On Canicide and Concern: Species Sovereignty in Western Accounts of Rwanda's Genocide

There is no "crime against animality" nor crime of genocide against nonhuman living beings.

Jacques Derrida The Beast and the Sovereign

Dogs, in their historical complexity, matter here. Dogs are not an alibi for other themes; dogs are fleshly material semiotic presences in the body of technoscience. Dogs are not surrogates for theory; they are not here just to think with. They are here to live with. Partners in the crime of human evolution, they are in the garden from the get-go, wily as Coyote.

Donna Haraway The Companion Species Manifesto

The opening pages of James Dawes's That the World May Know offer one of the few descriptions of the unique fate of dogs in Rwanda's genocide. The author recounts a story of the Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) having encountered, in their liberation of the nation, dogs that "were unusually large and fierce, having fed well on the heaps of corpses choking the roadways. RPF soldiers, sickened by this final indignity, began to shoot the dogs. Immediately, animal rights groups in London launched a protest to protect the dogs" (20). Dawes later cites this protest as evidence that "the genocide becomes primarily an occasion for whites to fantasize about themselves," an act of "moral self-congratulation" (33). The genocide of some eight hundred thousand Rwandans (mostly Tutsis) in 1994 was largely overlooked by the West, and Dawes uses this show of concern for animals to emphasize the flagrant disregard for Rwandan humans between April and July 1994.¹ Although Dawes problematizes the interest in animal rights that overlooks human rights, his text defines animals exclusively in terms of the indignity they perform on humans, showing no concern for their lives and deaths. Given this indignity, are shows of concern for animals allowed? Is it permissible, for instance, to suggest that dogs feeding on the dead and the production of canine ferocity have a history, not only in narratives like Dawes's but also in a genocidal political climate in whose memory ethical concern for the non-human is unquestioningly suspended? When the UN troops stationed in Rwanda declared the dogs a "health problem" (as many texts document), how should we understand the relationship between this biopolitical claim on dogs' bodies and concern?

I begin with Dawes in order to think about how texts direct our concern in particular ways when we think of postgenocide Rwanda, especially when various figures of animality become categories—applied to both humans and non-humans—for which concern is suspended. This paper theorizes concern as a technology of relationality that affectively orients how we associate with others across interpersonal, international, and interspecies contexts, one that accompanies processes of narration and representation to produce certain lives as subjects of legitimate ethical engagement, and others as objects for whom ethical engagement is not, or does not have to be, a consideration. Interrogating Western texts' handling of the fate of the dogs, I argue that these texts' attempts to account for, bear witness to, and especially (belatedly) show concern for the Rwandan genocide construct the animal as a marker of non-concern, a category for which concern is always already foreclosed. In the global handling of conflict, the animal is used to direct the trajectory of concern toward the human and away from those deemed beyond the categorical limits of humanness, separating and elevating human concerns from those of non-human life. This reading follows recent postcolonial analyses, in the era of what Rob Nixon calls the "slow violence" of environmental degradation (11), which demonstrate that—particularly in postcolonial fields of knowledge-making and situations of conflict—human and non-human concerns cannot easily be separated as independent from one another.²

The first section of this paper examines how the orientation of concern in certain Western accounts of the genocide produces a species sovereignty of the human that disavows its ties with the non-human. This sovereignty renders humanness the absolute ontological centre of the globe and the sole category toward which concern can be oriented or from which it can derive...