Academic article

1. Muchativugwa Liberty Hove
North-West University
muchativugwahv@gmail.com 22055215@nwu.ac.za
Re-victimising the victim; glamourising tragedy
Abstract
This article unpacks both the textual and visual vocabulary of war and genocide and, in the
process, seeks to understand how successive generations interpret these memories in Africa
through literary historiography. Re-victimising the victim; glamourising tragedy interrogates
therefore whether or not absolute truth about the experiences can ever be possible, or even
desirable. Wars in Africa, and genocide in particular, have been characterised by specific
stages, including, among others, classification, symbolisation, dehumanisation, organisation,
extermination and, finally, denial. Three inter-related discourses have exerted a palpable
influence in shaping the perceptions of and about war and genocide: juridical, cinematic and
literary historiography. In the uncanny packaging and distribution of these tropes of tragedy,
devastation and loss, it is vital to ask whether or not graphic images of war and genocide
provide insights into the causal factors for such strife. Exhibitions of horror are, like other
mass communication strategies, frequently charged with purveying compassion fatigue rather
than the truthful confrontations, past and present. Juridical and museological attention to the
aftermaths may, ultimately, be no guarantors that the facts of war and genocide will be
understood more fully; rather, they re-victimise victims and (un)intentionally glamourise
tragedy.
Key words: Re-victimising, memorialisation, torture narratives, symbolisation, cinematic
and literary packaging, peripatetic search
Introduction
Wars in Africa, and genocide in particular, have been characterised by specific stages,
including, among others, classification, symbolisation, dehumanisation, organisation,
extermination and, finally, denial. Three inter-related discourses have exerted a palpable
influence in shaping the perceptions of and about war and genocide: juridical, cinematic and

2. literary historiography. In the uncanny packaging and distribution of these tropes of tragedy,
devastation and loss, it is vital to ask whether or not graphic images of war and genocide
provide insights into the causal factors for such strife. Exhibitions of horror are, like other
mass communication strategies, frequently charged with purveying compassion fatigue rather
than the truthful confrontations, past and present. Juridical, narratological and museological
attention to the aftermaths may, ultimately, be no guarantors that the facts of war and
genocide will be understood more fully; rather they re-victimise the victims and
(un)intentionally glamourise tragedy. Re-victimising the victim; glamourising tragedy
unpacks and interrogates whether or not absolute truths about military and genocidal
experiences can ever be possible, or even desirable.
This article also engages with what it perceives to be a pernicious practice: atrocity tourism.
Atrocity tourism privileges difference. It exploits images and murals in order to package and
distribute them primarily to a privileged consumerist audience who can access the packaged
versions and, secondarily to victims of persecution and genocidal experiences. Atrocity
tourism selectively depicts and projects profiles of victimage where the emotional contagion
is re-inscribed in the psyche of survivors. Murals and collages of pictured violences have a
profoundly disturbing effect that arguably falls short of representing and historying the
totality of experiences of genocidal wars. A narcissistic propensity is evident in this
packaging of grossly mutilated bodies of victims and often, their inadvertent deformations in
the military encounters, as if to confirm the indisputable barbarity of the purveyors of such
violence.
Richard Dowden (2008) argues that the long-run effects of the 1884–5 Berlin Congress are
marked in its mission statement that created rules on how to “peacefully” divide Africa
among European nations for aggressive colonisation and exploitation of Africa’s human and
natural resources. In Altered states, ordinary miracles, Dowden (2008:13) makes three
pertinent observations about the scramble for Africa:
 Border drawing was arbitrary and essentially artificialised homogeneity;
 Border design partitioned ethnic cleavages and these ethnic partitions have continued to
suffer devastating civil, and often genocidal wars; and

3.  Consequent upon Berlin, causal negative effects, such as patronage politics, have
contributed to country and ethnic-family fissures where the dominant lexicon has become
war, horror, victimage and re-victimisation.
“Imagined” states, such as Ethiopia, Central African Republic (CAR), Congo, Rwanda,
Somalia and the secessionist Biafra have been driven by conflict and strife as part of the long-
run effects that Dowden observes in the architecture of documents crafted at Berlin. Berlin
artificially “homogenised” inherently different ethnicities in its cartography and,
consequently, set aflame rivalries that, in the postcolony, have been stoked by an agenda-
setting hybrid of loyalties. Michalopoulous and Papaioannou (2011:10) also point out that
since 1970, in Africa, there have been 49 civil wars; seven, including Rwanda, are classified
as “international internal”, with 42 classified as internal armed conflicts. The conflict that
flared into genocide in Rwanda lasted a hundred days, from 6 April 1994 to 18 July 1994.
The elimination of Tutsi loyalists was intent on destroying, in whole or part, a national, ethnic
or religious people perceived as “vermin”. International responses, particularly from America
and other Western nations, could have taken the following forms:
● Presidential statements, White House and Downing Street correspondences and press
interviews that condemned genocide;
● State Department diplomatic visits to sites of genocide;
● American, French and British military interventions, soft and hard;
●American, French and British public protests, letters to the editors, articles and opinion
polls.
None of these anticipated responses was evident. There seems to be a surreptitious agenda in
such silences, an agenda that seeks to “narcotise” sceptics who perceive deliberate non-action
when the “subaltern” and the “other” are both agent and victim.
Almost 120 years after Berlin, the International Criminal Court of Justice (ICC) was set up in
The Hague, the Netherlands, in order to deal with “mass atrocities”, genocide, war crimes and
crimes against humanity. The ICC is generally defined as a permanent, treaty-based,
international criminal court. It was established to promote rule of law, and to ensure that the
gravest crimes do not go unpunished. The ICC is currently under attack for being perceived

4. as the citadel of neocolonialism, principally because from 2007 to 2010, the following cases
have been prepared and brought before the office of the prosecutor at The Hague:
 2007 – The first accused was Thomas Lubanga, former commander-in-chief of the Patriotic
Forces for the Liberation of Congo (FLPC). The second was Bosco Ntaganda, also of FLPC.
 2009 – Germain Katanga and Mathieu Ngudjolo Chui were charged of crimes against
humanity and war crimes, both from the DRC.
 Omar Hassam al-Bashir, the sitting Sudanese president, was charged for crimes in Darfur,
Sudan.
 Bahr Idriss Abu Garda, also from Sudan, was charged for killing 12 UN peace-keepers in
Darfur.
 2010 – Jean Pierre Gombo was charged for crimes against humanity and war crimes.
On the court’s wanted list are Joseph Kony, Vincent Otti, Dominic Ongweni and Okot
Odhiambo, all from Uganda, Africa. Joseph Kony, according to A poisoned chalice (2011:1)
for instance, “abducted and abused children, carried out atrocities of the most appalling
nature, and had a cultish aura that seemed to negate any rational political agenda”. The
perceived trouble with the selectivity of the ICC is that perpetrators of war, crimes against
humanity and genocide are African – Charles Taylor of Liberia (transferred to the UK in
order to serve a 56-year sentence, October 2013), Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto
(presidential incumbents in Kenya; President and Vice President) – the Western accomplices
and perpetrators have been left untouched. Selective targeting of “overpoliticised” individuals
by Western governments in Syria (Asad), Libya (Moummar Qaddafi), Iraq (Saddam Hussein
and Tariq Aziz) and Palestine (Yasser Arafat and Ali Halimeh) are justified as targets for
“sanitised interventions” that proffer democratic processes and peace, none of which has been
established so far. This way, the ICC’s formidable mandate of ending impunity for the worst
crimes in the world through “justicing the victims” has been characterised by tensions and
divisive engagements. African Union (AU) member states, in October 2013, just fell short of
unanimously resigning en-masse from the protocols of the ICC.
The crimes for which all génocidaires have been charged constitute a tenuous legal
framework that has been called “situational gravity”. Recalcitrant African states targeted for
such juridical inquiry into and prosecutions for mass atrocities perceive the ICC as an

5. international legal system that cannot effectively and efficiently reach or prosecute the
perpetrators of many atrocities. Britain, France and America have been cited as hypocritical
because of their participation in Iraq, Egypt and Syria and the ways in which they have
manipulated domestic (dis)order and international governance and opinion. African
genocidaires therefore perceive themselves as “othered” by a “globalising” judicial system
that seeks, theoretically, “rule of law,” justice and impartiality.
Mass atrocities and “situational gravity” imply three volatile elements:
 Harms evoking “human alarm” and, therefore, “global concern”,
 Systematicity in the execution of the crimes, and
 The contention that state-sanctioned crime is graver than the crimes of rebel groups.
Perhaps because of the tenuous legal terms here, the ICC is increasingly perceived as a court
that can only symbolically express outrage and condemnation – an impotent legal and global
institution. Partisan considerations, extraneous to the law, downplay “other crimes” while
highlighting others, a phenomenon that has been called “the CNN and al-Jazeera effect”
where even the mass media selectively highlights certain international events over others. A
facetious cognitive heuristics leads to mass media focusing on the most visibly palpable of
crimes. The argument here is that criminal law is not only about deterring future wrongs or
exacting retribution. Rather, criminal law is understood as forming, and periodically
reinforcing, a moral consensus among the law-abiding. This way, criminal law enhances
social solidarity.
There are a number of questionable insertions in the documentation of the charter of the ICC,
for instance. Article 98 confers immunity from prosecution of all American servicemen.
Article 16 of the ICC court statute also allows the UN Security Council to block ICC
indictments by majority vote. The skewedness of such proclamations and promulgations
allows sceptics to decipher the impunity of the United States, and the ways in which such a
state parades its professed exceptionalism. The argument in this segment of the article is
more succinctly conveyed by Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2009:182) who observes that
“systems of governance that emerged in pre-colonial Africa and [after Berlin] were
underpinned by complex ideologies involving an intricate interplay of authoritarianism,

6. militarism, populism... patriarchal tendencies, kinship and communalism”. Indeed, the
articulation of power and governance was permeated and mediated by these crucial
ambiguities and contradictions.
Without condoning the massacres and genocide perpetrated by those charged by the ICC so
far, it is crucial to understand the mental health problems that are a result of war and strife.
Munashe, the protagonist in Alexander Kanengoni’s novel, Pawns (1997), eventually
commits suicide at the end of the war in Zimbabwe because of the horrors that are indelibly
printed on his mind. Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), the most invisible ogre created by
genocidal wars, hounds Munashe till he takes his life. After the CNN, Al-Jazeera and BBC
cameras have left the war-torn regions, tears are the most profound expression of deep pain
and trauma. Grief in those affected by war is evident in sad eyes, internal and often
psychological crises, harrowing memories, emotional wheals, invisible voices and frequent
gunshots, explosions and delimbed body parts. Indeed, when “tears become a language” there
is urgent need for scholarship to seek an epistemological understanding of re-victimisation,
an engaged and enraged scholarship that examines evolving histories, emerging marginalities
and the unstated agenda of visual representations.
Biafra: The tempestuous template of There was a country
One of the principal tensions that courses through the experiences of Biafra (1966–1970)
relates to the efficacy of visual media as a representative field of this episode. Put simply, do
visual media have more successes in representing and historying the genocidal experiences
that unfolded in Biafra?
Genocide is derived from Latin roots, genos (race/tribe) and cide (killing). Genocide
therefore, quite often, is social, political and perhaps much more “everyday” and permanent
in its effects, rather than just an ungraspable and unspeakable, accidental moment of
madness, implicating “them” instead of “us.” Patriarchal loyalties, ethnic cleavages and
resource-plunder/manipulation often compellingly drive genocidal agendas.
Biafra, between 1966 and 1970, witnessed atrocity, “Igbo cleansing”, torture, mass starvation
by death and lasting psychological scars that drove many an Igbo, like Munashe, to suicide.
In There was a country, Chinua Achebe (2013) captures these horrors in the entire
autobiography and, more succinctly, two poems, Refugee mother and child and Vultures.

7. Writing of the media war, Achebe (2013:199) clarifies his position relative to the impact of
televisual images:
In the televised Biafran War, blood, guts, severed limbs from the war front flooded
into homes around the world… in real time. Television invaded without mercy the
sanctity of people’s living rooms with horrifying scenes of children immiserated by
war… Biafra became synonymous with tear-gutting imagery of starving babies…
blown out bellies, skulls without subcutaneous fat…(my emphasis).
In connecting to my thesis of televisual re-victimisation, Achebe confesses that “for those of
us on the ground in Biafra, where this tragedy continued to unfold, we used a different
language… the language of memory, of death, of despair, suffering and bitterness” (Achebe,
2013:199). For Achebe, the images conveyed through television de-sanctified the privacy of
home and their impact was invariably to wrench tears and compassion fatigue from the
viewers. Thus, in place of pictures, Achebe resorts to words and the language of desperation
and suffering in Refugee mother and child. He writes of
a mother’s tenderness
for a son she soon will have to forget
…she held
a ghost smile between her teeth
and in her eyes the ghost of a mother’s
pride as she combed the rust-coloured
hair left on his skull…
she did it like putting flowers
on a tiny grave.
Achebe manages to invite readers to smell the heavy odours of diarrhoea, visualise the
washed out ribs and dried up bottoms. Each reader emerges with a different tapestry of
pictures rather than the selectively manufactured images of photojournalism. There is a
certain currency and fidelity in this language of memory, layered with the genuine bitterness
over the futility of life that seems absent in still and motion pictures. Achebe privileges and
indexes the entire autobiographical text in order to re-inscribe both his history and identity as
simultaneously Igbo and Nigerian. The strife and war in Biafra is already known and
recognised from the photojournalistic displays, but Achebe’s public signature and

8. participation can only be clearly hearkened in the repetition of words that carve his record of
restrictions and choices, nomadism and dislocation, words replete with nuances of
solitariness and solidarity. The circumstances surrounding There was a country are about
being both Igbo and Nigerian, a panoply of identities that is rhizomatic with the world since
Achebe’s nomadic experiences are saturated with and propelled by a despotic, Nigerian
political and military machinery. As a selfing discourse, written 43 years after the Biafra
War, There was a country becomes a “retrospective contemplativeness” (Assman, 1995:129)
where the ambivalent processes of deterritoriliasation and reterritorialisation of the
Biafran/Nigerian spaces compel a reconceptualisation of home and becoming.
This article has already argued that genocide is characterised by six seminal steps:
classification, symbolisation, dehumanisation, organisation, extermination and, finally,
denial. At the end of the Biafran War, with over a million Igbos gouged by vultures and
gunfire and rudimentary machetes at the hands of Obafemi Awolowo, the last stage in
genocide, denial, takes on a sinister form. Biafra is not a subject open to discussion; Biafra
has not been taught as part of the bitter Nigerian experience; Biafra has been de-historicised.
Yet, ironically, Biafra remains, in spite of all excuses, a stubborn, ineradicable episode. There
was a country is therefore read as an important addition to the conversations about genocide
and the reflective insights and experiences afforded to both victims and perpetrators alike.
Witnessing and picturing violence: Photojournalism and glamourising tragedy
In 1994, Kevin Carter, a South African photojournalist, published a disturbing photograph of
a child being stalked by a vulture in the conflict in Sudan. That same year, Kevin Carter
committed suicide. Whereas Susie Linfield (2010) argues that viewing photographs of
torture, mutilation and death is not exploitative but rather a necessary step in alleviating
political violence, this segment of Re-victimising the victim; glamourising tragedy contests
that photographs are exploitative, deceitful, pornographic and voyeuristic. The drones, the
pangas, the machetes and landmines that are made in the US, the UK, France and other states
are not pictured in the violent furore dramatised on African spaces. Such weaponry is made
and supplied on the immoral and mercantilist understanding that they would be used to kill
and maim.
I enlist the voice of Dona DeCesare (2013:1), who asks pertinent questions related to
photojournalism:

9. How do you stay safe, stay ethical and tell good stories when you are covering
violence, and dealing with [women] and children, and foreign cultures…Why do
words so often fail to express the impact of terror, tragedy and disaster? What does it
take for survivors to tell their stories?...What role do journalists play in the process of
finding narratives, meaning, and justice in the face of atrocity?
In witnessing and picturing violence, genocide, and massacre, the photojournalistic becomes
a participant in the strife, taking angles of victimage and, in the process, re-victimises the
victim. Pictures of war are constituted of atrocity, bloodshed and tears. Nothing but injustice
emerges from such narratives, hence the subtitle of this article, “glamourising tragedy”. The
spectacle of violence verges on the gross and narcissistic. Photojournalism, for instance,
becomes complicit in tragic scenes, both as record and display in the public necklacing of the
“burning [Mozambican] man” in South Africa’s xenophobic chapter in 2008. Like
pornography, photojournalism has come to mean “the violation of dignity, exploitation,
objectification, putting misery and horror on display, moral and political perversion… a
practice in excesses” (Campbell, 2012:6).
Modernity’s culture of spectatorship, coupled with its incessant exposure to harrowing
images, maps photojournalism’s preoccupation with crisis coverage and this, we argue, abets
and ratchets a cultural meme where international responses to crises are overtly insufficient,
indifferent, or, arguably, avoided. The political economy of disturbing “international
conflicts” that are bereft of oil, diamonds and other exploitable natural resources is that they
apparently are not compelling enough to galvanise concerted “international” responses.
Campbell (2012:20), however, perceives the particular individual image as a stimulus to
responsiveness, arguing that
 A single individual is viewed as a psychologically coherent unity, whereas a group is not;
 Identifiable victims are more “vivid” and hence more compelling;
 Identifiable victims are actual.
He argues that “emotional contagion” produced by particular individual shots of powerless
victimhood consolidates the efficacy of photojournalism’s peripatetic search for “good
stories”. What Campbell observes here is quite related to Walter Lippmann’s (1986) “agenda
setting theory” which analysed the impact of media on audiences’ perceptions of and

10. responses to events that etch pictures on our minds. The selectivity of the media, and
especially photojournalism, functions in a deterministic way principally in priming, vivid
presentation and positioning of specifically volatile projections of horror.
The agency of performative and ideological prisms
Two films on genocide, Hotel Rwanda and Sometimes in April are examined in this segment
both as performative and ideological prisms through which mass participation in genocide
was disseminated. Ethnicity is fore grounded in both films, emphasising a routinised
demonisation of “the other” and the bloody reprisals who became a consequence of this
invocation. Juvenal Habyarimana, then president of Rwanda and a Hutu himself, set in
motion an incendiary agenda against the Tutsi minority as part of a legitimising protocol,
rubanda nyamwinshi (majority rule) for his stay in power. The Tutsi minority was
delegitimised, specifically through classification as inyenzi intokanyi, the cockroaches.
Political power, which at the end of the colonial reign had been passed over to a Tutsi
“aristocracy”, was being re-invented by the Hutu under Habyarimana. The radio became a
key site for the articulation and broadcasting of a stilted propaganda that resonated with the
virtuoso of the Hutu grouping. For instance, Simon Bikindi, a Hutu singer, composed anti-
Tutsi songs that were repeatedly played on RTLM in order to bolster their dehumanisation.
In a review of the film Hotel Rwanda, and the compassion fatigue that it generates, David
Campbell (2012:6) argues that this film tackles “one of the most horrifically ugly events
[displaying] a terrifying campaign of genocide… while the rest of the world looked and did
nothing”. Paul Rusesabagina, a Hutu himself, stars as the hotel manager at Les Milles
Collines in Kigali. He is a successful businessman, and wields massive political capital
because he is well-connected. But his wife, Tatiana, is a Tutsi. As the violence escalates, Paul
Rusesabagina’s hotel soon becomes a “refugee camp”, and his “guests” (the Tutsi minority)
grow more precarious each day as the Hutu siege becomes a ubiquitous menace at
roadblocks, in churches and every conceivable space in Rwanda.
Sometimes in April is another cinematic exploration of vexed and polarised ethnicities, the
Hutu and Tutsi. In the real and the reel, one Hutu family is torn apart by the genocidaires and
Idris Elba stars in his role as he defies Hutu hegemony and tries to move his Tutsi wife to
safety. Honore, Augustin Elba’s brother has been arrested and is awaiting trial in Arusha,
Tanzania, for the bloodless role that he and other journalists played in the Rwanda genocide.
A United States Deputy Assistant Secretary of State, Prudence Bushnell, is cast in a role in

11. order to convey her frustration and sadness since she fails to persuade the US to intervene in
the genocidal crisis in Rwanda. The reason proffered in the rejection to intervene is cold: to
avoid “another Mogadishu” where 18 American soldiers were killed in active combat in
Somalia.
In both films, the unbending critical view remains that as the genocide unfolds, the
“international” world looks askance. Journalistic figures range from 620 000 to 800 000 Tutsi
killed during 2004 alone in Rwanda (United Human Rights Council, June 2014). Both reels
and the photographs shot and disseminated during the conflict constitute an intertextual
narrative linking the political situation in Rwanda to the “consumption matrix” where viewers
reacted vicariously to both cinematic and visual displays of horror. In tandem, these tropes of
representation (un)intentionally glamourise tragedy and call upon the world to react in
specifically packaged ways. Nicholas Sarkozy, the French president, encountered the
Rwandan genocide at the Memorial of the Rwandan Genocide during a state visit in Kigali on
25 February, 2010. He remarked that “France and the international community had failed to
act during the genocide because [they] suffered a kind of blindness.” His public remarks
came after the event. What remains incorrigibly evident is the fact that the largely faceless
victims of this genocidal episode, as depicted in the mural, died and are forever beyond the
reach of the filmic and photographic displays. Equally, the survivors have their memories of
departed ones endlessly stoked in revisiting the scenes of horror and re-looking at the
perpetrators. Such experiences re-victimise the victims. When “the good story” of genocidal
crime is told, it is the victim’s narrative that is remembered. Such painful stories are,
ironically, tremendously important in the memorialisation and reconstructive processes; they
represent a difficult equilibrium between ethics and reconstruction, torture, hurt and memory.
Injustice indeed becomes a verb in the systematic catalogue of rape and forced impregnation
and de-limbing of genocidal victims.
Literary historiography and autobiographical dimensions
Sarah Prett (2009: ii) suggests that literature has the potential to act as both a laboratory for
the testing of limitations of narrative identity and the resilience of ethical mores. She adds
that the representation of trauma and torture has an important part to play in the readership’s
attempts at rehabilitation. This segment of the paper selectively analyses three narratives of
genocide: Dee Brown (1971) Bury my heart at Wounded Knee, Richard Wright (1964) Native
Son and Alex la Guma (1978) In the fog of the season’s end. As a set, these narratives

12. provide an alternative and complementary ethnography of the vexed realities and experiences
of marginalised bodies and their societies in a world of interconnecting local and global
hierarchies. The principal connection among them is the biographical mode, an artistic act of
camouflage amenable to the storying of nomadic experiences in spaces that are characterised
by being banned and confined to designated areas. The ever-shifting plateaus of experience in
which the political exerts monumental presence allow the inscription of re-membered
archival versions of injustice.
Bury my heart at Wounded Knee reconstructs the decimation of the Dakota, Pinca, Cheyenne,
Apache, Aztec and Cochise natives in the American episode of opening frontiers for white
settlement. Through the voices of women, children and the chief spokespersons, Dee Brown
demonstrates that the violence unleashed on the American natives constitutes genocidal
tragedy: they were ruthlessly murdered and the perpetrators of this genocide, the white
militia, were given medals and accolades for “distinguished service”. The social, cultural and
political rights of Native Americans are violated by white militia and military commanders
while the political masters of this wave of brutality validate their atrocities. Thus, to the
victims, the Indians, “it seemed that these Europeans hated everything in nature – the living
forests and their birds and beasts, the grassy glades, the water, the soil, the air itself” (Brown,
1971:48). In an even more poignant observation, Black Elk and Chief Seattle state that “they
[Europeans] made us many promises, more than I can remember, but they never kept but one;
they promised to take the land; they took it” (Dee Brown, 1971:67).
The Wounded Knee Massacre, as it has come to be called in American history, demonstrates
the sheer brutality of white soldiers as they shot women and infants at point-blank range. The
grief and mourning, the palpable anger of the Native Americans are inestimable, particularly
in the book more than in the filmic version.
In the fog of the season’s end is read as a national allegory, a novel that demonstrates that the
conscience of apartheid’s operational ethos verges on violence. Elias Tekwane, Isaac and
Beukes and other black marginalia are the panopticon who gaze at several historical
antecedents in the apartheid-triggered purposeful decimation of a people through brutal
repression and military tactics that verge on genocide. The extermination and enslavement of
the Khoisan peoples post Vasco da Gama’s 1642 cursed landing at the Cape of Good Hope,
the routing of Mzilikazi’s impi by Voortrekkers at Mosega in 1837, Dingane’s invasion at
Blood River in 1883 and Cetshwayo’s valiant stand at Isandlwana in 1879 are artistically

13. choreographed in La Guma’s narrative in order to give the novel a historicist dimension that
unpacks art’s aesthetic capacity and commitment to a liberatory cause. Such a matrix teases
out the interface between art and society and history; this interdisciplinary matrix is an
enduring trope that deals with the deepest human laws, problems and contradictions of the
apartheid epoch in the South African imaginary. Indeed, as Olu Obafemi (1997:7) avers in
“Literature and society on the border of discourse”, “[In the fog of the season’s end] reflects,
represents and refracts the reality of the world across… time.”
The qualities that make In the fog of the season’s end a national allegory emerge most
significantly in the positioning of the writer relative to the liberation struggle. La Guma’s
aesthetic demonstrates an enduring mediation of a writer’s responsibilities in apartheid’s
moral and political siege against black subjectivities. When the novel garners revolution as an
anaesthetic to the systematic purge of blacks, the narrative has invoked both the Sharpeville
Massacre and the Soweto students’ uprising, charged moments in South African
historiography that are emblematic of the only possibility towards reconciling a history of
violence and brute force with a primed consciousness. La Guma insists that the state of being
too poor, too miserable, too hunted and scared, and too debased inevitably directs a subjected
people into a mobilised front that seeks redress and change to a chromatic configuration that
privileges whiteness over blackness.
In a very incisive introduction aptly entitled “Mending wounds: Healing, working through, or
staying in trauma,” Masterson, Watson and Williams (2013:1) argue that “trauma disrupts the
ordinary mechanisms and representations of consciousness and memory”. I concur with their
observation that “trauma is a shattering experience that disrupts and distorts memory,
rendering it thereby vulnerable and fallible in reporting events” (2013:1). Trauma
testimonies, such as the burdened versions of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of
South Africa (TRC), are authenticated and validated through the tears and wounds of the
victims. The regaling of violence and torture and rape and hopelessness constitute what I
perceive to be a process towards closure, a prolonged moment of inscripting novel identities
by the victim, especially as the same victim attempts to integrate the present “other” that was
lost during the remembered episode of victimage. I also perceive, in the victims, an agonised
denial of loss, a denial that enlists the past because the present is ineluctably linked to that
past and its history. Since the “history” of the future is privileged in consciousness as
possibility, healing and redemption are prioritised in the process of reconstructing both the
scarred body and the traumatised psyche.

14. La Guma therefore emerges with the narrative of Elias Tekwane as a narrative that
disentangles bodies and words from the experiences of trauma under apartheid. Where words
and bodies were trapped, truncated and deformed, La Guma voices the multi-layered
conundrum of woundedness. The scarred body and its disorienting traumatised experiences
challenges videographic, filmic and juridical projections and versions to the extent that
apartheid and the massacres at Sharpeville call for a more nuanced literary hieroglyph, a
tapestry that invents mimicry of the perpetrators of violence. Wounded Knee, Mogadishu,
Rwanda, Sharpeville and Soweto publicly proclaim to the world, “I kill, therefore I am”,
while the victims attempt to reconstruct identities that escape criminalising and criminalised
vocabulary. The wounded body, raped and disfigured, maimed and mutilated are indexical,
disturbing images that almost defy mending and reconstruction. Perverse photographs and
filmic projections apparently flounder in their “search for good stories”, especially when the
hiatus of the viewer and the viewed becomes compounded with hegemonic silencing and
perverse practices.
In the civilisational paradox that tampers discursive practices on genocide, this paper
contends that there are irreducible tensions and contradictions that, ironically, plague and
enrich photojournalism relative to literary imaginaries. These tensions, invariably, surround
the representation of the victim, the “other”. I contend that photojournalism harbours an
ethnographic impulse, approaching the victim from an overblown mission of “salvation”,
rescue, rehabilitation and marketing both the debased subject/object and the image. An
inherent ethnographic proximity to scenes of victimage, an intimacy with the victim, a
focusing and re-focusing of the lens all collude to project both compassion and glee. I am
aware of the ire that arises from such a viewpoint, but this project is also aware that the
incompatibilities between the visual and the written cannot be simplistically dichotomised
nor rationalised away as though they were generative or enabling contraries.
Heidi Holland (2010) and Peter Godwin (2009), in the tradition of Michel Leiris and Claude
Levi-Strauss, take on a dual position as informants to a largely European audience and
detached photographers/ethnographers about the implosion of a state called Zimbabwe. In
their performances for both roles, there emerges what I perceive as a burgeoning dichotomy
between photojournalism and literary qua literary representation. I add that the verifiable
subjectivities captured through the camera lens lack the representation of thoughts and
feelings, experiences and phenomena that can only be accessed through a literary lens; hence
photojournalistic projection transfers these to the viewer. Further, photojournalism is

15. obfuscated by the particular choices made: close shot, angle, zoom, narrowing and other
specific decisions that anchor the picturing practice. Literary narrative, on the other hand,
strives to occupy the intimate interior of subjectivities and experiences that it explores.
Massacres, such as Chimoio (Mozambique, 1977), Wounded Knee and genocidal experiences
such as Auschwitz and Rwanda, all in all become pejorative stereotypes, enhanced in
globalised crusades that harp on human rights, democracy and the rule of law. One of the
most significant ironies lies in the fact that photojournalists jet in from violence-free zones in
order to capture what I perceive as “tautologies”, articulations of the grotesque whose
negative depictions of horror, barbarism and savagery confirm the postcolonial dialectic
between civilisation (resident in the West) and barbarism (resident in the East).
In the dialectic of the juridical and the literary, one perceives again a Calibansque response:
“you taught me language, and my profit on’t is I know how to swear”. Genocide has gained a
notorious relativity, an unfixed meaning as long as CNN/BBC and Al Jazeera remain
oppositional perspectival media houses that transmit hermeneutically positive or negative
valences of the same experiences through the image. These ideologically oppositional
channels have become tools of apodioxis – that refusal of all argumentation or refutation –
because of the “real, the reel, the visual” that each channel selectively adopts to project to
premeditated audiences. Each projection of mass murder, I argue, conveys a standpoint, a
politicised statement, an (in)adequate index of authorial intentions. As hinted at earlier in the
French president’s response to Rwanda’s genocide memorial, there is an evident ambivalence
between condemnation and exhortation, a quaver between commercialism and energetic
denunciation or intervention. Representational problems, I argue, are endemic to the
ethnographic gaze: the dynamics of colonialism’s gaze often resort to a negritudinal
apodioxis that capitulates to stereotypes.
Trayvon Martin, shot in cold blood in the US in 2013, is only one of millions of Bigger
Thomases profiled and targeted for their blackness in America. On the occasion of the jury
finding Zimmerman, the murderer innocent, President Barack Obama spoke emotionally
about “the fact of blackness,” a la Frantz Fanon:
When Trayvon Martin was first shot I said that this could have been my son. Another
way of saying that is Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago. And when
you think about why, in the American community at least, there’s a lot of pain around
what happened here, I think it’s important to recognize that the African-American

16. community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and a history that
doesn’t go away (Remarks by the president on Trayvon Martin,19 July, 2013).
This set of experiences that Obama alludes to is a history of genocide. It does not go away as
victims are re-victimised in memoric re-enactment.
Obama addressed why emotions over the Zimmerman verdict were running so high. He
explained the lens through which many black Americans see the case…and how their own
experiences and America’s history inform their perception:
There are very few African American men in this country who haven’t had the
experience of being followed when they were shopping in a department store. That
includes me. There are very few African American men who haven’t had the
experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of
cars. That happens to me… at least before I was a senator. There are very few African
Americans who haven’t had the experience of getting on an elevator and a woman
clutching her purse nervously and holding her breath until she had a chance to get off.
That happens often (Remarks by the president on Trayvon Martin, 19 July, 2013).
What Barack Obama testifies to, and speaks about in such an impassioned fashion,
constitutes the very fabric of genocide: classification, symbolisation, dehumanisation,
organisation, extermination and, finally, denial as evidenced by the acquittal of Zimmerman.
“Secondary victimisation” is indeed a misnomer for the experiences that survivors of
genocide and massacre go through as cinematic reels and legal procedures investigate, probe
and arrive at “conclusive” judgments over the perpetrators. Suicide (recorded and
unrecorded), post-traumatic stress disorders, emotional re-scarring are all pre-eminent
signatures of what this paper calls re-victimisation, a re-engagement with the sordid details of
experiences that victims of military and civilian episodes would rather efface than see
replayed and re-enacted.
Bigger Thomas, in Richard Wright’s Native Son, smothers a white girl, Mary Dalton, in the
blind gaze of Mrs Dalton. Mrs Dalton is immensely rich and Bigger is aware that the drunken
girl he is carrying into the house might scream rape. Such an incipient and imagined crime
portends death by hanging for Bigger Thomas, simply because he is black. Bigger therefore
knows that his only escape is through practically smothering Mary so that he could be hanged
for a crime that he verily committed, rather than one he would be perceived as having

17. committed. The alarm that Richard Wright set as the wake-up call for Bigger Thomas at the
beginning of the novel is, metaphorically, a wake-up call for all America to hearken to the
issues of race and the systematic erasure of black lives in their midst.
At the end of the novel, Bigger Thomas awaits execution and is confined to a solitary cell. In
this respect, Wright sets out to explore the interfaces of racial profiling and the criminal
justice system in America. Wright magnifies law’s ultimate violence and collusion with race-
based police stop-and-search practices targeted at black citizens, the (un)fairness of the
justice system (especially prosecutions that are led by an all-white jury) and the frustrations
of black subjectivities where institutional penology sanctions retributive punishment relative
to the chromatic configurations of the perceived criminal. Read in this way, Bigger Thomas’
crime is the crossing of societal and legal boundaries; his crime is “trespass on the property
interest in whiteness” as Bennett Capers (2006:8) amply demonstrates. In fact, I read the
novel as a text that focuses on the interplay between legal cases and oppositional story-
telling, a novel that bridges a vision of justice and the social, legal and political enactment of
that vision. The tripartite division of the novel into “Fear”, “Flight” and “Fate” suggests also
the antipodes that generate an indispensable lens for the reading of Native Son: black male set
against white female and black male set against black female. Rape and murder, inadvertent
and premeditated, and the disposal of murdered bodies into a furnace and air-shaft are critical
incidents that allow Wright to explore American genocidal profiling.
Cesare Lombroso, editor of the daily newspaper that reports Bigger’s trial and conviction,
provides a startling revelation about America’s construction of race, and its ultimate
complicity and culpability in the targeting and extermination of African American criminal
phenotypes:
Overwhelmed by the sight of his accusers, Bigger Thomas, Negro sex-slayer, fainted
dramatically this morning at the inquest of Mary Dalton, millionaire Chicago
heiress…
“He looks exactly like an ape!” exclaimed a terrified young white girl who watched
the black slayer being loaded onto a stretcher after he had fainted.
Though the Negro killer’s body does not seem compactly built, he gives the
impression of possessing abnormal physical strength… His jaw protrudes
obnoxiously, reminding one of a jungle beast… It is easy to imagine how this man, in

18. the grip of a brain-numbing sex passion, overpowered little Mary Dalton, raped her,
murdered her, beheaded her, then stuffed her body into a roaring furnace to destroy
the evidence of his crime… All in all, he seems a beast utterly untouched by the
softening influences of modern civilisation (Wright, 1940/1998:127).
The media here exacerbates the profiling: it is a strategic mechanism for the inscription and
dissemination of certain images that ultimately facilitate the legal framing of Bigger. Mary is
“little Mary Dalton” while Bigger is a “Negro sex-slayer”. Bigger is a “jungle beast”, “out of
place” while Mary is a “millionaire Chicago heiress”. The media colludes and serves as an
institutional discursive mouthpiece that participates in reproducing and representing the
“other”. In wording and publicity, the newspaper sets an agenda and promulgates an acutely
efficient “grammar” of racialising, stereotyping and magnifying black criminality. A
symbiotic relationship emerges between the media and the police and the law in their drive to
police, monitor and eliminate transgression against “societal” normative practices.
Bigger is one in a lineage that upon landing at Charlestown in 1676 became criminalised,
profiled and targeted for systematic servility and extermination. Such prototypes engage
writers and are depicted in Alex Haley’s Roots (1976), Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man
(1952), Maya Angelou’s Caged Bird (1969) and even in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mocking Bird
(1961). Ellison was later to express the mirage of equality and freedom in the US in the most
poignant way:
The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience
alive in one’s aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not
by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic
lyricism. As a form, the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe
expressed lyrically (quoted in Olderman, OR, 1966:143).
Literature, like the blues in Ellison, approximates the “autobiographical chronicle of personal
catastrophe”. Thus, Alex Haley’s Roots fits perfectly into this template. Roots, over and
above everything else, is the monumental two-century drama of Kunta Kinte and the six
generations who came after him. By tracing back his own roots, Haley tells the story of 39
million Americans of African descent (Laist, 2013:3). It speaks to all races everywhere, it is a
story of classification, symbolisation, dehumanisation, organisation, extermination and,
finally, denial. The narrative in Roots is one of the most eloquent testimonials ever written to

19. the indomitability of the African American spirit (Laist, 2013:4) and the experiences of an
unacknowledged centuries-long genocide.
Conclusions
This paper has argued that genocide involves specific stages: classification, symbolisation,
targeting, dehumanisation, organisation and finally, denial. Chromatic classifications, and
later branding, on the shores of Charlestown, become specific instances for the
dehumanisation and killing of black subjectivities in America. To the extent that Barack
Obama spoke to the world about the horror-packed murder of Trayvon Marin in 2013, it is
clear that genocide does not have to be measured in years, as in Auschwitz, the Central
African Republic (CAR), Kenya and Rwanda. Language, race, gender, sex and xenophobic
episodes have all constituted markers of identity that have spurred genocide. As repertoires
and toolkits of identity, these are marked by their absences in photojournalistic and juridical
records of genocide. Manufactured and conveniently contextualised identities, including
ascribed markers, have been marshalled to organise genocidal crusades. In America,
systematic genocide has been enacted on black subjects since the Black Atlantic, to borrow
from Paul Gilroy (1993).
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