Corporealities of violence in southern and eastern Africa

Abstract

In a recent discussion on the display and concealment of bodies during Rwanda's 1994 genocide, Nigel Eltringham asserts a common anthropological truism that 'violence is discursive', and that 'the victim's body is a key vehicle of that discourse' (2015, 161). This point preambles his argument that scholars should pay 'the same attention … to post-mortem disposal as has been given to ante-mortem degradation' (2015, 172) in contexts of violent conflict. His argument points to the need to consider ante-and post-mortem violence within continuous, coherent necropolitical frameworks of meaning (Fontein 2010), across often arbitrary or imposed distinctions between life and death. But the argument he develops also questions the validity of differentiating between 'the instrumental, didactic display of bodies in "cultures of terror", where the intention is to discipline a population and, in contrast, the concealment of bodies in contexts of genocide, where the intention is to exterminate a population' (2015, 168). As he shows for Rwanda's genocide, with comparative examples drawn from Argentina (Robben 2004), Columbia (Uribe 2004) and Zimbabwe (Fontein 2010), this dualism simply does not work. 'Not all cultures of terror display bodies instrumentally' and as the Rwandan case clearly shows, 'not all genocides only involve concealment' (Eltringham 2015, 167-168). Eltringham builds his case for the didactic and discursive significance of the diverse ways in which corpses were handled and disposed of during Rwanda's genocide with reference to, amongst other things, Taylor's well-known analysis of 'flow/blockage symbolism' in Rwanda's conceptions of the body (1999). These, Taylor argued, were reflected in the way that the genocide was carried out, which betrayed a preoccupation with the movement of persons and substances and with the canals, arteries, and conduits along which persons and substances flow: rivers, roadways, pathways, and even conduits of the human body such as the reproductive and digestive systems. (Taylor 1999, 128) Although this analysis is (as Eltringham notes) necessarily speculativebecause it is impossible to know, without thorough ethnographic work amongst perpetrators, what motivated them, and it remains possible the disposal of bodies 'was more pragmatic' and 'prosaic' than 'poetic'it does resemble cultural motifs and 'flow metaphors' elsewhere in the region (Warnier 2007). The articles in this special issue not only engage with the concerns that Eltringham raises but also, in an important way, move beyond them. The articles derive from a workshop held at the University of Edinburgh in September 2013, one of three workshops that formed a three-year British Academy-funded project entitled Transforming Bodies: Health, Migration and Violence in Southern Africa. Building on a recent growth of academic interest in the complex social and political significance of human corporeality, this international partnership between scholars at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, and the University of the Witwatersr...

Vital instability: ontological insecurity and African urbanisms

“…These speak to the ontological force and vitalism of material and corporeal substances (cf. Fontein 2010;Fontein and Harries 2013;Major and Fontein 2015). Ontologies may be viewed neither as essences nor as historical epiphenomena, but as sources of vitality and orientation amid the flux of life.…”