The (dis) appeal of Darfur

Several years before this very class started, I had watched a documentary film entitled “The Devil Came on Horseback”. I remember to this day that the documentary had actually left me more confused about the conflict in Darfur than I had been prior to watching. It had left me with a very unsettling feeling that I had somehow missed something important, yet I could not understand why that “something” kept escaping me.

At the time I watched this film(2007), the genocide was in its early stages, and seldom was understood by the outside world. I too, had very little idea of not only what I was watching, but as to why it was happening. The distant ramifications of what I was watching at the time went unnoticed for several years.

The documentary was filmed and narrated by a former US Marine, who was sent to the African Union as an international observer. His job was to watch and record and to document human rights violations, but to not enforce or intervene. In this role he was restricted by the Sudanese and African Union governments from travelling to many areas during the genocide. With these restrictions and no enforcement powers many events would go unobserved, undocumented and unreported. Much of the film had very little to show for the actual genocide. He obtained very few pictures during his time in Darfur and was restricted from observing areas that had been attacked by pro government rebels. Even in his vague description, of men on horseback attacking villages, he did not seem to fully grasp the nuances of highly localized events in the Sudan that preceded the fighting.

The reason I could not grasp the concept at that time, and why it has taken so long to raise awareness of the conflict are the very same reasons pointed out and discussed as being unnarratable. My lingering questions of the film were not a shortcoming of the documentary, but a result of the inability of the subject to effectively be transmitted and identified with by others around the world.

Many independent factors conspired to make this narrative disappealing. The conflict in Darfur happened in some of the most remote regions of the world, where travel is done on horseback and by foot and where information poverty runs deep. There are no computers or internet let alone electricity. The “proximity and nearness” that Galtung and Ruge identify as being newsworthy[1], place this conflict very far down on the news agenda. Another factor is that the Genocide happened largely without pictures and documentation. Without seeing the faces of and identifying with the people of Darfur it was even harder to find a narrative that was highly transmissible and circulist in nature. Without crucial images or daily news headlines of reporters or eyewitnesses bringing first hand accounts to our attention, the world was not drawn to Darfur because we could not identify. There was very little authenticity or verification from any authors because governments kept reporters out for many years to under report the genocide (This is in stark contrast to today’s images of the toppling of Governments in other parts of North Africa). A final causality added to the laundry list of factors is the very nature and concept of genocide. Genocide is an issue in which Robyn Warhol describes as “antinarratable” because it transgresses social convention and is genocide is generally taboo.[2]

Without access to twitter or iReports from computers and cellphones, the world slept while Darfur burned, and we either did not know, or simply did not care because we failed to identify with the people of Darfur. We failed to understand the nature of their conflict. We failed to understand them as a people. We failed to believe in the rumors and stories because we saw no evidence. We failed them because they are not part of our information and media system. They were cut off and isolated from the effects of globalization. We need to do much more to prevent this from happening again.

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[1] Galtung, Johan/Ruge, Mari Holmboe: The Structure of Foreign News. The Presentation of the Congo, Cuba, and Cyprus Crises in Four Norwegian Newspapers. Journal of Peace Research, vol. 2 (1965) p. 68

[2] Robyn R. Warhol: Neonarrative; or, How to Render the Unnarratable in realist Fiction and Contemporary Film. In: Phelan, James/Rabinowitz: Peter J.: A Companion to Narrative Theory. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005.