Making Genocide Thinkable

When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda
by Mahmood Mamdani
Princeton University Press, 2001, 364 pp., $29.95

Anyone sets out to show how genocide can become thinkable ought to have an eye on the line beyond which it becomes justifiable. Understanding genocide carries intellectual and moral risks for the scholar, who functions somewhat like a laboratory scientist undertaking the study of a lethal virus while trying to remain uncontaminated. The title of Mahmood Mamdani’s new book about the Rwandan genocide of 1994— the twentieth century’s final and most intensive—suggests this dilemma. It’s a subordinate clause, provocative in itself, waiting to be completed by a main clause that’s bound to be even more provocative. When victims become killers—then what? Do they remain in some sense victims? Are the implications of the killing different from when non-victims become killers, as in Nazi Germany? Is the meaning of the killing somehow changed? Is becoming a killer contained in, explained by, being a victim? Or has some categorical change taken place?

Mamdani’s project has all the more potential for going seriously awry given that the tool he brings to bear on the genocide is not empirical fact but critical theory. By his own account, he is impatient with scholarship that requires the “production of facts” to justify itself. Mamdani was born and educated in Uganda, then taught at the University of Cape Town before joining Columbia University as a professor of government and director of the Institute of African Studies. At the outset of When Victims Become Killers, he announces that he wants “to rethink existing facts in light of rethought contexts, thereby to illuminate old facts and core realities in new light.” The apparatus of theory can be hauled in to justify anything; “evil” does not make much impression on the postmodern mind. What’s more, Mamdani, who is far more capable of writing a direct and intelligible statement than most academics, occasionally lapses into the kind of language that by its very nature evades the key questions of agency and responsibility. He ought to try writing his next book without ever using the words “postcolonial” and “problematize.”