The Genocide Concept and Mass Violence in Postcolonial Africa

In the early 1940s, Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin, responding to Nazi Germany’s atrocities in Europe and also to such historical precedents as Ottoman Turkey’s attempted extermination of Armenians in the second decade of the twentieth century, coined the word genocide to describe as a crime the deliberate exterminatory acts and practices directed against human groups. By combining the Greek word genos [people] and the Latin word cide [murder] to mean literally mass murder of a human collectivity, Lemkin provided what many scholars consider to be one of the most important definitions of genocide. Footnote ¹ In his 1944 book, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, Lemkin uses “genocide” “to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves.”Footnote ² In other words, what makes genocide different from other varieties of mass murder is not its production of tremendous numbers of corpses. It is rather, according to Lemkin, its attempt to destroy a people. That is, victims of genocide are exterminated for what they are imagined to be or what they are identified by. For Lemkin, therefore, genocide targets the corporeal manifestations of human groupness and seeks to destroy the essential foundations of group identity. Lemkin’s definition provides the basis for not only the official and legal definition adopted by the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (subsequently UNGC), Footnote ³ but also for how scholars from different disciplines have been grappling with the genocide concept.

It is worth noting that only four countries in Africa participated as independent political entities at the drafting of the UNGC in the 1940s—Egypt, Ethiopia, Liberia, and South Africa.Footnote ⁴ South Africa eventually declined to sign the convention before it came into effect in 1951, obviously because of its policy of apartheid that was being introduced at the time. In the decades following independence, however, the genocide concept and rhetoric found popular use among several African groups who drew upon the word to agitate for different interests or to call attention to their experiences of violent abuse under different postcolonial political regimes.

For example, in 1960, the UN secretary-general, Dag Hammarskjöld, accused the first prime minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Patrice Lumumba, of perpetrating genocide against the Luba people in the resource-rich South Kasai region. During the same period, roughly between 1959 and 1962, Tutsi victims of Hutu uprisings in Rwanda invoked genocide rhetoric to describe their experience of massacres and displacement from their traditional homeland. Between 1966 and 1970, the Igbo and later the secessionist Biafran government (of former Eastern Region of Nigeria) labeled as genocide the organized massacres and persecutions across Nigeria of Igbos and other groups from the Eastern Region of Nigeria. These charges led to a UN investigation in 1968 to determine whether genocide was taking place.Footnote ⁵ Also by 1967, the UN Commission on Human Rights suggested that the 1960 Sharpeville massacre in South Africa was genocidal. Similarly, in the late 1960s, separatists from the southern parts of the old Sudan charged the north-controlled government of the country with genocide.

The rise of totalitarian regimes in Africa from the mid-1960s through the 1990s, as well as the occurrence of many so-called civil wars during this period, was accompanied by an intensified employment of the genocide concept in accounts of mass killings of civilians happening across the continent. Several autocratic regimes were dogged by charges of genocide. In 1972 in Burundi, for example, hundreds of thousands of Hutus were massacred by the Tutsi-led military dictatorship of Michel Micombero. The massacres drew intense charges of genocide by victims and international human rights groups. Similar charges of genocide resulted during the bloody wars in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Angola, Rwanda, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the Sudan, to name just a few sites of violent conflict.

In all these instances of charges of genocide, only the case of the 1994 genocide of Tutsis and so-called moderate Hutus in Rwanda, and marginally the case of Darfur in Sudan, received official, international recognition and international legal prosecution. Notwithstanding these important acknowledgments of genocidal intent, the use of the genocide concept and the rhetoric surrounding it to describe mass atrocities in Africa is not recent. Nor is it unpopular. Officially, as well as in scholarship focused on African violence, however, oftentimes the refusal to recognize cases of atrocities as genocide results from what some scholars and activists fear may constitute a political, moral, and analytical emptiness of the genocide concept when it becomes easy to apply it to just any case of mass murder.Footnote ⁶ This pattern of anxiety accounts further for why many imaginative literatures on genocides have generally been framed in scholarly criticisms around concepts of violence considered nongenocidal.

The point being made here is not whether the use of the term meets the legal requirements stipulated in the UNGC. Nor is it to dismiss the warning by the concept’s gatekeepers who would rather insist on certain narrow definitions and strict criteria for determining genocide if only to maintain the concept’s special, exceptional status as a signifier of extreme evil.Footnote ⁷ Rather, the point is to acknowledge the nature of the politics that is impelling the uses of the concept in Africa. Besides the genocide concept’s fraught history, international politics led by Western countries continue to insist on the selective application of the term to mass violence closely resembling the Holocaust. Paying closer attention to this politics underlines not only the “methodological problems” or conceptual crises confronting theorization of genocide in postcolonial Africa, but also the patterns of influence shaping the discourse of genocide in Africa and beyond, especially as seen in African cultural expressions.Footnote ⁸

Writing the Genocide of Igbos in Nigeria: Rethinking the Genre of War Fiction

To date, no event in Nigeria’s colonial and postcolonial history has produced more literary and historiographical responses than the genocide and war of 1966 to 1970. Hundreds of literary books—including novelistic, biographical, poetic, and dramatic texts—have appeared since 1968. In very important but not always direct ways, many of these writings address themes of genocide and war, reimagining the circumstances fueling mass atrocities. Nevertheless, critical reception of these books has conspired to mute the theme of genocide because critics have mainly discussed them as examples of war literature. My discussion here focuses on the critical reception of novels since the novel as a literary genre has so far received the most sustained and committed scholarly attention. But what I say about the so-called war novels in Nigeria applies to other genres of writing related to that violent past.

Taken broadly, critics have tended to categorize any novels representing the violent events of 1966–1970 in Nigeria as “war novel[s],” “civil war novel[s],” “Nigerian [civil] war novel[s], or Biafra War novel[s].”Footnote ⁹ To be clear, these novels embody themes of war in ways that necessitate their reading as war fiction as well. In fact, Lemkin conceives genocide as war, except for him genocide signifies total war in which no distinction is made between enemy combatants and civilian noncombatants. Recent scholarship especially in political studies has also highlighted the nexus between war and genocide.Footnote ¹⁰ The strength and coherence of claims concerning the existence of links between these two violent processes requires revision of our conceptions of genocide and war otherwise understood as mutually exclusive processes/categories.

For example, in the case of the Nigeria-Biafra war, one such critical link connects war and genocide to nationalism. Oftentimes, nationalism is both war’s and genocide’s driving force. Ironically, at the same time nationalism is often a response to (and outgrowth of ) war and genocide. The relation of war to genocide in the Nigerian context is not marginal, but rather central to understanding literatures written in response to the atrocities of 1966–1970. The discourse on the Biafran war, however, has tended to sideline any critical consideration of genocide and its representation in the Nigerian context in ways that have ended up excluding from serious consideration some important questions about that violent past. Recovering the discourse of genocide in creative and critical responses to Nigeria’s traumatic past, I argue, offers the possibility of more complete readings of novels taking the Biafran conflict as their subject.

As war fiction, what seems most pertinent to any scholarly discussion of these novels is the following: (1) how the experience of war propels a rethinking and reimagining of postcolonial nationhood from the viewpoint of “ordinary people”;Footnote ¹¹ (2) how the emergence of “the Nigerian war novel” or “Biafra war novel” presupposes an evolving “Nigerian national literature” that is based on apprehensions of war as a crucible of national births or rebirths;Footnote ¹² (3) how the aesthetic choices evident in Nigerian war fiction suggests fictional, historiographical, and ethical dilemmas implicit in writing war in Nigeria;Footnote ¹³ and (4) how writings about the Nigerian civil war provide a template for reimagining Nigerian nationhood in terms of gender and class justice.Footnote ¹⁴ Scholars who have taken up these issues have produced work that tends to advance two broad theoretical claims. The first holds up so-called Nigerian war fiction as a “people’s history” that reimagines Nigerian nationhood based on the experiences of common peoples and in some other accounts based on the experiences of gendered subjects. The second regards this body of literature as dramatizing a contest between relatively “introverted” and “extroverted” national literatures.

According to Eleni Coundouriotis, Footnote ¹⁵ considered as a genre that articulates a popular Nigerian history, the Nigerian war novel is prodigiously a witness literature or set of proxy accounts testifying to the travails of common or ordinary peoples in their quest for survival during wartime. On this reading, writers of war fiction in Nigeria’s postcolony represent war using the “language of suffering” of people whom official histories tend to sideline.Footnote ¹⁶ Due to the war writer’s inclination to articulate the suffering of ordinary peoples and turn that suffering into a protest against war in general, Coundouriotis contends that the discourses of humanitarianism and victimization remain conspicuous in the Nigerian war novel. These discourses developed around a naturalistic aesthetic practice, particularly given naturalism is “historically entangled with the emergence of humanitarianism.”Footnote ¹⁷ The perceived ethical imperative to relate in detail the horror and immensity of human suffering is one reason for naturalism’s proclivity for details. These details are supposed to invite the audience to empathize with sufferers, whose misery is documented in extremely fine detail.

Coundouriotis claims that writers’ focus on ordinary people is their way of undermining official histories in favor of a more democratic explanatory project. This project condemns the divisive and militarized ethnic nationalisms fueling conflicts in Africa’s postcolony. The preference for naturalist aesthetics predisposes writers to stage war as an abnormal circumstance occurring in “an environment in which man appears as different from what he normally is, unmasking a self that he must subsequently struggle to disavow.”Footnote ¹⁸ Amid such chaos, human behavior and action become the sum of the prevailing conditions of anomy. For Coundouriotis, writers of war fiction use their work to dramatize the nature of this chaotic environment and to caution against its deterministic elements that undermine individual moral agency.Footnote ¹⁹

I do not disagree with the critical reading calling attention to the prevalence of naturalist aesthetics in these novels. Issues of nationhood, audience, and aesthetic practice raised by this reading are also relevant for consideration of these novels as genocide literature. However, a major problem with this reading of “Nigerian war novels” concerns the idea of “ordinary people” and their history. To be clear, ordinariness in this context suggests the conditions of deprivation, poverty, and in some accounts illiteracy that poor and common peoples of a nation usually experience. These ordinary peoples’ experiences oftentimes do not make it into official discourses and mainstream historiography, which is a reason why fiction writing that sheds light on marginal voices and perspectives becomes important. As Coundouriotis rightly notes, fictions of this kind provide a means to recover sidelined experiences and put them at the center of consideration regarding war and nationhood.

Yet this perspective on “ordinary people” in the context of genocide and war makes no distinction between people conceived of as ethnic (or similar identitarian) entities and people broadly understood as the demos (common people) of a nation. Indeed the “people” of the novels in question—on whose account Coundouriotis argues for approaching war experience in Nigeria as signaling a writing trend reimagining nationhood from common people’s experience—are not, properly speaking, the ordinary people most affected by the events in Biafra. In fact, these are mostly Igbos and other minority groups persecuted across Nigeria at the time of the conflict there. Their experiences were not by and large the experience of common Nigerian people generally. Rather, Igbos/Biafrans were victimized by a genocidal regime in Nigeria. Between 1966 and 1967, this regime—the Federal Military Government of Nigeria led by Lieutenant Colonel Yakubu Gowon—engineered and supervised the targeted mass murders of thousands of mostly Igbos who were living in the Northern and Western Regions of Nigeria.Footnote ²⁰ Also, during the ensuing war between Nigeria and Biafra from July 1967, the Gowon federal military government executed a draconian war policy of indiscriminate bombing of Biafran combatants and civilians alike as well as used a strategy of blockade and starvation that led to more than 2 million casualties in Biafra.Footnote ²¹ Therefore to describe so-called “Nigerian war fiction” as part of the genre composed of the Nigerian people’s novel ignores the genocidal circumstances of the Biafran crisis and its legacies, further marginalizing the perspectives and experiences of victims.

Scholarly readings of the “Nigerian war novel” such as Coundouriotis’s attempt to make the case for reading works of this kind as literature of the people and for the people, the people here signifying the common peoples of the Nigerian nation. Such scholarship encourages us to view the Nigerian war novel as writing the Nigerian nation. Coundouriotis’s claims about the “Nigerian war fiction” as the “people’s novel” echo popular scholarly work from the 1970s and 1980s that treats some of this “war” literature as narratives of an emergent Nigerian nationalism. The emergence of this scholarship coincided with the rise of socialist and feminist activism in the 1970s. Many critics and authors with these ideological leanings began at this time to reconsider the terms standard in discussions of the Nigerian-Biafran crisis.Footnote ²² Their aim was to shift the analytical focus away from ethnicity and racism because emphasis on the latter was assumed to be polarizing, tended to exceptionalize Igbo suffering, and appeared inadequate for thinking about the crisis from a widely shared national position. Hence, scholars and writers with socialist and feminist bents began to interpret the Biafran crisis as one impelled by class and gender injustice, and not specifically ethnic injustice. By focusing on class and gender struggles, these critics and writers downplayed the subject of genocide. The ethnic/racial underpinnings of the violent events of 1966–1970 become muted in favor of an appreciation of suffering cashed-out broadly enough to accommodate experiences of injustice and hardship widely shared by other Nigerians.

In 1974, the Marxist-socialist critic Omafume Onoge published an influential essay titled “The Crisis of Consciousness in Modern African Literature,” wherein he makes the case for a sociological appreciation of modern literary history in Africa. Onoge claims that from the late colonial period African literature has proceeded to develop in response to three writing impulses or consciousnesses: nativist, critical realist, and socialist. The nativist consciousness, exemplified in the Negritude writings of Senegalese Leopold Sedar Senghor, is literature of self-assertion responding to colonial violence. Critical realism, by contrast, characterizes the literature of postcolonial disillusionment, lamenting the failures of postcolonial African states to realize their promise of freedom and independence. For Onoge, the problem with these two creative impulses is that they fail to underscore the history of capital impelling the conditions of exploitation that these literatures are lamenting, and as such fail to offer a usable vision of redress. For the critic, usable redress should organize around and dramatize class struggles by way of provoking in working peoples a new awareness of their place in the postcolonial capitalist world order. Accordingly, Onoge describes literatures thematizing class struggles as being impelled by a socialist impulse/consciousness. He endorses this consciousness because, for him, it allows authors to reimagine the postcolonial African state by dramatizing class struggles and by using the tensions constitutive of class conflict to mobilize working-class people against the neocolonial African state.

Drawing on Onoge’s sociological criticism of African literature and his endorsement of the socialist impulse, the critic Chidi Amuta sees in writing about Biafra an emerging Nigerian national literature that brings the popular concerns of working-class peoples of various ethnicities into the national consciousness. He notes thus: “Literary works based on or inspired by the civil war in Nigeria, as well as those that have arisen with the liberation struggles and other anti-imperialist struggles in Africa, represent some of the most important manifestations of the national imperative in African literature.”Footnote ²³ For Amuta, the focus in these writings on working-class experience suggests that the war helped to rid “Nigerian literature of the disturbing infestation of [ethnic] gods and godlings,”Footnote ²⁴ thus serving as artistic response to national experience of capitalist exploitation foisted by colonialism: “With the receding ethnic base, the sacred groves of ethnic deities are relieved of the unwholesome duty of serving as moral sanctuaries for people who pour libation with beer and imported spirits.”Footnote ²⁵ Amuta suggests in this quote that the emergent Nigerian war novel focusing on Nigerian common and working-class people’s experience has come to remedy the distractions aided by previous ethnic-driven literary works that he regards as complicit in neocolonial capitalist exploitations of the working people. According to Amuta, this remedy is possible because these war novels have been underpinned by Marxist ideologies that predisposed writers to dramatize the crisis of postcolonial nationhood as based on class struggle.

Insisting on viewing postcolonial violence in terms of class struggle, these critics as well as some writersFootnote ²⁶ dismiss previous literary works concerned with realities in Nigeria’s postcolony as problematic. According to the critics, these works, the kind Onoge has categorized as driven by nativist and critical-realist consciousness, are problematic because they represent national experience of capitalist exploitation as localized ethnic experiences. Accordingly, as critics such as Amuta suggest, many of these writings about the problems of postcolonial nationhood infused with ethnic consciousness contributed to the crisis in Nigeria because they failed to envision the postcolonial state as resting on shared structures of meaning and experience, particularly the shared experiences of working peoples’ impoverishment and suffering across ethnicities. These critics propose that by focusing on class, writers could speak to shared experiences of exploitation and suffering across ethnicities in ways that serve to promote a Nigerian victimization narrative, as opposed to more fragmentary narratives tied to the experience of “Other” victims belonging to distinct minority ethnic groups.

The obvious problem with such a view is that it tends to obscure the extent of the chaos brought about by colonialism’s forceful integration of different previously autonomous groups into the colonial state. Dismissing this reality cannot resolve the problems it presents. The suggestion that focusing on certain shared experiences, such as class and gender injustices, can resolve the problem of ethnic strife in the postcolony is simply false and unrealistic. On the one hand, it tends to assume that experiences of so-called working peoples are the same across ethnicities within the postcolonial state. As several writers show in their novels, many Igbo working people killed in the massacres of 1966 or forced to leave their places of residence in other regions outside the East suffered prejudice and aggression for several reasons, including the fact that they were Igbos and so were viewed as an economic threat to other ethnicities. It may be worth recalling that most of the people who, responding to this threat, took active part in the 1966 campaigns to exterminate nyamiri (derogatory Hausa term for the Igbo) across the Northern Region were, in fact, members of the Talakawa (the proletariat or commoner in Hausa) whose cause progressive political leaders such as Aminu Kano championed. The suffering of Igbo working people contending with postcolonial capitalist exploitation and ethnic prejudice in their region of settlement cannot at the same time serve to advance understanding of the widely shared experiences and other commonalities of Nigerian peoples.

To be clear, there is more to the muting of ethnicity in the literature of war and genocide in Nigeria. In fact, I suspect that in muting ethnicity some critics such as Amuta were also trying to correct historical memory and position class as a more encompassing paradigm for understanding the challenges of the postcolnial state. One recalls that, from the outset, the crises that led to the genocide and war in Nigeria always had a class dimension. In colonial and post-independence Nigeria, it was largely the members of the elite (the “traditional” rulers and the Western-educated political class) who dominated the competition for power, wealth, and prestige. As Chinua Achebe’s A Man of the People suggests, however, the elite class used the terminology of “the tribe,” which decades of colonial discourse had entrenched as an explanatory device for everything African, to mobilize support. This device came in handy before and during the war as a way of characterizing it as a national event. If it helped them to explain the war, however, it was less helpful in explaining the ethnic emphasis in the violence against the Igbo that preceded the war and the program of starvation that the Nigerian state adopted in its prosecution of the war. If nationalism and Marxist ideology inspired Amuta, Onoge, and so forth to mute the ethnic identity of the victims of genocide in Nigeria, so did the impulse to correct prior mischaracterizations of the war.

Equally, Igbo writers from the Biafra region have produced the majority of the novels later claimed as Nigerian war novels. Many of these authors, writing during and after the defeat of Biafra, have used their work to account for their experience as “Igbos/Biafrans,” as opposed to “Nigerians,” or to account for the intergenerational legacies of that conflict. For example, in her discussion of women’s writing on the violent events of 1966–1970, scholar and writer Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo observes that no woman outside the Biafra region has yet written a full-length literary work or a memoir centering on the experience.Footnote ²⁷ At the same time, however, she classifies her selection of writings by women who suffered as Biafrans/Igbos as an instance of Nigerian civil war literature. Even so, she never explains how these writings serve or function as specifically “Nigerian” literature.

Like several other critics, Adimora-Ezeigbo’s feminist criticism of Biafra writing takes what arguably are specifically “Biafran” (or, to distill it further, “Igbo”) stories, claiming them as articulations of an emergent Nigerian national feminist consciousness, one suggestive of writers’ attempts to transcend an ethnic imaginary in favor of one that is more broadly national. This scholarly claim belies, distorts, or misrecognizes the commitments of writers who reject identification with the project of Nigerian nationalism, a cause in the pursuit of which many Igbos/Biafrans lost their lives. One way to understand such scholarly distortions is to consider the question of the audience of this body of literature.

Again, I turn to Coundouriotis. We may consider her attempt in The People’s Right to the Novel as one of breaking with critical practices that have always interpreted African writing as directed at Western audiences. For example, Eileen Julien has argued that the implied reader of much African writing is Western. She describes this supposed attribute in African writing as marking what she refers to as “extroverted” literature. The notion of extroverted literature designates African literatures that are essentially addressed to Western audiences located outside of Africa.Footnote ²⁸ Coundouriotis uses her reading of so-called African war novels to challenge the claim that African writers address Western audiences in their work. For Coundouriotis, African/Nigerian war fiction disrupts this extroverted tradition. She instead moves to explain the specifics of what she views as a set of “introverted” representational practices yielding works directed toward African audiences. Introverted literature speaks to the people within the nations whose traumas are being depicted, and so Coundouriotis views Nigerian war fiction as contributing to efforts to redefine the nation in Africa’s postcolony.

Contrary to Coundouriotis’s claims that so-called Nigerian war fictions are introverted and primarily address Nigerian audiences, I argue first of all against any such dichotomy between introversion and extroversion. For instance, if we consider the possibility that some “Igbo” writers might have considered as their audience Nigerians residing outside the immediate traumatic contexts of the war and genocide, then the claim about an introverted literature gets complicated. By itself, even if we accept hypothetically—because in reality this is far from the case—that the primary audience of such writing consists of members of the Nigerian nation, writing [to] Nigeria will not automatically presuppose introversion because the Nigerian audience in question resides outside the immediate traumatic context of Biafra that informs the writing.

Second, a major problem with seeing so-called Nigerian war fiction as introverted is that doing so conceives of this kind of writing as contributing to the postcolonial nation state’s establishment. This is perhaps one major flaw with critical discourses on African war writing in general: its emphasis on the nation and the national project. Some of the novels Coundouriotis and other critics read as examples of national literature—for example, Soyinka’s Season of Anomy, Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun, and so on—resist any such pigeonholing/localizing. If anything they speak against and beyond the nation.

What changes in our understanding of these so-called “war” novels when we approach them as responses to genocide? By reading these fictions as genocide literature, it becomes possible to problematize sweeping claims that they perform a service for postcolonial Nigeria. The scholarly deemphasizing of the specifically ethnic character of the Biafran conflict in favor of references to broader categories of class and gender identity shifts attention away from the exterminatory character of the violence meted out against those identified as Igbo. By so doing, many critics of this literature ignore questions of genocide and privilege the notion of the shared struggles and plights of oppressed Nigerian peoples generally conceived. In this way, too, the peculiar circumstances that condemned a targeted group to destruction in the postcolonial state is presented by these critics as a measure of national class and gender oppression, even when both wealthy and poor Igbos, men as well as women, were targeted for massacres and expulsion across Nigeria. This kind of scholarship demonstrates a general and enduring failure to respond to the genocide of Igbos as such in Nigerian and Biafran writing. This is a significant failure because it obscures links between the traumatic experience of genocide, defeat in war, and an emergent exilic consciousness among the defeated that led several writers to appropriate a different, universalizing vocabulary in order to articulate their experience of suffering.

Many of the novels held up by critics as Nigerian war novels barely depict battlefield combat. They are described as war fictions because they are set during the same time period as the Biafra-Nigeria war. Other than that, most of these novels focus on genocidal atrocities perpetrated against civilians, not on military operations per se. These novels chronicle the trauma that the massacres across other regions in Nigeria, the imposition of an economic blockade on Biafra, and the endless shelling of towns and villages by the Nigerian military, caused the Igbo civilian population. To enlist these novels as “Nigerian civil war novels” without qualification is to take for granted something about the nature of the violence these writers are attempting to imagine. Although an argument can be made that war fiction may include experiences of suffering unrelated to battlefield encounters, such a view nonetheless still needs to account for categorizing as war literature a sustained literary practice that has consistently focused on atrocities perpetrated against defenseless civilians. If, as Lemkin explains, genocide is also a kind of war systematically directed against a population in a way that blurs the boundary between combatant and civilian, then any conception of war fiction needs to account differently for bodies of imaginative writing calling attention to, respectively, aggression against civilians and the violence of the combat experience.

The failure in Biafra scholarship to account for the genocidal character of postcolonial violence has negatively affected cognizance of writers’ attempts to create a vocabulary supple yet probing enough to capture the contradictions inherent in African violence, some of which are exterminationist. This scholarly snub of genocide and its related discourses in and about Biafra has resulted in neglect and misrecognition of certain dominant representational approaches in literatures about that past, mostly manifest in the influence of the Holocaust on these writings.

To be sure, I am by no means claiming that reframing the discourse on Biafra using the frame of genocide is less problematic or that it will adequately answer all the complex questions that that past and its legacies raise. In fact, as I will go on to elaborate in the closing section of this essay, the frame of genocide as it has been represented in the literature brings its own challenges. One major tendency in the artistic representation of the crisis as genocide has been to compare it to the Holocaust, which in part is a way writers try to legitimize it as genocide. But by so doing, the violence is oftentimes deterritorialized from of its historical contexts and presented as a story of evil. This tendency is most evident in the katabatic trope that is a central feature in several narratives taking the Nigeria-Biafra case of 1966–1970 as their subject. Yet by focusing on genocide, my goal is to highlight an important subject in the discourse that critical practices over the years have excluded from the discussion. Importantly, too, it is crucial to think about the questions of what is gained, obscured, or left out by framing discussion of violent events in Africa as war or genocide.

Writing Rwandan Genocide: On the Emergence of an African Genocide Canon

Apart from journalistic accounts of atrocities and a few unpopular literary publications, committed writing about the 1994 genocide in Rwanda did not begin until after 1998. In 1996, a US-based Rwandan academic, Aimable Twagilimana, published the first novel about the events leading up to the genocide, Manifold Annihilation. Footnote ²⁹ Although published two years after the 1994 genocide, Manifold Annihilation focuses on pre-1994 events in Rwanda, apparently, because the writer completed the book in 1993. Unlike most accounts of the genocide, Twagilimana’s novel concentrates on events leading up to the genocide. His novel highlights the totalitarian conditions and arbitrary violence that were an omnipresent feature of the Rwandan civil war. Twagilimana remains one of a few writers to write about the civil war. In other words, Manifold Annihilation remains one of the only available literary works that addresses the 1990s Rwandan crisis from a perspective of war that provides context for thinking about the prevailing circumstances in the early 1990s that prompted the genocide of 1994.

By the time Manifold Annihilation appeared in 1996, only a few testimonial and personal accounts of the genocide had been published. Most of the work in print at this time had been reports of investigations into the genocide. The best known of these documentary texts include the influential African Rights reports published in 1995 as Rwanda: Death, Despair and Defiance, reports and investigative documents by Alison Des Forges such as Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda, published in 1999, and Rwanda: Histoire d’un genocide [“Rwanda: History of a Genocide”] by Colette Braeckman. In 1997, the first survivor testimony, by Yolande Mukagasana, was published in French under the title, La Mort ne veut pas de moi [“Death Does Not Want Me”]. In addition, journalistic reports and other works of nonfiction such as Philip Gourevitch’s We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families and Jean Hatzfeld’s Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda Speak were influential in calling attention to the Rwandan genocide.

Many scholars, however, believe that the event that most crucially shaped artistic responses to the 1994 genocide was a commemorative project from 1998 known as Rwanda: Ecrire par devoir de mémoire [“Rwanda: Writing as Duty to Memory”].Footnote ³⁰ This project was first proposed in 1995 by Chadian writers Nocky Djedanoum and Maimouna Coulibaly, who were the directors of the festival Fest’Africa in Lille, France. According to Boubacar Boris Diop, one of the writers who participated, the project arose out of some African writers’ expression of commitment to write about violent realities occurring on the continent following the 1995 execution of writer and environmental rights activist Ken Saro-Wiwa by the Nigerian military government of Sani Abacha.Footnote ³¹ The writers gathered at the festival thought that it was about time African writers took a more active role in writing about violent events taking place on the continent, particularly the atrocious realities beyond each writer’s national borders. During the discussions at the 1995 Fest’Africa, as Diop recollects, it became apparent to many of the writers that they had mostly failed to write about the genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda, an attempted extermination that Diop considered “one of the greatest tragedies of the twentieth century.”Footnote ³²

To remedy this failure, the Fest’Africa directors decided to send ten African artists to Rwanda to bear witness to the Rwandan genocide in order to demonstrate African writers’ ethical commitment to memorialize the tragedy. With the sponsorship of Fondation de France and the French Ministry of Cooperation, as well as with the support of the Rwandan government, participating writers traveled to Rwanda in 1998 to memorialize the genocide in its aftermath and interact with survivors four years after it took place. There was barely any doubt in the minds of the artists that the event they were tasked to represent constituted a genocide. The guiding objective of the project was to attempt genocide memorialization out of a sense of the writer’s moral dutyFootnote ³³ “to act against forgetting and to express solidarity with the Rwandan people.”Footnote ³⁴

A central feature in the publications from this project is that all the works focused essentially on events that took place in Rwanda between April and July 1994. In narratives of the events, the katabatic imagination of the genocide is prevalent, perhaps because these writers visited Rwanda as tourist-outsiders. It is remarkable that in the wake of the “Rwanda: Ecrire par devoir de mémoire” project a tremendous amount of cultural and artistic responses to the genocide in Rwanda and by Rwandese began to emerge, including films and survivors’ memoirs.Footnote ³⁵

The Rwanda project was not without its controversies, however. First among its critics were scholars. In response to participants’ framing of the project as a manifestation of their moral duty to remember, critics were quick to question the legitimacy and ideological foundations of a memory project sponsored by the French government, a key player in the genocide. Furthermore, some critics expressed concern about whose memory would be privileged in the project—that of the writers, survivors, perpetrators, or bystanders. This was not an unreasonable concern given that most of the texts emerging from the Rwanda project were published in France and their translations generally addressed Western readerships. Martina Kopf summarizes the anxieties raised about the usefulness of such a project: “In addition to the question, whose memory they transmit and recreate, the question invariably arises, whose memory they nourish and intend to transform. Is it the collective memory of Rwanda, the collective memory of Africa or of an equally vague ‘world public’?”Footnote ³⁶

The artists involved were well aware of the problems of the Rwanda project and concerned about the contribution it would make to discourse on the Rwanda genocide. In response they attempted to use their writings to foreground these problems. As a result, even given legitimate ethical worries about language, audience, the politics of memory, as well as the choice of style and representational strategies for writing about the genocide, many critics agree that the project was remarkably successful if only because it popularized the genocide and shaped the nature of subsequent discussions about the atrocities that were committed before, during, and after the events of 1994. Some scholars thought that the project was significant for at least two major reasons. First, it provided a much-needed “African” perspective on the genocide, one that helped to reclaim the explanatory initiative from journalists and writers from the so-called global north.Footnote ³⁷ Second, the project contributed to modifying the ways of thinking and writing about genocide characteristic of the legacy of the Holocaust.Footnote ³⁸

In both the Nigerian and Rwandan contexts, literary works and the discourses shaping their interpretation serve to mark certain violent experiences as worth imagining and writing about, and others not. In the case of Nigeria, discussions of writing about the massacres of “Igbos” or “Easterners” between 1966 and 1967 and during the war from 1967 to 1970 have tended to focus on war while sidelining the subject of genocide. Likewise, in the case of Rwanda, literary and critical responses to the Rwandan crisis have concentrated on the genocide of Tutsis, but not often on the brutal civil war that began in that country around 1990 and was being fought alongside the genocide that took place in 1994. The basis of post-1994 Rwandan national trauma, which may be detected in imaginative and critical writings about the country and its genocide, as well as the Rwandan state’s rules and regulations governing commemorative activity generally, focus nearly entirely on the deaths of targeted civilian populations and ignore the suffering experienced on the battlefield.

Unlike in Nigeria, where a genocidal government won the war, the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) insurgency defeated the genocidal government in Rwanda, a development that has contributed in important ways to how the memory of the violent past has been shaped afterward. The memory of the war has not served the RPF government well as the basis for post-1994 Rwandan nationalism because accounts of the conflict implicate the RPF in its extreme violence and atrocities.Footnote ³⁹ Whereas in Nigeria the discourse of genocide did not gain traction in constructions of a postwar national consciousness, Footnote ⁴⁰ in Rwanda genocide figured prominently in the new Rwandan national identity. In order to sustain that consciousness, the Rwandan government of Paul Kagame has systematically repressed the memory of the long civil war and invested instead in a national imaginary organized around the memory of the 1994 genocide, which it officially conceives of as an extreme evil, perpetrated almost entirely against the Tutsis that is on a moral par with the Holocaust.

As a result of this official shaping of Rwanda’s national memory culture, artistic and discursive practices in the country have become heavily invested in the project of genocide representation. Unlike in Nigeria, many of the artists writing about the Rwandan genocide are non-Rwandans or Rwandans resident in Europe and North America. So far, their works have found more traction with audiences outside of Rwanda. In order to address this global audience, a majority of whom are European and North American, many writers have drawn on vocabularies of suffering that are likely to resonate with readers located outside the specific traumatic context of their writing. Contrary to Coundouriotis’s claim that “African” writers responding to postcolonial wars and genocide on the continent are writing [to] the nation, we can instead see an attempt in these genocide writings to write beyond the postcolonial and post-genocidal nation-state. If the violent encounters associated with colonialism motivated thinking about independence and the nation-state, postcolonial genocidal violence seems to inspire a radical rejection of the state, as well as any idea of the state’s autonomy.

A Theory of Genocide Fiction: Imagining Africa’s Postcolony as a Journey through Hell

I venture to argue that the katabatic imagination of genocide―that is, portrayal of genocide as an encounter with hell―constitutes the pivot on which many stories of African genocides revolve. Important exemplifications of this trope can be found in several fictional and nonfictional narratives written in response to atrocities in Nigeria and Rwanda, including, to mention only a few notable accounts, Wole Soyinka’s Season of Anomy, Buchi Emecheta’s Destination Biafra, Chukwuemeka Ike’s Sunset at Dawn, Festus Iyayi’s Heroes, Chimamanda Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun, Boubacar Boris Diop’s Murambi, the Book of Bones, Véronique Tadjo’s The Shadow of Imana, and Gilbert Gatore’s The Past Ahead. We can also find this trope in other accounts by non-Africans such as Vincent Banville’s An End to Flight, Gil Courtemanche’s A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali, Roméo Dallaire’s Shake Hands with the Devil, among several others. In all of these texts, encounters with mass atrocity figure in different ways as a descent into hell. The prevalence of this trope suggests that what I am calling the African genocide narrative approaches the subject as a kind of protest against catastrophe. Several such works increasingly take on the role of “proxy testimony,” speaking against atrocity and championing an idea of testifying against genocide in response to a moral imperative.

In her book Hell in Contemporary Literature, Rachel Falconer argues that the katabatic imagination or the descent to hell narrative is popular in Western writing and that it evolved to occupy a central place in Western literature following World War II. Although this trope is a very ancient one, the difference between its articulation in ancient literature and in post-1945 narratives is that “while the descent to hell still functions as a quest for knowledge, reparation of loss or superhuman power, the descent occurs within a context which, unlike their classical predecessors, is already understood to be infernal.”Footnote ⁴¹ Hence post-1945 hellish narratives are often fatalistic and address metaphysical questions about the scope and limits of agential (moral and other) determinism. This is especially notable in the Holocaust’s witness narratives, such as those by Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, and Sarah Kofman. The representation of traumatic encounters as hell, according to Falconer, usually proceeds as an infernal journey through the depths of evil. This way of imagining constitutes a dominant trope in writings about genocide in several African contexts. Consider two representative novels separated by a wide historical time and dealing respectively with atrocities in Nigeria and Rwanda: Soyinka’s 1973 novel Season of Anomy and Diop’s 2000 novel, Murambi.

Season of Anomy chronicles the story of a poet, Ofeyi, who journeys into a postcolonial African hell in order to rescue his kidnapped wife, Iriyise, from genocide perpetrators. Soyinka’s novel is based on the genocide of Igbos in Nigeria between 1966 and 1970, and Ofeyi’s quest to hell serves as a metaphor for an artist’s encounter with genocide. Genocide, understood as hell in Soyinka’s novel, is profoundly marked by horror. The hell iconography in Soyinka’s imagining of genocide is based on a confluence of three hell mythemes from different traditions: the Orpheus myth and Dante’s myth of the Inferno, and the Yoruba Ogun myth. According to Anne Whitehead, Virgil’s version of the Orpheus myth is popular in Western descent narratives and appears to be the version Soyinka draws on for Season, Footnote ⁴² even though the contours of hell in Season also evokes the hell of Dante’s Inferno. In Virgil’s story, Eurydice, Orpheus’s wife, dies from a snakebite and descends to Hades. Grief-stricken, Orpheus embarks on an impossible journey to the underworld to try and bring Eurydice back to life. He wins over the guardians of the Underworld with his songs, and they agree to return Eurydice to life under the condition that Orpheus never looks back as he exits the Underworld. Orpheus fails this test and loses Eurydice a second time. Because of his failure, Orpheus himself is killed and claimed by the Underworld, wherein he finally reunites with Eurydice.

It is not clear from Virgil’s version of the myth whether Orpheus looks back in order to ensure that it is Eurydice who is behind him or whether he does so out of curiosity about what in the exit scene of the Underworld warrants the demand that he not look back. His backward glance suggests a number of interpretive possibilities: the superiority of artistic curiosity over love;Footnote ⁴³ the artist as an ignorer of rules and disrupter of order;Footnote ⁴⁴ and the capacity of art to recover or symbolize what has been rendered lost and irrecoverable.Footnote ⁴⁵ The last point, articulated most trenchantly by the French philosopher Maurice Blanchot, has over the years found more acceptance among scholars.Footnote ⁴⁶ Blanchot celebrates Orpheus’s looking back as the beginning of the writing process that is initiated in the wake of catastrophe such as the Holocaust. For Blanchot, Orpheus’s failure signifies the futile attempt to restore and make present an irrecoverable loss. In this way, writing may be considered compensation for what has been rendered irrecoverable by catastrophe.

In Soyinka’s artistic world, however, the celebration of Orpheus’s backward glance in Western writing encapsulates the problem that catastrophe presents to the artistic imagination.Footnote ⁴⁷ The artist, for Soyinka, must resist the lure of this backward gaze in order to escape its hold on the imagination. The captivating backward gaze is not a mark of artistic heroism, according to Soyinka.Footnote ⁴⁸ It is rather a symbol of the failure of the artistic will experienced during the artist’s encounter with traumatic atrocity. This backward gaze, according to Soyinka, is a mark of selfishness, symptomatic of individualism and submission to death. In Season, therefore, Soyinka allows Ofeyi to successfully retrieve Iriyise from hell without looking back.

It is worth restating here an important criticism of Soyinka’s vision of artistic will in Season. In her essay “Periodic Embodiments,” Florence Stratton observes that several postcolonial African male writers often appropriate the figure of the “African” woman as all that is ideal in Africa’s past or as a mark of rape and plundering by colonial and postcolonial powers. For Stratton, the undercurrent in these male, seemingly emancipatory dispositions to the condition of African experience, represented through symbolized womanhood, is such that the African male writer sets himself up as the creative, active agent against a passive and romanticized female object. In these men’s writings, often composed in response to critical historical interfaces in national history, the woman is reified as the figure of innocent or disfigured nationhood. In this way of imagining womanhood, women’s creativity and active participation in history remain excluded from national discourse. As Season depicts them, women are symbols of a kind of collective coma from which the male writer-activist must resuscitate the nation.

This way of using women’s condition (as well as, we should add, the disfigured victims of genocide) as a metaphor raises questions about whether Soyinka’s primary interest “really [lies] in exposing the injustices done to women” and victim groups or else in the convenience of artistic symbolization.Footnote ⁴⁹ It is, perhaps, no wonder that a node of tension in representations of the Biafran crisis and the violence against Igbos in Nigeria continues to generate significant conversation along gendered lines, as one finds in Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun.

One way to consider the difference between Soyinka’s use of the katabatic trope and Senegalese Boubacar Diop’s use of the trope in his Rwanda genocide novel is to treat Soyinka’s Season as a descent narrative that dramatizes an artist’s attempts to reverse, through his handiwork, the infernal conditions of genocide by witnessing atrocities in response to a moral imperative. In Season, the quest into hell signals Soyinka’s acknowledgment of genocide’s inversion of the universe. The hero’s descent and successful ascent from hell metaphorize a kind of inversion and then reversion or restoration of the order of things. The artist’s traumatic encounters at the bottom of hell function mainly to strengthen his resolve and will regarding the purpose of his artistic mission. His encounters do not change him or alter fundamentally his awareness of himself. The hero’s artistic vision remains intact, and hell functions in the novel as a space to test this vision and for him to dramatize its importance. Unlike in Soyinka’s novel, however, the hell of genocide in Diop’s novel Murambi, the Book of Bones constitutes a space conducive to the conversion of the artist. Within Diop’s conception of genocide, the artist may be seen as coming into a new awareness both of himself as an artist and of the purpose of his art.

Diop’s Murambi presents the 1994 Rwandan genocide as a katabatic narrative that relies heavily on the biblical story of the gentile’s conversion to Christianity. The biblical story of Cornelius’s conversion and meeting with apostle Simon Peter is central to understanding Diop’s thematic concerns in this novel, at least insofar as genocide and its representation are concerned. The main story of Murambi is about Cornelius Uvimana, a Rwandan exile returning from Djibouti, a small and little-known African country in some ways much like pre-1994 Rwanda. Cornelius arrives in Rwanda four years after the genocide to witness what he believes to be the extermination of all members of his own family and to write a play about the genocide. His journey to his hometown of Murambi is presented as a descent narrative that Diop emplots katabatically. The town of Murambi figures in the story as the heart of hell within which Cornelius must confront the revelations won during his quest. Within this hell, Cornelius’s main guide is his uncle Siméon Habineza, who, like biblical Simon Peter, “baptizes” Cornelius into ideas and helps him find new insights into human cruelty. Cornelius’s journey to Murambi symbolizes a process of coming into awareness. His ignorance about the genocide and his sense of self-righteousness disappear the deeper he enters the hell of post-genocide Rwanda. He realizes while inside this hell that the massacre of more than fifty thousand people including his mother and siblings at the Murambi polytechnic has been planned and executed by his own father, Dr. Joseph Karekezi. Like the biblical Roman centurion, whose baptism causes him to epiphanically speak in tongues, Diop’s Cornelius is prompted into a new awareness of himself. After his baptism in hell, Cornelius in Murambi declares a different kind of commitment to writing genocide:

Like Ofeyi in Season, Diop’s Cornelius refuses to succumb to the horrors of hell. The representation of genocide as a moral creed or as a traumatic gospel signals Diop’s heavy investment in the redemptive message of Christianity. This redemptive message, however, emphasizes individual soul searching as conducive to self-emancipation. Accordingly, the vision of post-genocidal redress in Murambi (as well as in Soyinka’s Season and several other novels) revolves centrally around introspection and the exercise of willpower. I am inclined to argue that although this vision is useful for tasking Africans with taking responsibility for their own complicities in genocides, it fails to envision prospects and mechanisms for political redress and justice. The commitment of Diop’s and Soyinka’s artistic visions in genocide’s aftermath is thus more moral-theological than it is political and structural.

From these works as well as others by writers of different ideological persuasions, one can glean what I am proposing as the major motifs of African genocide narratives: chief among which is the katabatic imagination of genocide; that is, an imagination of genocide as a kind of descent narrative and as ritual sacrifice performed in a fiendish space and requiring, thereafter, an obligatory memorialization in narrative that naturalizes carnal injury and pain. Because these stories represent the sites in which one encounters the casualties of genocidal violence in hell and the journey there as a “descent” into hell, I am contending that African genocide novels (at least the Nigerian and Rwandan ones) are mostly (or have been evolving as) descent narratives. In such narratives, protagonist figures such as Ofeyi and Cornelius descend into a spatialized infernal world that looks like an afterlife. After a “tour” of the infernal underworld, they emerge bearing a new moral awareness put into the service of bearing witness to the unspeakable horrors and carnage that they saw there. Understood in this way, African genocide narratives are a legacy of cautionary tales in which the damned bequeaths to posterity the hermeneutic “truths” about its genocidal past.