Post by Trog on Aug 1, 2017 13:27:44 GMT
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: Rereading Albert Speer’s “Inside the Third Reich”
In my graduate class at Yale, a classmate once said, while studying the war in Sierra Leone, “African violence is different.” In that word, “different,” was a repressed shudder. He meant that hacking people to death with machetes lacked something that might have made it more bearable. A cold-blooded elegance, an efficiency, a remove. I will always remember that student because he illuminated for me the Western idea that turpitude, when committed by a certain kind of person and in a certain kind of way, is worthy of being engaged with.
In my many years of drifting around internet forums, I have occasionally embroiled myself in arguments about the relative barbarisms of peoples. And every now and again I ended up on the wrong side of somebody saying: "But you white people. How can you accuse anyone else of brutal murderousness, when you managed to refine killing into an industrial process?" This in relation to the first and second World Wars, and the holocaust. And some of the other wars prior to that - Napoleon in Russia, Napoleon in Spain. Stalin and co. in Russia. And so forth. Maybe up to 100 million people dead.
But in truth and as per the quote above, I too always had the very distinct impression that “African violence is different.” No matter how brutal the behaviour exhibited in European wars, or how total the warfare, or how effective, how horrific, I always perceived at least some sort of purpose behind the behaviours it elicited. Even if the purpose was small and petty, maybe just even hate or revenge, or to generate fear, or cold and calculated otherwise. And this I find not only in European wars, but in violence all over the world generally, except for African violence. Apart from in Africa, there is at least an inkling of some purpose.
But for Africa, I often perceive a total lack of purpose, of total mindlessness. Of people being killed or maimed or tortured for nothing at all. Not even for the gratification of the person inflicting the pain. It is almost as if the concept of killing someone else doesn't even enter into the mind of the killer - the knife goes up, it goes into someone, and you walk on, in the same way you unexpectedly sneezed, or absentmindedly scratched an itch. Should somebody ask you: "Did you kill someone," you honestly say: "I don't know. I'll have to think about it a bit." No hate, no revenge, no purpose, nothing. It is as if, in the rest of the world, killing a human is something significant, even for those who are utterly depraved. In Africa, killing a human very often has no significance at all.
So yes, for someone who has grown up in Africa and lived here for all of my life, African violence is different.
