By the same author: African Philosophy and the Quest for Autonomy: A Philosophical

Investigation (2000); Amsterdam and Atlanta: Editions Rodopi B.V.

THE GEOMETRY OF VIOLENCE
Africa, Girard, Modernity

LEONHARD PRAEG
The Geometry of Violence

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All rights reserved. Copyright © 2007 Leonhard Praeg

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 DEDICATION

To Angelique Umutesi – pulled from under the dead weight of your

parents and grandparents in Byumba, Rwanda. I never know if this
second birth was a curse or an act of grace. I lost the reference to it along
with the original draft of chapter one. Then I pulled you out; again.
Your third gasp, too, was paradoxical; indecipherable. But that’s perhaps
because your breath, like any other, does not signify. It just is; on
every page.
Violence will come to an end only after it has
had the last word and that word has been
accepted as divine.
- René Girard
 CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION ..................................................................... 1
1. Inventing genocide ......................................................... 1
2. Genocide as (another) genocide ......................................... 3
3. Genocide as homicide ..................................................... 4
4. Religion and crimes against humanity .................................. 9
5. Sacredness and humanism ................................................. 14
6. Timelessness ................................................................. 16
7. Violence as sacrifice ........................................................ 17

GENOCIDE ............................................................................ 25
1. A balance of forces ......................................................... 25
2. Apprehension ............................................................... 26
3. Foundational violence ..................................................... 30
4. The sacred ................................................................... 33
5. Misapprehension unveiled – the sacrificial crisis ...................... 35
6. Foundational violence deferred: Julius Caesar and
Kigeli V. Ndahindurwa .................................................... 36
7. Genocide as deferred act of foundational violence ................... 41
8. Mimesis and modernity ................................................... 42
9. Global(ising) empathy ..................................................... 45
10. Slaughter, not murder: the map is not the territory ................. 46
11. Talking as doing ............................................................ 48
12. Modern pain: the fear of freedom ....................................... 51
13. The fear of God ............................................................. 54
14. The implosion of the “ethnic” self (I) ................................... 56
15. From anthropological gaze to political haze ........................... 58

NECKLACE MURDERS ............................................................... 61

1. Maki Skosana ................................................................ 61
2. Witch way? .................................................................. 62
3. System of difference ....................................................... 64
4. Crisis of degree ............................................................. 65
5. Ontology wars .............................................................. 66
6. “I am because we are” ...................................................... 68
7. From witches to informers ............................................... 71
8. Perfect victims .............................................................. 72
9. Nosipho Zamela ............................................................ 74
10. Lindsaye Tshabalala ........................................................ 78
11. Hierarchy and equality ..................................................... 79
12. “These times are no more” ................................................ 83
13. A post-colonial ritual ...................................................... 85
14. Maki Skosana and her imagined community ........................... 87
15. Panic .......................................................................... 92
16. The timeless present (1) ................................................... 94
17. The timeless present (2) ................................................... 96

FAMILICIDE ........................................................................... 99
1. Event .......................................................................... 99
2. Global - and local family romance ....................................... 100
3. The meaning of familicide on the horizontal axis; or:
a trans-modern crime scene .............................................. 101
4. The politics of personal autonomy ...................................... 103
5. Regicide ...................................................................... 105
6. Oedipus and the quest for psychological autonomy .................. 108
7. Of autonomous men and sovereign states .............................. 112
8. Sacrifice and the (re)invention of autonomy/sovereignty ........... 115
9. Feminising terror/terrorising the feminine ............................ 119
10. Founding (archi-) familicide .............................................. 121
11. The meaning of familicide on the vertical axis; or: re-asserting
the event in time ............................................................ 125
12. Familicide as the will to survive .......................................... 128
13. Connecting the dots: familicide, kleptocracy and genocide ........ 129
14. Of autonomy and sovereignty ............................................ 132
15. Mugabe, genocide and the spectre of deferred foundational
violence ...................................................................... 133
CONCLUSION ........................................................................ 135
Part I ................................................................................. 135
Part II ................................................................................. 141

POSTSCRIPT .......................................................................... 153

REFERENCES ......................................................................... 157

ENDNOTES ........................................................................... 167

 INTRODUCTION

1. INVENTING GENOCIDE
It is necessary that I should spend some time in this introduction on the
process that culminated in the criminalization of genocide, because it will
explain essential features of this essay - such as the choice of the kinds of
violence analysed (genocide, necklace murder, familicide) and how they are
related.
The birth of the concept of “genocide” and its subsequent
criminalization in international law reveal not only the inescapable violence of
language, but also how that violence is a condition for the possibility of
making sense of the world. To explain this it may be useful to make an
arbitrary – and I admit not unproblematic – but nonetheless useful distinction
between the birth of the concept of genocide, a subsequent process aimed at
demarcating what constitutes genocide, and what I very specifically want to
delimit as the meaning of genocide.
As for the birth of the concept, Lemkin used the word genocide for the
first time in his Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (1944). 1 By combining the Latin
genus (birth, race, stock) with cƯdium (cutter, killer, slayer), he described
genocide as “the criminal intent to destroy or to cripple permanently a human
group”. Genocidal acts, then, are “directed against groups, as such, and
individuals are selected for destruction only because they belong to these
groups (see Gellately and Kiernan, 2003:6). For some this constitutes the
ultimate crime against humanity, because it targets people for destruction on
the basis of their involuntary membership of certain classes and groups (race,
ethnicity, religion, etc.). The United Nations’ indictment of 24 Nazi leaders
in 1945 confirmed the use of the word “genocide” when it found that all the
defendants “conducted deliberate and systematic genocide, namely, the
extermination of racial and national groups ...” (Gellately and Kiernan,
2003:6).
But etymology hardly exhausts the meaning of a word. We also need
clarity on what needs to or may be included and what needs to or may be excluded
for an event or series of an event to remain/become “genocide”. As a rule we

1
 THE GEOMETRY OF VIOLENCE

do not consciously circumscribe the meaning of words – unless, that is, there
is a clear political or social need for doing so. Here an agreement in principle
on the need to criminalize genocide required exactly such a delimitation of
what constitutes genocide. How many murders constitute genocide? Does
there need to be a clear intention to eradicate a group? What is the relation
between motive and intention? Can people be guilty of genocide when they
acted on superiors’ orders? What kind of complicity is commensurate with
“culpability”? These were the kind of questions the Sixth Committee (1947) of
the United Nations had to consider as part of the process of preparing a
convention on genocide.
Demarcation: The results of this committee’s deliberations are not
important here. We can note in passing that when the Convention on the
Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was finally adopted in 1948, it
was the result of a long and torturous process that included the rejection of
the Sixth Committee’s resolution and the drafting of a proposed convention
submitted jointly by Cuba, Egypt and Panama (amended by China). For the
purposes of this introduction I consider this to be the process that demarcated
what constitutes genocide. Lippmann’s (2002) road map to the convention is a
clear description of this process and a useful archive of the complex
negotiations required to arrive at the agreement. The convention was
unanimously adopted at the 179th meeting of the UN General Assembly on
December 9, 1948.
As for what I narrowly want to de-limit as the meaning of genocide, this
relates more precisely to what happens when somebody, upon surveying an
event or a series of events, makes the statement “It is/was genocide”. When
we hear this statement two chains of signification are triggered which,
although apparently unrelated, together constitute what I want to delimit as
the meaning of genocide. 2 This meaning is located neither in the objective
historical archive of etymology that details the birth of the concept, nor in the
equally objective record of negotiations that resulted in an agreement on what
constitutes genocide. Rather, it involves the manner in which two different
chains of associations (or plays of differentiation) intersect in our
consciousness to generate the meaning of genocide. The first of these chains
extends horizontally, the second vertically.