism that is unpredictable, something that performs a brutal disconnection in the body, which prevents ideas moving forward, that explodes arbitrarily across the vast network of information. What are the connotations of the underground for you today?
MK: My first thought when we spoke of the underground and dragged down into lowercase was to mass graves and then graves in general. I had been reading a lot about the mass killings of the twentieth century in Europe especially. I wondered about the location of mass graves in Rwanda relative to human settlements and what the known ones become to the people who
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Kigali Memorial Site, Rwanda. Found Photograph.
live nearby. I think that mass graves serve a function that goes beyond the logistical need for the killers to dump and hide the evidence of their crime. Mass graves are a very real extension of the collective punishment that constitutes the central logic of massacre. None of the victims is given the dignity of being an individual by the killers, and it is this refusal to recognise individuality that allows the killer to be so brutal and callous. The negation of the individual’s life in contrast to the logic of group identities and motivations lies at the heart of genocide, and is part of the reason victims are buried together. The mass burial thus becomes an extension of the genocide by refusing to accord the victims any individuality even in death. This is not all I associate with the underground but I cannot deny that it strikes me even now as a word tinged with shame, terror and many, many dead bodies.
CD: When you went to Rwanda, what understanding did you glean from local people and various aid organisations on the possibility of memorabilia, of museographic installations, and sites of remembrance?
MK: Rwanda today has dozens of memorials to the genocide. Most of them were actual killing sites. These are often schools and churches now turned into museums, tombs or mausoleums of a kind. Often the bodies have been left lying as they were during the fatal moment. The guiding idea is that by maintaining the site and the evidence of murder one is able to resist forgetting, which is regarded by the authorities as crucial to preventing future genocide. But then a memorial, no matter the fine intentions behind it, can only be a very poor approximation of the
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Nyamata Memorial Church, Rwanda, 2007. Photo Martin Kimani.
killing moment. Skeletal remains, bloodied clothing, bullet holes are moving and horrifying to the visitor but they are far from the actual events of the day.
Many of the people killed met their end in churches. They believed that they would be safe from their hunters in church. It was a reasonable assumption because, in the late 1950s and the 1960s when attacks on Tutsis were common, they had sought and found safety within churches. However in Rwanda, the church has been much more than a place of worship. The Catholic church, in particular, was a critical part, the ‘brains’ of the colonial regime. Towns in Rwanda are built around churches, which literally makes them the foundation on which communities are created. It is therefore not surprising that violence should occur inside them, as was the case during those tragic three months in 1994. The Catholic church in Rwanda is quintessentially political and has been since its earliest days.
At first glance this appears to be macabre: using a church as the site of murder and hatred. But it does cut to the heart of the church’s role in Rwandan life. The church today is where spiritual transcendence is sought, where love is on every tongue, and this only a few years after the radical opposite was the case. I do not know if people in church feel that their space of worship has any connection whatsoever with the killings that happened in it. Nor do I know whether at mass they seek redemption or solace. What is clear is that they are in the one building that all Rwandans believe to be powerful and significant. It is in such buildings that the White Fathers, those politicians in priests’ habits, looked after the souls of the colonial subjects. It is in seminaries that they schooled the country’s future leaders, separating and opposing Tutsis and Hutus. It is in church buildings that Tutsis sought cover and were killed. Today, it is here that the majority congregates every Sunday. Turning churches into genocide memorials must therefore be very deeply felt since the church is so central to every community in Rwanda. Whether the memorials remain in place depends a lot on the political dispensation of the day. They may commemorate the past but they are also potent political symbols that remain useful to those in power. They stand not merely as reminders but as justifications of the State’s determination to quash any opposition that may lead to what it believes may be the resumption of genocidal thinking.
One of the more persistent and to my knowledge largely unanswered questions from the Rwandan genocide is how such an event can be prevented in the future. The memorials are surely intended to be part of this preventive answer. But how can we be sure that civilians will not take their gardening tools in hand once more and search out their neighbours? This is a global question, not one that is limited to Rwanda but pertinent even if the answers are dissatisfying.
One consideration is the utility of social engineering in which every State engages, no matter how libertarian its rhetoric. The genocide in Rwanda was the result of years of politics as social engineering: the State was the embodiment of Hutu-ness, the Tutsis were the potential negation of Hutu nationhood, the evil element in the social mix, endured and always valuable whenever a scapegoat was required. For eighty years, a mix of racialism, and what today is known as ethnic baiting, was practiced in every social sphere: from schools to churches to government. It produced in Mahmood Mamdani’s phrase ‘victims who became killers’. And one can assume the memorials to be one brick in such a project of social engineering. It brings to mind B.F. Skinner’s box or operant conditioning and the utopia he wrote about in Walden Two.
Colonial enterprises in Africa, when they were not busy extracting wealth, were borne from the ideals of social engineering. The ‘native’ was to be saved, his soul for God, his body for capitalism, and political and social systems were erected to support these goals. Racialist ideas and eugenics were not presented as evils but rather as the protection of ‘nature’ and the ‘natural’. The myths of Tutsi superiority and Hutu inferiority on which the 1994 genocide was erected were taught in schools and even announced at the pulpit (the church again!) as the expression of what was natural. And what was natural was then seen as what was right and proper. Transcendent conceptions of an idealised trusteeship of the doomed native were influenced by views rooted in biology. Social engineering continues to this day in the developmental programme of many States, not least through Rwanda’s attempt to shape a citizen who will presumably never be tempted to participate in genocide or its politics again. And the churches as memorials are, in their way, an attempt to engineer a different more morally responsible attitude to politics and the role of violence in it. The worldview that persists here is that if Rwandans were engineered and conditioned into killing, then they can be worked on in the opposite direction.
My scholarly immersion in the biological claims underlying the racialism and eugenics of the last century has made me deeply suspicious of anyone who makes political or social claims in the name of nature. It seems that the work of science that extends human dominion over nature is fraught not just with danger for the environment but for humanity as well. Science begins by aiming its lens at nature and then turns that lens onto us with intentions that are not always benign.
[1] ‘Melting into my Blues’, Martin Kimani, in Farafina 11, 2007, Lagos.
[2] In 1962 when the Belgians granted Rwanda its independence, the two largest buildings in Kigali were the Catholic church of Saint Famille, standing at the top of a hill overlooking the city, and Kigali Central Prison located at the bottom of a hill. Both were made of the same red brick, both were large, appropriate symbols of the country’s sovereign power. Church and State twinned, both looming over all that they surveyed. To the individual and the polity the option was to be enfolded within the bosom of the church and thus to tower above all Rwanda, or to tumble to the bottom of the pile, literally to the foot of a hill and into the State’s grim and intimidating prison. The prison was built three decades earlier, in the 1930s, the year before Musinga was baptised and announced Jesus Christ to be the King of Rwanda. Those in his court and around the country who remained opposed to this measure were thrown into the newly built prison. With that, the precedent was set for Church and State to remain entwined, as they would until the day when genocide broke out.
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