VIOLENCE IN/AND THE GREAT LAKES i Thinking Africa is a series produced by the Department of Political and International Studies at Rhodes University and University of KwaZulu-Natal Press. For more information on the project, visit http://www.ru.ac.za/politics/thinkingafrica/ or write to: Leonhard Praeg: Series Editor Thinking Africa Political and International Studies Rhodes University Private Bag 94 Grahamstown 6139 South Africa Email: [email protected] Previous series titles: The Return of Makhanda: Exploring the Legend by Julia C. Wells (2012) On African Fault Lines: Meditations on Alterity Politics by V-Y Mudimbe (2013) A Report on Ubuntu by Leonhard Praeg (2014) Ubuntu: Curating the Archive edited by Leonhard Praeg and Siphokazi Magadla (2014) ii VIOLENCE IN/AND THE GREAT LAKES The Thought of V-Y Mudimbe and Beyond Edited by Grant Farred, Kasereka Kavwahirehi and Leonhard Praeg iii Published in 2014 by University of KwaZulu-Natal Press Private Bag X01 Scottsville, 3209 Pietermaritzburg South Africa Email: [email protected] Website: www.ukznpress.co.za © 2014 University of KwaZulu-Natal All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from University of KwaZulu- Natal Press. ISBN: 978-1-86914-284-1 Managing editor: Sally Hines Editor: Alison Lockhart Proofreader: Christopher Merrett Typesetter: Patricia Comrie Indexer: Ethné Clarke Cover design: MDesign Cover art: Luc Tuymans, Speech, 2010 (206.4 x 138.4 cm, oil on canvas) Printed and bound in South Africa by Interpak Books, Pietermaritzburg iv C O N T E N T S Acknowledgements viii Introduction: Silhouette of the Unknown Woman 1 Grant Farred 1 For a Common Ascension in Humanity: The Intellectual’s Mission in the Great Lakes Region 16 Kasereka Kavwahirehi 2 Life, ‘Life’ and Death 35 Grant Farred 3 Violence of Details and Details of Violence in Novels by V-Y Mudimbe 54 Justin K. Bisanswa 4 Representations of Violence in V-Y Mudimbe’s Novels 74 Olga Hél-Bongo 5 Making Visible and Eradicating Congo’s History of Violence: Maiming the Female/National Body 87 Ngwarsungu Chiwengo 6 A Phemonenology of Violence 108 Laura Kerr 7 On the Banality of Violence: State, Power and the Everyday in Africa 128 Zubairu Wai 8 Postcards from the Postcolony 161 Leonhard Praeg 9 Debitores Sumus . On Ways of Exhausting Our Question on Violence 188 V-Y Mudimbe v Coda: Violence and the Sublime 202 Leonhard Praeg Notes on the Contributors 209 Index 211 vi To V-Y Mudimbe: Friend, Colleague, Thinker vii A C K N O W L E D G E M E N T S Both the seminar, hosted at Rhodes University, South Africa, and the publication that emerged from it, Violence in/and the Great Lakes: V-Y Mudimbe and Beyond, would not have been possible without the support of the Africana Studies and Research Center at Cornell University and the Thinking Africa project at Rhodes University. As editors, we would like to thank the Africana staff at Cornell – Ms Renee Milligan for her tireless, diligent work on arranging the logistics, all conducted in the best possible spirit; Ms Treva Levine for her keen oversight and the interim director, Salah Hassan, for providing subvention support – and the Thinking Africa staff at Rhodes – Siphokazi Magadla, Sally Matthews and Phumlani Majavu – for working through the winter break to organise the colloquium. We also acknowledge the generous financial support provided by the office of Peter Clayton, deputy vice-chancellor of research at Rhodes University. We are grateful to V-Y Mudimbe’s assistant, Mr Trip Attaway, for liaising among three institutions and two continents. It could not have been easy, but Mr Attaway always, it seems, had a smile at the ready, no matter what the logistical issues were to be resolved. University of KwaZulu-Natal Press was encouraging and supportive from the first. We are grateful for the work they have done to make this publication possible. As has been the case in the preceding volumes of the Thinking Africa book series, we would like to acknowledge the support and dedication of Debra Primo and Sally Hines. In particular, we would like to thank our editor, Alison Lockhart, for her close and insightful reading of the manuscript. Grant Farred would like to thank Richard Pithouse, who first welcomed him to Rhodes University. His engagement with the Thinking Africa project at Rhodes University began with Richard. Thinking Africa would like to thank Grant Farred from Cornell University for initiating and funding the lion’s share of this collaboration. Lastly, we want to thank the participants/contributors for their commitment to the project. Our colleagues travelled great distances to attend the seminar and they kept, as nearly as can be expected, to the publication schedule; moreover, they did viii so in good cheer. All of which, we suspect, can be ascribed to their deep regard for the thinking of V-Y Mudimbe and the pressing questions his work provokes, as well as the intellectual example he has established over several decades. Through his work, our friend, colleague and, above all, our teacher, Valentin- Yves Mudimbe has inspired many generations of scholars, all across the world, to take up the difficult issues he raises. He does so in the most learned, generous and serious way imaginable. We are all immensely pleased and, indeed, honoured to have been able to share the colloquium experience with him. This publication is the acknowledgement of our relation (one that he will deny, as is his wont) of intellectual and ethical debt, a debt we are all too happy to assume, to underwrite, to him. So much of our work would not be possible without him, without the oeuvre he has created – for us and for those who will surely take up this responsibility after us. ix Our metaphysical faculty is paralyzed because actual events have shattered the basis on which speculative metaphysical thought could be reconciled with experience. Once again, the dialectical motif of quantity recoiling into quality scores an unspeakable triumph. — Theodor Adorno, ‘After Auschwitz’ x INTRODUCTION I N T R O D U C T I O N Introduction Silhouette of the Unknown Woman Grant Farred . mustn’t responsibility always be expressed in a language that is foreign to what the community can hear or understand only too well? — Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death Here is a nightmare of my wearing black for more than ten years. — V-Y Mudimbe, ‘Debitores Sumus . .’ V-Y Mudimbe’s essay, ‘Debitores Sumus . On Ways of Exhausting Our Question on Violence’ (Chapter 9), grounds this volume. It does so only in part, it must be said, because Violence in/and the Great Lakes derives from a conference, of the same name, assembled in Mudimbe’s honour. ‘Debitores Sumus’, a ‘statement about the deaths of millions of people. For sure, between seven and ten, by now. The statement is grave’, is the central essay because it sets the terms for this thinking of violence in Mudimbe’s native region. Violence in the Great Lakes region is the ‘nightmare’, the number of dead so shocking as to exceed any other in history, that compels Mudimbe to wear only black ‘for more than ten years’. In its oral presentation, at the conference at Rhodes University, in Grahamstown, South Africa, there was a signal moment in which Mudimbe – a bespectacled man, almost hunched over his papers, dressed all in black, only the grey in his whiskers providing any contrast – presented his audience with another, now long-forgotten nightmare. Mudimbe’s oral presentation – possessed of the authority of delivery, the authority of physical presence – was the defining moment of the conference and as such it, rather than the published version in this volume, provides the philosophical basis for this introduction. The ending of Mudimbe’s presentation was, like his choice to forswear any colour other than the most sober one, unmistakably a political event. It was 1 GRANT FARRED poignant, too, possessed of an ethical conviction and a singular rhetorical and symptomatic force. It was strategically placed, designed to unnerve, to throw everything that had gone before – most of which is recounted in this volume – into stark, and starkly troubling, relief. It apprehended the audience, it made itself – Mudimbe’s ‘revelation’ (I will offer other articulations of it shortly) – the object of thought that reverberated; Mudimbe’s ending pointed back, it would seem, to the very beginning of the colloquium, but not only to the conference proceedings that had gone before, coming as it did in the final session of a gathering organised to honour Mudimbe. The last words of his presentation reached back chronologically to an act of violence that long preceded the conference. It was the very elocution of the last word that could not stand as such; instead, it demanded a response, as any ‘final’ remark is apt to do. The process of engaging with the last word that is, of course, never the last word, began in Grahamstown and finds its most recent articulation here – this time as the ‘first word’ in this collection, a first word that birthed the philosophical terms in which Violence in/and the Great Lakes is conceived. The ethical force of the Grahamstown presentation derived from the haunting image with which Mudimbe concluded his argument. One night, in a convent, a woman was dragged off by some unidentified forces of repression (we have no idea exactly who committed this act), we know not where the Unknown Woman (there is no other way to name her, a fact that must itself trouble us) was taken but we suspect the worst, as we should when people are disappeared in the dead of night.