The Routledge Companion To Literature And Human Rights

Satire, Sentiment, and Rights in African Texts and Contexts

Madelaine Hron

Humor and human rights: propaedeutic examples

Can human rights be humorous? In 2014, during the twentieth commemoration of the genocide in Rwanda, the recurring question about the value of humor in human rights discourses resurfaced when a particularly repugnant joke went viral online. In the offensive clip, a French talk show shockingly compared the Tutsi genocide to Candy Crush: “Tutsi Crush,” or “the genocide in Rwanda finally adapted for your smartphone,” featured skulls to crush as candy. Guest singer GiedRé blithely explained that “I’m not really into video games, but I’d play this. It looks like fun [rigolo]” (Tutsi Crush 2014). The clip provoked outrage from Rwandans, activists, and casual browsers alike, and confirmed that indignation, gravitas, and pathos may be the only possible ethical responses to heinous rights violations. The show’s supporters argued that global audiences were not grasping the French sense of humor, here possibly “cynical humor,” or “a general expression of moral alienation from the political order” (Speier [1975] 1998: 1358). However, their lame defenses only emphasized the need to distinguish between “jokes of triumph … from above” and “jokes of resistance … from below,” or between humor that disempowers the weak and vulnerable, and humor that empowers them (Speier [1975] 1998: 1353). As Alison Brysk reminds us in her study of human rights rhetoric, “human rights satire is written for citizens and against leaders or elites. It must mock domination but not suffering” (2013: 122). Ironically, when reappropriated as resistance from below, this joke turned out to be most effective in engaging human rights issues. Circulated as “outrage porn” (Holiday 2014), it prompted activism on a number of levels: it reiterated the horror of genocide, recalled France’s complicity in 1994 events, and engaged the participation and imagination of people who had forgotten about the commemoration.

Yet, what if humor “from below” is missed or dismissed? What if its “resistance” is misunderstood? Intriguingly, this was the case shortly after the fifteenth commemoration, with the release of Africa United (2010), the first widely accessible Rwandan film that chose not to address the Tutsi genocide. Africa United features a group of kids traveling to the 2010 FIFA World Cup, while addressing such human rights issues as AIDS, child soldiers, refugees, and sexual slavery – in a humorous way. In interviews, British director Debs Gardner-Paterson and Rwandan coproducer Eric Kabera explain that they wanted to create a film that countered stereotypical representation of Africans in disaster films or in charity campaigns, as subjects of savagery or objects of pity. Therefore, they adopted a humorous, rather than a sentimental or tragic approach; they broached serious topics via the lens of irony, rather than of pathos; and treated Rwandans as subjects with agency, rather than as commodities to be consumed by viewers. Unfortunately, reactions to the film were mixed. Critics often misunderstood the film’s humor, misinterpreting it as facile sentimentalism or feel-good schmaltz.

How, then, to write humorously about human rights, in resistance from below? In his satirical masterpiece, “How to Write about Africa” (2005), Binyavanga Wainaina offers hilarious instructions for brewing up just such a bestseller; it’s a flavorful, yet stereotypical, blend of sentimental humanitarianism, White supremacy, primitivism, and exoticism. Wainaina’s recipe includes the book cover (i.e., disempowering yet exotic) and compulsory characters (e.g., “The Gorilla” and “The Celebrity”) to promote the book’s repeated purpose – “because you care” – and warns against taboo subjects (e.g., ordinariness or modernity). Satire is often emblematized by a “fantastic … central symbol of violence” (Paulson 1967: 9) – here it is the disturbing image of “the Starving” who, “utterly helpless … never say anything … except (unspeakable) suffering” and “have no past, no history” (Wainaina 2005). In the YouTube version, Djimon Hounsou’s deep voice conveys the gravitas associated with human rights, just as the soundtrack – Ayub Ogada’s haunting yet familiar “Kothbiro” – recalls the colonial humanitarian Sehnsucht: “without your intervention … Africa is doomed” (Wainaina 2005).

Wainaina’s propaedeutic is both hilarious and powerful because it so cleverly parodies and thus exposes the stereotypical assumptions associated with Africa, stereotypes that are recognizable by both western and African audiences. Most humor theorists agree that humor results from incongruity, or surprise; in literature, it is both a “wake-up call” and a “reflexive cue” (Chambers 2010: 103). Especially in parody, a metafictional genre, this incongruity arises “from conflict with reader expectations,” from “the pleasure of recognizing ambiguity” in the space “between recognition and reflection” (Rose 1979: 38, 79, 81). Humor is therefore predicated on recognition: on the reader’s competence in recognizing the normative cultural values or generic forms being distorted. As Judith Butler reminds us regarding parody, “it is only within the practices of repetitive signifying that a subversion of identity becomes possible” (1990: 145). It is only within the space of repetition, of shared cognitive schema, that humor has the “potential to offer a challenge to the hierarchy of the very sites of discourse, a discourse based on dominance” (Hutcheon 1995: 30). For me, in this space between reflection and recognition, Wainaina’s parody calls to mind certain challenges at the very sites of discourse, namely the ambiguous slippage between satire and sentiment, between resistance and imitation, or between human rights and humanitarianism, as developed in historical discourses about Africa. Furthermore, it also presages the possibilities and limitations of humor, satire, and parody in current African contexts.

Satire and sentiment: historical observations concerning Africa

It is interesting to consider the twinned genealogies of satire and sentimentalism in the evolution of human rights. While numerous human rights scholars have emphasized the role of the sentimental novel in the development of eighteenth-century rights discourses (e.g., Hunt 2007; Rorty 1998), the role of satire, by contrast, is sometimes glossed over. Clearly, though, Voltaire, Swift, the Scriblerus Club, and many other Enlightenment satirists critiqued the status quo, lambasted injustice, and called for reform, while advocating skeptical reason, cultural tolerance, and intellectual openness – basic democratic values that led to the development of rights and self-determination (e.g., Bloom and Bloom 1979; Paulson 1967; Palmeri 2003). Just as novels such as Pamela (1740), Clarissa (1747), or Julie (1791) helped readers “to think of other people as their equals” and “empathize across social boundaries” (Hunt 2007: 58, 40), so did satires such as Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1725), Voltaire’s Zadig (1747), or L’Ingénu (1767), except that the latter more sharply pointed to the causes of social injustice by exposing absolutist mores and sociocultural stereotypes and by challenging religious prejudices and xenophobic patriotism, all while fostering attitudes of tolerance, curiosity, and openness to the complexities and differences of others. Scholars note that satire both informed the development of the sentimental novel and later worked to critique its underlying narrative and sociocultural biases, including “the assumption of complicity with the author, as well as the likelihood of becoming sympathetically involved with the characters” (Palmeri 2003: 205). It is worth remembering that Richardson’s Pamela (1740) was quickly parodied by Fielding’s Shamela (1741), just as the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man was quickly called into question by Olympe De Gouges’ Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen (1791). Similarly, contemporary parodies such as I Ain’t Yo’ Uncle (Alexander and Aiken 1996) speak back to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s sentimentally patronizing portrait of African Americans in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852).

As I have argued elsewhere (Hron 2014), the history and legacy of sentimentalism is problematic in the African context. Although it manifestly helped mobilize public sentiment for the abolition of slavery in the British Empire and later in the United States, in the nineteenth century, sentimental rhetoric increasingly became aligned with discourses of imperialism, scientific racism, and missionary humanitarianism that culminated with Africa’s full-scale colonization in 1884–85. Notably, blatant racism was often tempered with sentimental depictions of Africans as children, akin to Stowe’s infantilizing portrait of Tom. Much like abolitionist Stowe, racists like Cecil Rhodes depicted Africans as “children … just emerging from barbarism” (quoted in Vindex 1900: 383), so as then to justify their colonial brand of humanitarianism: “let us call them our children. Let us educate them carefully … not to our own level – that … can never be” (Reade 1864: 430). Sadly, this colonial attitude persists well into the twenty-first century (Fanon 1967: 31). Representations of Africans as suffering children – from humanitarian campaigns to postcolonial Bildungsromane – often replicate patronizing and cozening missionary templates, “wherein the adult-Northerner offers help and knowledge to the infantilized South” (Burman 1994: 241).

The historical role of humor, satire, and laughter in the African context is equally complex and ambiguous. Humor in precolonial Africa is sorely undertheorized because of language barriers, cultural differences, and because much of the historical record is shaped by colonial explorers and missionaries. Nonetheless, William Piersen draws on examples from colonial anthropology to showcase that West Africans drew on satire in songs and ceremonies “to defuse hostility and check antisocial behaviour,” to “reduce both social and personal stress,” or to release repressed frustrations “as a kind of communal psychological medicine” (1993: 53–54). Piersen also examines similar elements of satirical resistance and self-healing in African American slave songs. Such satire would have likely been dismissed by slave owners or nineteenth-century readers as “a resistance too civilized to notice” (Piersen 1993: 53), because understandings of humor were very different at the time.

When considering humor historically, it is crucial to distinguish between satire – the cultivated expression of wit – and laughter, the spontaneous vocal response to humor. Historically, in Western Europe, wit (l’esprit), or the repartee of educated upper classes, was valorized, whereas open laughter was devalued and dismissed until the twentieth century, as evidenced for instance, in the history of art, where laughter is largely missing for centuries. Plato, for instance, considered laughter ugly and feared its power to undermine authority and overthrow the state. The eighteenth century held a similarly dim view of laughter: audible laughter, associated with the lower classes, was considered ugly and primal, a sign of loss of control and intellectual deficiency. This misoglast (laughter-hating) attitude only worsened in the nineteenth century. To exemplify, in his treatise The Philosophy of Laughter and Smiling (1875), Vasey describes laughter as “hideous and idiotic,” as well as “maniacal,” “degrading and vicious” – a sign of mental instability, moral corruption, and turpitude (Vasey 1875: 125, 153, 79). Notably, Dracula’s villainous cackle corresponds with Vasey’s maniacal and hideous laughter, and reflects the Victorian fear of laughter.

Anthropologists, explorers and missionaries of the Victorian period therefore often drew on laughter to demote Africans as subordinate beings. In various cases, writers may have intentionally omitted any allusions to Africans laughing, because it was believed that nonwestern peoples “have not yet entered into the laughing stage of humanity” (Vasey 1875: 49). In other instances, conflating ridicule with sentimentalism, Africans were downgraded to a dependent childlike status, precisely because of their laughter: “[t]hey are just like children … always either laughing or quarrelling … good-natured and passionate … the intelligence of an average negro about equal to that of a European child of ten years old” (Henty et al. 1895: 118). Aggressive humor in the form of shaming ridicule was routinely deployed to mock African customs and behaviours and to disparage and dehumanize African peoples, so as to deprive them of rights. This association between laughter and primitiveness, and the role of ridicule as means of social control, continued well into the twentieth century. In the United States, jokes, caricatures, or Black minstrel shows manifestly functioned to subordinate African Americans. In Africa, an interesting example is the famous 1962 “Tanganyika Laughter Epidemic.” Though it seems incredible, this “epidemic disease” was a real event of “considerable public health importance” at the time (Rankin and Philip 1963: 167). To clarify, soon after Tanzania (formerly known as Tanganyika) gained independence in 1961, uncontrollable laughter mysteriously took over and spread throughout the rural population for 18 months. Though the epidemic’s causes remain unknown, doctors at the time largely explained this strange behaviour as Tanzanians’ inability to control themselves in light of changing social conditions, thus implicitly alluding to their incapability for self-government. In their report, Rankin and Philip repeatedly remark that no “literate and relatively sophisticated members of society have been attacked” by the laughing “mass hysteria,” hinting that, without colonial intervention and education, uneducated populations will remain “susceptible” to such “culturally determined diseases” as uncontrollable laughter (1963: 167–70).

Most intriguing in colonial texts, however, are the various ambiguous examples of Africans parodying Europeans. To illustrate, Clapperton writes about an African performing “the caricature of a white man” taking snuff (Piersen 1993: 59); Stanley, about the “ludicrous spectacle” of an African guide pompously strutting around with an umbrella (Headley and Johnson 1890: 342); and Macbrair, about the “amusingly ridiculous” scene of African women play-acting White in a mirror (Macbrair 1861: 381). It is often unclear how to interpret these parodic performances. On the one hand, these writers seem to be ridiculing Africans’ attempts at passing or gently tolerating their childish colonial mimicry. On the other hand, these parodies – as mockeries of colonizers’ behavior – may be considered forms of resistance or transgression, wherein Africans, with “contemptuous amusement,” “ridicule and censure” European colonizers (Piersen 1993: 58–59). Certainly, this ambiguity reflects the double-voiced, “double-accented, double-styled hybrid construction of parody” (Bakhtin and Holquist 1981: 30). Concomitantly, it evokes Bakhtin’s notion of carnival, or a comic social inversion, “the suspension of all hierarchical rank” in a “temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and the established order” (Bakhtin 1984: 10). However, just as in Rabelais’ time, carnival was authorized and legalized in official feast days, celebrations, and ceremonies, these examples of colonial parody reflect “an authorized transgression of norms” (Hutcheon 1995: 74).

Humor and parody in Africa today: from censorship to subvertising

Unlike in the Victorian period, in the present day, laughter is celebrated and authorized, associated with health, happiness, and social welfare. For doctors, laughter lowers blood pressure, boosts immunity, or releases beneficial hormones; for psychologists, it reduces stress, eases fear and anxiety, or increases coping and resilience; and for social scientists, it strengthens relationships, defuses conflict, or promotes group bonding. Concomitantly, literary scholars acclaim satire’s social justice potential: be it as an “offensive weapon” (Speier [1975] 1998: 1354), a “powerful agent of reconstruction,” “reform,” and “sociomoral reparations” (Bloom and Bloom 1979: 68, 17, 26), or as “a culture jamming … repurposing, deconstructing or hijacking mass culture” (Day 2011: 159).

However, as the above historical examples emphasize, humor is always situational; that is, it is always related to a specific culture, context, and target audience. In certain African contexts, humor is not celebrated; on the contrary, it is censored. In Rwanda for instance, there is much skepticism towards humor, because disparaging and aggressive forms of humor were deployed in genocidal propaganda to shame, denigrate, and dehumanize Tutsis (e.g., in the Kangura magazine or on the RTML radio station). Today, ironically, this distrust of humor is deployed by the current regime as a means of social control and censorship. Cracking a political joke could land a comic in jail or possibly worse. To clarify, using the labels Hutu, Tutsi, or Twa, even jokingly, is considered the crime of “divisionism.” Similarly, disputing events related to 1994, or related to the government’s role post-1994, may be considered the crime of “genocide negationism” or “historical revisionism” – all crimes punishable by prison sentences. Thus, humor, potentially dangerous, is often (self-)censored in Rwanda, as it may be in other repressive regimes.

Despite possible censorship, a survey of postcolonial African literature yields a wide variety of satirical works, such as the anticolonial novels of Mongo Beti, Ferdinand Oyono, and Bernard Dadie, the political plays of Wole Soyinka and Femi Osofisan, the essays of Saro-Wiwa, or the poetry of p’Bitek, to cite a few. However, many of the allusions in these texts quickly become obsolete and point to the difficulties of marketing politically motivated texts to a global audience. Even in the case of renowned writer Chinua Achebe, in comparison to Things Fall Apart (1958), the more polemical sequels of his African Trilogy are very rarely read. Similarly, although Mariama Bâ’s So Long a Letter (1989) and Flora Nwapa’s One Is Enough ([1981] 1992) both tackle the thorny issue of polygamy, Nwapa’s satirical feminist critique is very rarely read in comparison to Bâ’s emotional struggle for survival. Moreover, the most recent humorous treatment of polygamy and arranged marriage, Lola Shoneyin’s The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives (2010), is much more gentle in its humor, evoking the American TV show Sister Wives. Conspicuously, in current African diasporic literature, parody is emerging as a marketable form of humor – perhaps because of its more recognizable cultural referents. For instance, Chris Abani’s GraceLand (2004) features a Nigerian Elvis Presley; Alain Mabanckou’s African Psycho (2007) perverts Ellison’s original, and Bernardine Evaristo’s Blonde Roots (2009) brilliantly imitates Alex Haley’s saga Roots as well as an impressive array of intertextual sources to address the issue of slavery.

All of the above examples emphasize the difficulties of capturing humor in written form in ways that are recognizable in a global publishing marketplace. Humor, an oral, spontaneous, and contextual performance, is much more suited to such genres such as theater, stand-up comedy, or online interaction than it is to the privileged form of the novel. Indeed, stand-up comedy is booming throughout Africa, with Nigeria’s Basketcase, Kenya’s Redykyulass, or South Africa’s Trevor Noah, Loyiso Gola, or Kagiso Lediga, to cite but a few examples. In South Africa in particular, the stand-up comedy scene is flourishing. Associated with South Africa’s trendy urban youth, it reflects the upward mobility, ethnic and racial intermixing, and social engagement of the post-Apartheid generation. Scholars also emphasize the role of stand-up comedy in sublimating violence, reconciling racial and ethnic differences, and in reconfiguring gender roles: “young men who were throwing rocks at the police under Apartheid, are now deploying wit from a stage” (Seirlis 2011: 516). Yet again, however, grasping contemporary South African stand-up comedy often requires intimate and immediate understanding of South African politics, current events, and cultural references. Moreover, comedians such as Tsepiso Nzayo routinely perform and code-switch in various languages in the same performance. In order to gain recognition in the West, or go viral on YouTube, comedians must perform in English and feature issues that are accessible to western audiences. Often, like the African diasporic writers mentioned above, parodies or skits with western referents are popular means of getting hits on YouTube. As a case in point, Trevor Noah, arguably the most recognizable South African comedian in the West, largely gained his reputation because he capitalized on the more translatable issue of race, first in his show “That’s Racist” and then on tour in the West. On YouTube, it is clear that Noah’s top-ranking sketches are intertexual and parodic – his top videos satirize Oprah Winfrey, California surfing chicks, Black Americans, and Hitler.

To conclude, let us consider the surging role of humor in current social media. From entertaining YouTube performances of “How to Write about Africa” to offensive jokes such as “Tutsi Crush,” most of the humor today circulates online, often in the form of satire and parody that quotes the media and culture around us. Amber Day, who has analyzed the dissident role of humor in US political debates, suggests that this “pull towards the ironic” emerges largely as a response to the “manufactured quality of everyday life” (2011: 3). Day’s study spotlights the “ironic authenticity” of current forms of humour or “irony in the form of sincerity” (2011: 24–33). This irony counters the pervasive sentimentalism to which I have alluded throughout this paper, or the “posey earnestness, protesting-too-much religiosity and beyond New Age solipsism” that floods our inboxes and Facebook feeds (Hirschorn and Purdy 1999: 29). Although Day is concerned with humor in US politics, her brief discussion of “subvertising” – or subversive forms of advertising, specifically “parody ads antithetical to consumer culture” (2011: 160) – is pertinent as a number of “subvertisements” related to Africa have gone viral in the past few years. For instance, in the Water Is Life “FWP” campaign (2012), “Africans” (in this case Haitians) bemoan “first world problems,” such as unheated car seats, blocked Wi-Fi, or unwanted pickles, to call attention to the “real problem” of water scarcity. The ad’s ironic reversal of victimhood cleverly reframes the usual depiction of Africans as childlike dependents and of westerners as laudable saviors. Similarly, instead of relying on conventional pathos-laden images of suffering Africans, World Vision Australia (2010) memed an Old Spice commercial to draw attention to global poverty. Likewise, a World Vision UK campaign (2013) parodied the US Shopping Channel to draw attention to the plight of child slavery. Of course, despite their clever tactics, these campaigns are parasitically linked with the modes of discourse they are critiquing. Less-than-subversive, these advertisements are still selling a product; they still harness western guilt, and they still replicate social differentials. They do not teach us anything about Haiti, scarcity, or child-slavery; on the contrary, they blur the lines between consumerism, humanitarianism, and rights issues. Lastly, while these ad tactics now appear antigeneric and antinormative, their poetics of contradiction will eventually become canonical.

So, what is the punchline? Clearly, these subvertisements are a joke – they cannot teach human rights in any complexity. Yet, as “right-bytes” on the information highway, they are not meant to be didactic human rights reports. Their audience is also not the scholar, the activist, or the rights victim – it is the casual Web-browser or the rights neophyte who might otherwise never willingly engage with issues such as water scarcity. Joking aside, then, like the many examples of humor discussed in this chapter, these subvertisements aim to both draw awareness to rights violations as well as to criticize the negative discourses that shape them; moreover, they work to recontextualize these discourses, both on an aesthetic and cognitive level. Intriguingly, much like Wainaina’s “How to Write about Africa,” ads like “FWP” engage with, eschew, and reframe the sentimental humanitarian representation of Africans that has existed since the developments of rights discourse and the sentimental novel. So maybe these ads are no joke after all. Or maybe, as George Orwell reminds us, “each joke is a tiny revolution” (1968: 284).