15107

WiSe 16/17: Colonial Genocide in Sub-Saharan Africa - Namibia, Tanzania, Congo Free State

Sara Dehkordi

Comments

«There is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory». To control the archive, and therefore memory, means to control the ways in which history is perceived, but also, how it becomes reconstructed and imagined. Implied violences of the present can in this way be cut off from their historical backgrounds and reside as isolated conditions of the social, but not of the political. Dehistoricizing then means at the same time a depoliticizing of the event. The German genocide on the Herero and Nama in Namibia, on the Ngoni, Matumbi, and Ngindo in Tanzania, and the Belgian genocide on the Kongo, Mongo, and Luba in the Congo, have often been subjects of dehistoricization, depoliticization, and silence. It is impossible to read the catastrophe of the holocaust as a historical one , without taking into account the brutal manifestations of fascism within the German colonial apparatus. The genocidal practices and technologies in both cases, the manner in which colonialists and leaders of the national socialist party viewed themselves, the racialized regimes in which they ordered, administrated and made law, and the epistemological foundations through which they rationalized their notion of superiority and their relationship to violence, are inextricably linked. Patrice Lumumba’s joint execution by Belgian, UK, US, and Congolese forces in 1960, and the role of Belgium in the 1994 Rwandan genocide, have to be read against the history of unthinkable genocidal practices that were committed by Belgians at the end of the nineteens and the beginning of the twentieth century. The historical records that disclose these relations are rarely generated. What remains is to look at the power relations and political formations that led to the silencing and erasure and at the discourse that the present archival documents form, or, conversely, to pose the question of how that what is absent can be understood. In this seminar, we will discuss and carve out methods that allow us to reprocess these genocides respectfully and patiently, and to understand their historical and political meanings. In this process, we will also discuss how misleading and violent the use of colonial archives can be. This requires us to include questions of epistemology and method. close