Narratives of hate

When Claude Shannon (1948) developed his model of information, he was concerned with noise in telephone systems and how to reduce it or change the message structure to insure its reception. When Wilson (1960) asks how often human beings understand each other, he is acknowledging that human information systems include noise, too. This is not always evident. We may, therefore, benefit from examining the use of metaphors as a creative language activity that serves communication, cultural and socio-political purposes. Importantly, greater insight may be gained by examining an extreme situation: the use of metaphors to construct narratives of ethnic hatred during the 2007 pre- and post- election violence (PEV) in Kenya.
This paper seeks to illustrate how speakers sometimes use metaphors to mean what they don’t say as opposed to saying what they don’t mean through an examination of a number of metaphors used during the 2007 Kenyan crisis. The paper uses both information science and mass communication theoretical frameworks in interrogating this phenomenon.
A brief overview of the 2007 Kenyan electoral violence
When Kenya went to the polls in 2007, the country was ethnically divided more than ever before in its political history. Two political forces were competing for power: the Orange Democratic Party (ODM) and the Party of National Unity (PNU). ODM was a coalition of two major ethnic communities: Luo and Kalenjin. PNU was seen as being predominantly Kikuyu, the most populous ethnic community in Kenya. Other smaller communities aligned to one of these two parties. During the campaign period, both parties mobilized their ethnic supporters and demonized their opponents. The campaign was as ethnic as it was political. What followed was heightened propaganda that facilitated the construction of narratives of ethnic antagonism.
These narratives were predominantly constructed and disseminated through vernacular radio stations. It is worth noting that radio continues to be an unrivalled source of information in Africa and other developing parts of the world. This medium was extensively used during the campaign period. When the presidential results were announced in favor of PNU, Kenya degenerated into an unprecedented political turmoil. According to the Commission of Inquiry into Post-Election Violence (CIPEV, 2008), 1,133 people were killed and 350,000 internally displaced during the Kenyan post-election violence. The violence ended after three months of bloodshed when a group of Eminent Persons, led by the former UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan, brokered a shared power deal between the aggrieved parties. A prime minister position was proposed and entrenched in the Kenyan Constitution as part of the peace deal. The premier position, like that of the president, has executive powers invested in it. The position was strategically created to accommodate the ODM leader, Raila Odinga as one of the principals in the new Coalition Government.
Although the violence was triggered by the announcement of the contentious presidential election results, the bloodshed that visited Kenya has been defined as a political crisis with ethnic overtones. The media, especially the vernacular radio stations, were heavily blamed for constructing and fanning ethnic discourses that dangerously inflamed ethnic tension and passions. Carefully embellished metaphors were used as building blocks of narratives of hatred broadcast by various vernacular radio stations before and after the election. The result of these broadcasts, although not entirely responsible for, was a near-genocide.
Vernacular radio and ethnic loyalty
In Kenya, and in most other African countries, belonging to a certain ethnic community is equated with membership to a certain nationality; a kind of a small world. There exists a stronger allegiance to intra-ethnic identity within these small worlds than commitment to the ideals of the nation state. Language is a key ethnic marker in Kenya and it acts as a basic template for purveying sectarian and divisive ideas.
It is not surprising that civic duties often reflect allegiance to perceived ethnic ideals, as opposed to commitment to nation state’s ideals. This difference is prevalent in the political course of action associated with ethnic membership. Political loyalty, as a result, follows conspicuously ethnic lines. Consequently, political competition along ethnic lines harbors a huge potential of generating political animosity. During such power struggles, “individuals develop an intense hate and often use every means available to foment hate in their fellow citizens in order to gain the support they need to achieve their goals” (Sternberg & Sternberg, 2008, p. 6). The Somali experience has showed how differences among clans can be as detrimental as those among ethnic groups when it comes to power struggle.

This is reminiscent of the former Yugoslavia where the Serbs, being predominantly Orthodox, and Croats, being predominantly Catholic, considered themselves different as manifested in their political dispositions. Just like the religious differences between the Serbs and the Croats, ethnicity can also be perceived as membership in a small world that enables its members to adopt sanctioned viewpoints that define not only membership in a small world, but also non-membership of “ the others.” This idea of membership resonates with that of Wilson (1983, p. 3) on how we adopt perspective depending on the ethnic communities to which we belong, or depending upon our membership in certain small worlds: “We make points, take lines, occupy positions; we view, we see other’s point, but from our own angle.” Making points or taking views from “our own angle” can generate a conflict with that of “the other.” These conflicts manifest in several ways: political, religious, cultural, economic or social. Yet, whichever form the conflict assumes, information plays a vital role, both as a weapon and a target.

Gikandi (2008) provides an ingenious insight on the genesis of the Kenyan violence. According to him, the elites and intellectuals were the chief architects of narratives of hatred and ethnic hostility because they own the media and have the requisite power to control and influence the media content, just as they are able to shape the opinion of the masses. Gikandi argues that “ethnic identity is essentially a modern invention of ethnic elites and intellectuals pursuing economic and political objectives” (Karnell, 2003, p. 58). This view also acknowledges that the elites wield power and that they employ commonalities such as the media, language and religion as emotional building blocks in ethnic and political mobilization.
Gikandi’s constructivist perspective considers ethnicity as primarily built and manipulated in emotionally-laden symbolic and communicative spaces. Vital in this space is construction of messages only intelligible to certain audiences. Metaphors play a significant role in this space as well as in the construction of intention-driven, persuasive and strategic messages.

This was apparent in Kenya during the PEV in which vernacular radio stations spewed vitriol against perceived – real or imagined – politico-ethnic enemies. The language used was metaphorically-couched, so creative that one required ethnic knowledge to decipher. This strategic metaphorical construction of “reality,” in order to reach a certain audience while simultaneously disenfranchising the perceived enemies, has been used to antagonize communities in multilingual societies, not just in Kenya.
A case in point is the 1994 Rwandese genocide during which hate radio was used to construct and disseminate metaphors that incited the Hutus against the Tutsis. Before the genocide, Tutsis were metaphorically referred to as inyenzi, or cockroaches in almost every radio broadcast that aired. The metaphor inyenzi had been used by the Tutsi exiles that fled Rwanda following the revolution of 1959 after the toppling of the Tutsi monarchical fabric. The metaphorical reference of the Tutsis as inyenzi implied that, with time, they would, with the tenacity of the household pests, stealthily invade at night. However, this metaphor was co-opted by the Hutus and redefined in the early 1990s. The term Inyenzi went through a metamorphosis and was used in reference to rancorous vermin worthy of extermination from the Rwandese household (See also “Trial of Rwanda ‘hate radio’ organizers adjourned” September 18, 2005, www.cnn.com). But since these metaphors are not merely self-referring entities with a potential to drive self identified linguistic or ethnic group toward the unexpected, one must accentuate the historical burden these metaphors carry. These metaphors, as used in the Rwandese and the Kenyan cases, were often imbued with historical resonances that serve as an expose to not only the intersecting elements of ethnicity, class, and gender, but also to their (metaphors) very construction as a result of these elements.

In order to gain an in-depth meaning of the metaphors used during the Kenyan crisis, discourse analysis and critical discourse analysis were used as key approaches in this study. Discourse analysis considers discourse as data (Potter, 1997). As an approach, it is epistemologically constructivist in orientation. Yet to construct metaphorically, refers to making careful and even strategic considerations of existing linguistic components to build a discourse, to construct a narrative. Discourse analysis is an examination of human interactions and resultant acts. The focus of this paper is on the functional orientation of metaphors as a form of discourse that is constructed to generate a response, the action-effect of utterances – in this case hatred.

Discourse analysis helps in our examination of the interactions among members of different ethnic communities and their use of language in the production, consumption and interpretation of metaphors. Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) serves us well in the interrogation of the relationship between language and society. Blommaert (2005) has observed how CDA involves the intersections and interrelationships among language, discourse, speech and social interactions. Yet, discourse can be textual, discursive and a social practice. Fairclough (1992) has delineated three categories of discourse analysis. According to Fairclough, analyzing discourse-as-text focuses on linguistic components such as grammar, words and sentence structure, while discourse-as-discursive practice is a document (textual or spoken) that is packaged, disseminated and consumed in the society.
To avoid confusion with other notions of information, which fail to recognize that one can receive information without being informed, we apply a specific definitional model by noting the difference between the message and meaning of various metaphors. We examine metaphors by critiquing Paisley’s (1980) definition of information as any stimulus that changes the information recipient’s cognitive structure (see also, Hayes, 1991). Our focus pays particular attention to the propagators of metaphors and the intended recipients. In the process of propagating metaphors we differentiate among facts, data, metaphors, communication, and understanding.
Metaphors, in our case, involve data processing, a process that is external to the metaphor recipient. Once the metaphor is communicated, the recipient may derive the meaning from the message, but in a way not always intended by the source. Can a recipient claim to understand a message and yet appear to have misunderstood it in the eyes of the source? Hayes (1993) has addressed this complexity by defining terms such as understanding and knowledge. But acquisition of understanding and knowledge may require membership in a certain small world. What circumcision means, for instance, in certain communities may mean something different in other communities. To some, it is a medical necessity, a physical surgery, while for others it is a rite of passage with huge cultural implications upon which ontological systems are built.

This process of metaphor propagation is dependent on various factors such as context and the cognitive ability to decode them. Underlying the process of metaphor propagation is a set of dominant ethnic taken-for-granted ideas and assumptions, what Antonio Gramsci called hegemony. Hegemony, which is the dominant ideological framework embodied, inscribed and often perceptively invisible via a multitude of symbolic practices of storytelling, artistic displays, rites of passage and many other acts, serves to construct the small world of the particular ethnic community while it excludes “the others” who do not belong to the small world. As McQuail (2000, p. 97) notes, “hegemony tends to define unacceptable opposition to the status quo as dissident and deviant.” Thus, through symbolic practices, all those who have been excluded from the preferred and dominant small world must be marginalized, excluded and often demonized for the small world to maintain its hegemonic integrity. Metaphors, therefore, become important components of the socially-constructed symbolic practices that mobilize preferred interpretations of belonging, not belonging as well as framing “the other” as deviant, unacceptable and worthy of exclusion or even extermination.

Metaphors

Scholars such as Todoli (2007) have warned against an uncritical acceptance of metaphors, especially because some metaphors may have multiple meanings even within the same speech community. Metaphors acquire a life of their own, depending upon how they are used to propagate a discourse. Once constructed, they can tumble “anywhere among those who may or may not understand them, and know not to whom they should reply, to whom not” (Phaedrus, 275).
Faced with possibilities of (mis)interpretation, why then, one may ask, should we use metaphors? Metaphors vividly express what would otherwise be “difficult to express in literal speech” (Mio 1997, p.121). They also add vivacity to speech and allow acceptable breaking of language rules in order to communicate certain ideas (See also Gibbs, 1994). In fact, Charteris-Black (2004) sees metaphors as an embodiment of verbalized evidence. Although Todoli (2007) acknowledges the potential of metaphors in myth deconstruction, they also possess huge potential in myth construction, especially when the intention is to disenfranchise particular audiences from a discourse.

Conclusion

Most metaphors used during the Kenyan PEV existed before and had been accepted even as a rich source of ethnic stereotypical humor. They did not have any atavistic undertones they acquired during the electoral period. The context of deployment frames the meaning and potency of use. There are several Kenyan comedians who have thrived on these ethnic metaphors. We, therefore note that the potency of a metaphor is not in itself, but in the meaning we imbue it with, which meaning is as fluid and transient as context changes.
This not only challenges the notion of metaphors with determinate meaning, but also problematizes their instrumentalization by the media, in our case vernacular radio stations. They serve as a rallying cry and a call to arms not because of the totality of what can be inferred from them - both positive and negative, but their signification of aspects of difference. It is this difference, which was exploited during the PEV not because of the metaphors but in spite of them. In other words the metaphors become substitutes for some other things, for example land and education. Metaphors became an effective vehicle to foreground differences even as they silenced the real raison de etre for the violence.

(A complete version of this paper is available on request)