Contextualizing Justice and Human Dignity in Rwanda: The

1
Sylvanus I. Okoro
Sylvanus I. Okoro
1 Ebonyi State University

Send Message

To: Author

GJHSS Volume 16 Issue D1

Article Fingerprint

ReserarchID

K921N

Contextualizing Justice and Human Dignity in Rwanda: The Banner
  • English
  • Afrikaans
  • Albanian
  • Amharic
  • Arabic
  • Armenian
  • Azerbaijani
  • Basque
  • Belarusian
  • Bengali
  • Bosnian
  • Bulgarian
  • Catalan
  • Cebuano
  • Chichewa
  • Chinese (Simplified)
  • Chinese (Traditional)
  • Corsican
  • Croatian
  • Czech
  • Danish
  • Dutch
  • Esperanto
  • Estonian
  • Filipino
  • Finnish
  • French
  • Frisian
  • Galician
  • Georgian
  • German
  • Greek
  • Gujarati
  • Haitian Creole
  • Hausa
  • Hawaiian
  • Hebrew
  • Hindi
  • Hmong
  • Hungarian
  • Icelandic
  • Igbo
  • Indonesian
  • Irish
  • Italian
  • Japanese
  • Javanese
  • Kannada
  • Kazakh
  • Khmer
  • Korean
  • Kurdish (Kurmanji)
  • Kyrgyz
  • Lao
  • Latin
  • Latvian
  • Lithuanian
  • Luxembourgish
  • Macedonian
  • Malagasy
  • Malay
  • Malayalam
  • Maltese
  • Maori
  • Marathi
  • Mongolian
  • Myanmar (Burmese)
  • Nepali
  • Norwegian
  • Pashto
  • Persian
  • Polish
  • Portuguese
  • Punjabi
  • Romanian
  • Russian
  • Samoan
  • Scots Gaelic
  • Serbian
  • Sesotho
  • Shona
  • Sindhi
  • Sinhala
  • Slovak
  • Slovenian
  • Somali
  • Spanish
  • Sundanese
  • Swahili
  • Swedish
  • Tajik
  • Tamil
  • Telugu
  • Thai
  • Turkish
  • Ukrainian
  • Urdu
  • Uzbek
  • Vietnamese
  • Welsh
  • Xhosa
  • Yiddish
  • Yoruba
  • Zulu

The word “Inyenzi”, which is a Kinyawanda word for cockroaches, came into political lexicon in Rwanda following the Revolution of 1959 in that East Central African nation. Following that Revolution, a hitherto politically dominant ethnic fraction of a broadly homogeneous population -the Tutsi, lost its status to an erstwhile dominated group -the Hutu. Consequent upon this scenario, and in order to escape state-sponsored persecution, the Tutsi fanned out in different directions into the countries of the Great Lakes region -Burundi, Uganda, Tanzania, DR. Congo. From these countries of asylum, Tutsi refugees began to carry out sporadic raids into Rwanda, in an effort to get even with the authorities, but more ostensibly to forcibly re-enter Rwanda and re-assume its former dominant position. The now dominant Hutu ethnicity responded by referring to them as cockroaches, so as to encourage not just disdain and hatred for them from the larger society, but a murderous pre-disposition, much like the natural human disposition toward cockroaches. It is the extent to which this contextualizes the denial of justice and human dignity that this paper seeks to determine. The paper also evaluates the consequences of this exercise for peace and development in the Great Lakes region of Africa.

19 Cites in Articles

References

  1. De Forges,Alison (1995). The Ideology of Genocide.
  2. R Eripicum,Rwanda,Maintenat (1990). PREMIÈRE PARTIELA FRANCE ET LE PREMIER CONFLIT RWANDAIS(1990-1994).
  3. J Garner,Wilford (1937). Laws of War.
  4. Tharcisse Gatwa (1900). The Churches and Ethnic Ideology in the Rwanda Crisis.
  5. Dixon Kamukama (1997). Donor Complicity and Failures in Rwanda.
  6. Jacques Maquet (1970). The Premis of inequality.
  7. F Menghistu (1985). The Satisfaction of Survival Requirements.
  8. Ed Rancharam,Opara Okpara (2005). Human Rights Law and Practice in Nigeria.
  9. Khwaja Muntaqim (2008). Protection of Human Rights: Allalabad.
  10. Jean Nduwayezu,Damascene (1990). Les Fondements Physiques, Humains et economiques du developpement du Rwanda.
  11. Catharine Newbury (1988). The Cohesion of Oppression, Clientship and Ethnicity in Rwanda, 1860 1960.
  12. Catharine Newbury (1995). Background To Genocide: Rwanda.
  13. F Nkundabagenzi (1961). Rwanda Politique 1958-1960.
  14. C Omaka (2005). The State, International Human Rights Law and the Amplification of Human Dignity in Practice.
  15. Norman Palmer,Howard Perkins (2000). International Relations: The World Community in Transition 3rd ed.
  16. Gerard Prunier (1994). The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide 1959.
  17. F Reyntjens (1994). talk about permeable! There’s a way, oddly enough, that you can be very active in being looked at. Being extremely aware of that. It’s not a position of powerlessness. Women like to look too. PN: The gaze, of flirtation or voyeurism, seems bound up with another major theme of this novel, which is the artificiality of gender. Early on, Grace is warned against promiscuity by her brother: ‘“You did it when you were my age,” she said. “I’m a guy,” he said, “it’s different.” “Fuck difference,” she said’ (H, 37). The novel as a whole seems to ‘fuck difference’ in its play with forms of androgyny, transvestism, and so on. Would that be the right place to put the emphasis? LT: In the sense of a binary division. It’s a very hard thing to discuss. I’m such an anti-essentialist that while I recognize that there is difference, what that means will always be unknown for me. Why hierarchies come into being, how those kinds of differences are arrived at. And while you don’t know, there’s the area you can play. The space in which our ignorance of why things come to be the way they are can also give us the room and energy to fuck around, not to accept things for what they are. PN: The characters are haunted by the seemingly absolute forms of sexual difference then? And the novel seems to gesture toward an opposite idea of gender as fiction. Your references in the novel to Susan Sontag’s essay on Camp reminded me that she had proposed some of these ideas well before Judith Butler and others. Sontag says, for example, that ‘the most refined form of sexual attractiveness…consists in going against the grain of one’s sex’; and she defines Camp as ‘the triumph of the epicene style. (The convertibility of “man” and “woman”, “person” and “thing”).’ How important were these ideas to Haunted Houses? LT: Haunted by difference, yes, and also by the possibility of agency. ‘Camp’ was a revelatory essay for me. Unfortunately Sontag pulled back from those concerns. You would have felt from that essay that in the seventies she could have been a very sophisticated feminist. But she wasn’t, and in fact I think she’s something of an anti-feminist. Those kinds of ideas were important. The first gay male friend I had was when I was eighteen. I thought of feminism and gay liberation as working the same terrain. To me at that point it was all about not accepting what you were being handed on the sexual platter—what roles. PN: There’s a passage from Andy Warhol which you quote in one of your new pieces called ‘Love Sentence’: ‘Once you see emotions from a certain angle, you can never think of them as real again..
  18. Joseph Sebarenzi (2009). God Sleeps in Rwanda: Journey of Transformation.
  19. William Wade,Christopher Forsyth,Julian Ghosh (1994). Wade & Forsyth's Administrative Law.

Funding

No external funding was declared for this work.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Ethical Approval

No ethics committee approval was required for this article type.

Data Availability

Not applicable for this article.

Sylvanus I. Okoro. 2016. \u201cContextualizing Justice and Human Dignity in Rwanda: The\u201d. Global Journal of Human-Social Science - D: History, Archaeology & Anthropology GJHSS-D Volume 16 (GJHSS Volume 16 Issue D1): .

Download Citation

Issue Cover
GJHSS Volume 16 Issue D1
Pg. 15- 22
Journal Specifications

Crossref Journal DOI 10.17406/GJHSS

Print ISSN 0975-587X

e-ISSN 2249-460X

Keywords
Classification
GJHSS-D Classification: FOR Code: 750799
Version of record

v1.2

Issue date

April 10, 2016

Language

English

Experiance in AR

The methods for personal identification and authentication are no exception.

Read in 3D

The methods for personal identification and authentication are no exception.

Article Matrices
Total Views: 4055
Total Downloads: 2086
2026 Trends
Research Identity (RIN)
Related Research

Published Article

The word “Inyenzi”, which is a Kinyawanda word for cockroaches, came into political lexicon in Rwanda following the Revolution of 1959 in that East Central African nation. Following that Revolution, a hitherto politically dominant ethnic fraction of a broadly homogeneous population -the Tutsi, lost its status to an erstwhile dominated group -the Hutu. Consequent upon this scenario, and in order to escape state-sponsored persecution, the Tutsi fanned out in different directions into the countries of the Great Lakes region -Burundi, Uganda, Tanzania, DR. Congo. From these countries of asylum, Tutsi refugees began to carry out sporadic raids into Rwanda, in an effort to get even with the authorities, but more ostensibly to forcibly re-enter Rwanda and re-assume its former dominant position. The now dominant Hutu ethnicity responded by referring to them as cockroaches, so as to encourage not just disdain and hatred for them from the larger society, but a murderous pre-disposition, much like the natural human disposition toward cockroaches. It is the extent to which this contextualizes the denial of justice and human dignity that this paper seeks to determine. The paper also evaluates the consequences of this exercise for peace and development in the Great Lakes region of Africa.

Our website is actively being updated, and changes may occur frequently. Please clear your browser cache if needed. For feedback or error reporting, please email [email protected]
×

This Page is Under Development

We are currently updating this article page for a better experience.

Request Access

Please fill out the form below to request access to this research paper. Your request will be reviewed by the editorial or author team.
X

Quote and Order Details

Contact Person

Invoice Address

Notes or Comments

This is the heading

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Ut elit tellus, luctus nec ullamcorper mattis, pulvinar dapibus leo.

High-quality academic research articles on global topics and journals.

Contextualizing Justice and Human Dignity in Rwanda: The

Sylvanus I. Okoro
Sylvanus I. Okoro Ebonyi State University

Research Journals