The History of Violence, Large and Small

In this chapter I re-examine the European conquest of Africa in a critical dialogue with German philosopher Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). This book first proposed understanding the violence of Europe's twentieth century through imperialism and the conquest of Africa, placing what had been understood as separate and unrelated episodes within a single analytical frame.

Arendt's merit reveals itself precisely in the fact that Origins does not present a master narrative or overarching theory of totalitarian violence, identifying precursors and tracing developments as conventional historio­graphy might attempt. Indeed the ‘origins' of the book's title misleads many readers. Arendt does not concern herself with identifying an original point from which totalitarianism developed. Moreover, by ‘origins' she did not mean ‘causes'. Causality implies a sequence of events, where one event can be explained by a preceding event. Arendt argues instead that the ‘event illuminates its own past, but it can never be deduced from it’.¹ (Many scholars directly inspired by Arendt fail to grasp this nuance, as I will discuss below.) Her argument depends upon identifying violence’s ‘elements’, or the constitutive ideas and practices that ‘crystallised’ in the first half of the twentieth century.^{[403] [404]} Among the many who have been inspired by Origins to reread modern violence it is perhaps only the scholar Enzo Traverso who has fully grasped this specific point when he writes in his Origins of Nazi Violence that his goal ‘is to seize upon the elements of civilizational context in which that regime existed, elements that throw light upon it and, retro­spectively, can be seen to constitute its “origins”’.^[405] We see here something of Walter Benjamin’s better-known understanding of an event as a constellation of historical forces rather than their culmination.^[406] The massive violence of the mid twentieth century then appears as something of a perfect storm, neither an aberration nor a continuation but ‘one permuta­tion among an infinite number of possible configurations, conjunctions and correspondences’.^[407] This neatly departs from standard historical arguments with cause-effect questions concerning the continuity and discontinuity of violence, its long and short duree. Properly understood, Arendt’s ‘origins’ helps historians separate the causes of violence from its effects,^[408] while highlighting what Michel Foucault separately called genealogy, namely history’s ‘wavering course’, its ruptures, lack of stable forms and, ulti­mately, its heterogeneity, even to itself.^[409] This is especially important for the study of violence, with its traumas and related epistemological crises that seed the archive with aporia, fissures and gaps.

There are, however, perils to this project. Arendt's readers have commen­ted upon the difficult, improbable structure of the book. (Origins consists of three volumes: along with the second volume on imperialism is a first tome on anti-Semitism and the third volume on totalitarianism.) Moreover, Arendt's method strikes some as intuitive, even improvised.^[410] Even if one dispenses with reading Origins as a whole and focuses only on its volume for imperialism and Africa, as I propose here, the material can be problematic. First and foremost, there is the fact that Arendt knew very little about Africans or Africa despite the centrality of this place to her analysis. Indeed she may have harboured antipathy towards the continent, especially in the period when she finished writing Origins and the decades after when Africans threw off European rule. Decolonisation occurred with the violence that she abhorred and a sharp critique of European norms that she held dear, as she made clear in her 1970 essay, On Violence. This may account for the fact that, although she condemns racism as one of the most dangerous legacies of imperialism, she has no qualms approaching colonised Africans from the same prejudicial perspective as her sources, even placing people of colour ‘outside language... outside politics, outside reason', as her most trenchant critic has put it.^[411] Moreover, apart from the most famous figures, like Cecil Rhodes, Carl Peters and Lord Cromer, she knew precious little about imperialism's agents. That many of these agents were not Europeans never seems to have entered Arendt's mind.