Lessons from Rwanda in the Destructive Language of Hate

written by
Melissa Steyn

AS WE go into the emotionally charged period of election campaigning, political leadership urgently needs to take responsibility for the social effects of the language it uses.

African National Congress (ANC) leaders’ references to their political enemies as “snakes” and “cockroaches” are of considerable concern, as are “warnings” of violence should ANC president Jacob Zuma be prosecuted. Such utterances fit into well-known patterns that have extremely destructive effects on intergroup relations and pave the way for violence.

We learnt an instructive, and deeply tragic, lesson in the xenophobic violence last year, recurring in recent incidents in KwaZulu-Natal. When the xenophobic attacks happened, many of us who study social identities and the “politics of belonging” were not surprised. The warning signs had been there — even before the murders started in the late 1990s, name-calling with words such as “amakwerekwerere”, which serve to manufacture a consensus of rejection of those being constructed as “other,” was already happening.

At the time, alarm bells were not sounded, and we have seen how things escalated into shameful group-based behaviour. It would be reckless now not to confront the gravity of the use of hate speech at this particular political juncture. It does the everyday work of creating enabling conditions for group-based aggression — beliefs that legitimate, and emotions that facilitate, hostile actions along the fault lines of inclusions and exclusions.

In the case of the xenophobic attacks, competition for resources has been the most commonly proffered explanation for the outbreak of violence. But competition in itself does not explain violence.

The xenophobic attacks in SA should be understood in the context of the construction of a new nation. Processes of drawing boundaries between those who belong and those who do not were infused with feelings of anger and resentment. Discourses constructed competition by the “other” for the available opportunities within the nation as illegitimate. The sense of the unfairness of competition rested, in turn, on the perpetrators themselves feeling that they were, or had been, victims, and therefore that their expectations of exclusive rights were legitimate.

Neil Kressel, who has written on mass hate, points out that no group anywhere in the world that has committed acts of mass hostility has done so without feeling that they themselves have been victimised. But they do not always attack the group that victimised them. Indeed, they are unlikely to attack a group with more social, political and economic power than them. Rather, they attack groups that are more vulnerable.

In SA’s case, our nation is deeply damaged, the sense of citizenship is wounded — after all, it is only about 15 years ago that black people could not walk down public streets freely. There are expectations, fears and neediness that make the question of entitlement to the nation’s resources much more fraught, and susceptible to manipulation.

One can see how it would be easy to promote the persuasion that aggrieved nationals have the right, given the opportunity, to get rid of those they scapegoat for their own lack of advancement. Xenophobic violence is the exercise of power of those who feel entitled to do so.

The hate speech in which ANC president Jacob Zuma called his political enemies “snakes” and a North West ANC Youth League leader used the word “cockroaches” is a recognised discursive link in creating the preconditions for violence based on group identities.

In an extreme form of dehumanisation, the “other” is constructed in a way that identifies them with creatures that people not only fear and hate but also feel entitled or compelled to exterminate. These are creatures we feel comfortable with despising — creatures deemed vermin, such as rats, insects, and snakes (which carry particularly hateful cultural connotations in some communities). We know how Rwandans were mobilised with the use of the word “cockroaches” to describe those targeted for extermination. Jews were referred to as rats in Nazi Germany.

One can look at hateful behaviour as a kind of pyramid, with acts of subtle bias such as stereotyping, name calling and ethnic jokes at the bottom, moving to acts of overt prejudice and bigotry and discrimination, leading to acts of violence and extreme violence to individuals, culminating in genocide at the top of the pyramid.

The Rwandan example points to another important factor in conditioning society for violence — people look to authority figures for “permission” to do that which they would not normally do. This is why hate speech coming from leaders is irresponsible leadership squared, especially in a young democracy where we are still finding the appropriate ways to interact with each other.

Obedience is a strong and related factor. People do what they understand is required of them. This is pertinent in a country such as ours where we have a particularly authoritarian and patriarchal history coupled with levels of militarisation. The cultures of, for example, the Zulus and the Afrikaners, historically show a high level of deference to male authority. This places great responsibility on the shoulders of male leaders, and also indicates why we should reject the singing of macho songs such as Awulethu mshini wam .

Other enabling conditions include a high level of intolerance to difference. With Zuma, we are seeing how people are encouraged to identify in singular ways, and boundaries are policed through fear of being similarly typecast and dehumanised if you don’t conform.

This kind of talk discourages others who may be considering breaking from the dominant mode of identifying from doing so. For example, homophobic jokes are not just aimed at disciplining lesbians and gays but aimed at policing heterosexual men and women’s sexualities. These are all group-forming and group-preserving dynamics.

And these dynamics are well known to us. Apartheid tried to create homogenous groups with clear-cut others and clear-cut boundaries where resources were allocated on the basis of whether you are “like me” or not.

We even saw this when a third of those killed in the xenophobic attacks were South Africans. Colour is often a convenient marker, as in the targeting of darker Africans and those darker black South Africans being constructed as “others” by stronger in-groups.

The way out of this is to create openness for people to belong to different, cross-cutting groups and to identify in more complex ways — whether it be political parties or other differences — and to allow for more porous boundaries.

Leaders have a responsibility to educate themselves in this regard. Responsible leaders would recognise the potential for violence and consciously guide South Africans in a different direction. Otherwise we run the risk of perpetuating cycles of victimisation and acting-out in search of compensation.

Do we want to find out whether we are the kind of society that commits genocide? Political leaders should exercise extreme caution — they may end up getting more than just votes.
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# Steyn is director of intercultural and diversity studies and an associate professor in sociology at the University of Cape Town.