60 years after the UN Convention - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

14 development dialogue december 2008 – revisiting the heart of darkness
fi delity to what the slaves did in 1791-1804 in Haiti (Saint Domingue). 2
Fidelity is to the event, and to the subject that emerged out of it. Such
fi delity calls for emancipatory (and prescriptive) politics, 3 at a distance
from the state and all its ancillary structures. This essay is an
attempt to encourage a re-thinking of African history, disconnected
from those questions and themes that tend to entrap rather than
emancipate.
From such a perspective, two questions loom larger, much larger,
than this essay can hope to deal with in a satisfactory way: (1) what
is mass violence? (2) how do we frame colonial times when it seems
as if they have never gone away? From colonial times (in the Americas
and the Caribbean region) to today (think of World Wars I and
II, Iraq, Palestine, Haiti, Rwanda, Darfur), mass violence, in all of
its forms, has tended to mean radically diff erent things to those who
were being colonised (and their descendants) and those who were
colonising (and their descendants). The syndromes of discovery and
abolition continue to dictate how relations between people, and relations
between people and Nature, are framed. In trying to deal
with the above questions, this essay will be guided by another question,
namely: how would one go about putting into practice what
Albert Einstein was calling for when he made one of his most famous
statements,‘With the splitting of the atom, everything changed except
the way we think’? 4
If one looks at the world from places such as Darfur, Haiti, Palestine
and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) – while keeping in
mind what is going on in Iraq, Cuba, Venezuela, the United States
and the United Nations – it is diffi cult not to conclude that the world
is immersed in crises. As historians (practitioners, in most cases, of
a state discipline), we have been trained to chronicle the unfolding
changes and transformations through a frame which distorts what
happened and how it happened, aff ecting how we recount or tell the
story. This is so, whether the subject is mass violence or the manner
2 The overthrow of slavery by the slaves in Haiti, which took place between 1791 and
1804, must be considered an Event (à la Alain Badiou) on a scale comparable to 1789
or 1792-94 in France.
3 Along the lines described by Peter Hallward (2005).
4 It is worth adding the following quotes from William McDonough and Michael
Braungart (2002) on the page following the title page: ‘The world will not evolve past
its current state of crisis by using the same thinking that created the situation’ (Albert
Einstein); ‘Glance at the sun. See the moon and the stars. Gaze at the beauty of earth’s
greenings. Now, think’ (Hildegard von Bingen); ‘What you people call your natural
resources our people call our relatives’ (Oren Lyons, faith keeper of the Onondaga).