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- This article examines the construction and framing of Israel’s rhetoric in the Gaza War and its adverse effects on the lexicology of the word genocide and crime of genocide. This paper also quizzes Western complicity in the construction and reification of pro-Israeli genocidal speech. The central argument of this paper is that by denying that Israel committed genocide in Gaza, Israel and its Western European and American allies have colluded in disrupting the common understanding of genocide as contemplated in the Genocide Convention and universally understood. Furthermore, the West’s discursive assault on the concept of genocide fatally corrupted the term and its broader applicability. The immediate consequences of this corruption are the lives of over 37,000 innocent lives in Gaza as of June 2024, the disruption of international law, and potentially, the commission of more similar crimes in the future, which will result in even greater global instability. This paper will rely on a close reading and analysis of published pro-Israel speeches by Israeli, the European Union, and the United States’ leaders and influential political figures. These statements will be analysed using Critical Discourse Analysis, Articulation Theory and Hermeneutics.
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- In this article, I discuss different interpretations of Zimbabwean land in relation to the contradictory notions of victimhood in Peter Godwin’s memoir When a Crocodile Eats the Sun. I also explore the concepts of race, landownership and redress in relation to the legacy of colonialism in Zimbabwe. Through the use of the Cultural Interpretive Theory, Genre Theory and the Theories of Autobiographies, I explore how the politics of victimhood are used by both the Black Nationalist elites and the alienated White citizens to project the essence of ethno-racial grievance before local and international audiences for different ideological and political objectives. I show how the politics of victimhood and retribution which engender feelings of resentment and betrayal in Godwin’s memoir play into the hands of the Zimbabwe state’s anti-Western and anti Imperialist propaganda. I argue that Godwin’s otherwise important memoir on the destructive effects of Mugabe’s rule undermined its message through traces of “whiteness”, and also by competing on the same turf of victimhood that a politically discredited state had constructed for its own preservation. In the article, I suggest alternative readings of the Mugabe regime’s violent farm grabs to the rather one dimensional one offered by the memoir.
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- Reportage of violence against workers is often compromised by age-old tendencies in oppressive states to control narratives on epochal events considered potentially disruptive of existing exploitative economic relations through excision of uncomfortable truths from the official memories of states. Thus memory, in colonial and postcolonial contexts, has been a contested terrain, especially in the relationships between the state-aligned businesses and labour. There are parallels and contrasts in the remembering of violent labour-related events in Sembene Ousmane’s Gods Bits of Wood and the “Marikana Commission Report” which this article considers to be essential in preventing cyclical violence in the labour market. Hence this article comparatively discusses the treatment of history and memory as narrated in Ousmane’s God’s Bits of Wood and in Judge Farlam’s “Marikana Commission Report” on the Marikana massacre and argues that where memory is disputed and contested, the resultant submerging of truth for self-preservation reasons results in open-ended and recurrent violent events.
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- In this article, I argue that the recently exposed slave trade in Libya involving Black African migrants seeking opportunities in Europe is not merely a crime against humanity that has been justly condemned by the international community, but is also a serious indictment on the failings of the African Union’s leadership. It is a reflection of the duplicitous nature of Europe’s commitment to human rights and exposes the African leaders’ moral and leadership deficiencies. Through the use of the Hamitic hypothesis and the cultural racism theory, I discuss some causal factors that have led to the abuse of sub-Saharan Africans migrating to Europe and also the African response to the migrant crisis. Finally, I draw parallels between what I term the New Slavery and the evolving narrative of racism and conclude that poor African leadership is the Achilles’ heel in the restoration of African dignity.
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