Adebowale Oriku

A couple of weeks ago, while I was driving to Thingamajig in the town I live in England, listening to my favourite station, BBC radio 4 - the highbrow, genteel, and sometimes recherché, grey in the BBC’s vast stable - a middle-aged presenter had begun to wax morbid. He had told listeners to call in with every sort of -cide word that came to their minds: From genocide to matricide to fratricide to regicide and so on.

People had supplied a number of -cides. Somewhere along the line the presenter, a proud family man, had realised that no one had called in with what describes the crime of a man who kills his wife. The presenter himself did not know this and somehow at the end of the programme some thirty minutes later, no one had called in with the lexical signifier for wife-killing.

I knew even before the presenter finished the first sentence of his interactive request for the elusive word for wife-killing what it is. It is uxoricide. For me it was simple. If ‘uxorious’ describes a man that loves his wife to the point of self-emasculation, you only need to put -cide smack behind the root morpheme, uxori-. If it was in a classroom in a primary or secondary school, I would have been hopping on one foot, preening, thrusting my finger up, gulping for air, yodelling cocksurely: “Sir I know the answer. Sir I know the answer;” with an endpiece of unspoken conceit: ‘I know the word that everyone in the classroom does not know.’

I left secondary school almost three decades ago, and over the years I have grown less wordproud and truly less wordy than, say, in my freshman year. Even then if I was minded to call the presenter, after giving him the shorthand for wife-killing, I would have played devil’s advocate and asked why he had not thought it wise to ask his listeners for the -cide word for husband-killing. Wives kill their husbands too, don’t they? In these days of degenderification, there is no reason why what is sauce for the goose shouldn’t be sauce for the gander. Andrycide? Well.

I had briefly wondered, though, what the word was for friend-killing. Now it was a matter of course that your enemy might easily come to grief with you holding the smoking gun, but there is no doubt that the urge to kill a friend is sometimes as strong as the desire to put the kibosh on your enemy’s life. As we all know, few friendships meet Aristotle’s sublime benchmark.

Friendicide? Oh. How original. Lots of people must have been searching for the right word for friend-killing too. I saw later that an urban dictionary vocabularist describes ‘friendicide’ as the act of deleting a friend from your Facebook page. As it happens, I have not been completely won over by Facebook. And thanks to a slanguage expert, spousicide may as well do for the act of a spouse - man or woman - who kills the other. 

But while driving and listening to the unusually ghoulish radio presenter, another -cide word had superscribed itself on the silliness of ‘friendicide’ or 'spousicide,' a more serious word, a more thoughtful word. Senicide; or the lesser-used Geriatricide. Senicide has a long, if marginal, history. Ancient Greece and Rome may have done away with a number of elderly men for reasons they considered utilitarian. One of the more notable of the few recorded ones happened on the island of Sardinia when men seventy years old and over were sacrificed by their sons to the god Cronus.

Robert Mugabe had brought the word senicide to my mind on that rather halcyon morning that was shattered by the presenter’s flight of insalubrious fancy. I wondered: Isn’t there anyway a younger generation of Zimbabweans could do away with the octogenarian, why don’t the youths sacrifice the old man to an ancient Zimbabwe god, a maleficent one for that matter? On a more mundane level, not once have I nursed the unachievable wish to wring the puckered neck of the aged Zimbabwean, help rid his people of that piece of plaguey senility.

Now enough black humour. Yes, black humour indeed. The germ for this piece sprang with the news that the man who masterminded the Rwandan genocide has been sentenced to life, and some of his confederates put away for a long time. Theoneste Bagosora, a former military brass hat in Rwanda was found guilty for having committed genocidal crimes in 1994. Although the people of Rwanda are still admirably devising ways to get on with their lives and the wholesale slaughter is now receding into an historical past, there was still a vague feeling that justice was being done when sentence was passed on Bagosora and others. But then, however much the intercalation of time, the story of the Rwandan genocide will never lose its plaintive strains.  

After the Second World War, with the Jewish holocaust presenting the precedent, genocide was codified as a crime. The word genocide has always been problematic. Scholars have mentioned its inchoate composition. The fundamental definition of genocide is ‘the deliberate killing people of a certain race.’ A Jewish man - Raphael Lemkin - had coined the word, against the background of the holocaust. This may be why the word seemed at first glance too precise. And although since the early days, the crime of genocide incorporates the killing of people from another ethnic, religious, or national collective, the word is still being deconstructed and redefined.

Millions of the citizens of the former Soviet Union died under the aegis of Josef Stalin, but it could not have crossed anyone’s mind to try Stalin for anything before he died three years after the genocide was recognised as a crime. And Mao Zedong of China, who died in 1976. In their influential book on Mao, Jon Halliday and Jung Chang tot up the number of people who were murdered during Mao’s so-called Cultural Revolution at 3 million. Then there was Pol Pot in Cambodia. The skull-built shrines were monuments to the banal-looking man’s evilness.

African rulers and their henchmen have also often got away with murder. Idi Amin’s Herodian guts should have rotted in a prison instead of the late-unlamented ogre being featherbedded in a hospital in Saudi Arabia. What he did to his critics and people from other tribes in his native Uganda is now part of the distasteful corpus of modern African folklore. In the earlier part of his reign, Mugabe had committed what can only be described as genocide when thousands of Ndebeles, the ethnic group that his political opponent, Joshua Nkomo, belonged were slaughtered. Or is it ethnocide?

Possibly Politicide. One of the ramified meanings of politicide is the deliberate and systematic destruction of a group of people who commonly belong to a political movement or party. Which is what Mugabe has been doing since he assumed power in 1980. What Nigeria’s PDP is trying to do to other political parties, especially during Olusegun Obasanjo’s time, is also politicide: the neutralisation of political parties or groups. And curiously enough, Israel too has been accused of politicide by the Israeli author, Baruch Kimmerling. In his book Politicide: Sharon’s War Against the Palestinians, Baruch accuses former Israeli prime minister and the state of Israel itself of suppressing Palestinian’s people’s right to self-determination and mere existence.

And let me quickly slip in a word that looks like politicide in here. Policide: Since the word polis means ‘city’ or ‘town’ depending on the context and user - policide is defined as wilful annihilation of a city or town, or even village. Obasanjo now stands guilty of policide, seeing how he programmed gun-crazed uniformed zombies to go and raze Odi town to the ground, killing several hundred people. Civicide has also been suggested for the kind of crime Obasanjo committed in Odi, although I’d rather use civicide in a different way. I’d define it as the killing of civic pride and civic responsibility in the citizens by the kind of governments and ‘leaders’ we have always been cursed with in Nigeria. 

And that brings me to the word that I think should be used for what the heinous men I have mentioned above did – and which Mugabe is still doing. Homicide? Well, that is a good candidate. After all when a tyrant like Hitler kills ten million people it is homicide on a grand scale, a hecatomb. Even then the word homicide is very gender-determined because it only implies the killing of a man or men.

Democide then. In 1994, the political scientist, RJ Rummel, came up with the term in his book Death by Government. He wants democide to be the holonym for the multitudinous sins of genocide, mass murder and politicide. This is not a complex coinage, actually, because we all know the word demos means people in its Greek original. The killing of men and women on any scale should of course be called democide. Here is a sentence from the book: ‘When under the command of higher authorities, soldiers force villagers into a field and then machine gun them.’ Does this not recall what Obasanjo sent his togged-up thugs to do in Odi?

However, in spite of the repleteness of the term, Rummel introduces the clause of intentionality and non-intentionality to what should constitutes democide. For instance, he says ‘When a group armed by the government for this purpose turn the teachers and students out of their school, line up those of a particular tribe and shoot them, it is surely democide.

The above-cited circumspection is not necessary. When Emperor Bokassa of Central African Republic sent his bloodthirsty foot soldiers to go and massacre schoolchildren demonstrating peacefully, the gun-toting automatons did not care to ask which tribes any of children were from before they mowed them down.

Hairsplitting aside, most deaths that occur under the watch of an oppressive or repressive or corrupt or inept government is democide. The cholera deaths in Zimbabwe, for which Mugabe is the proximate cause, are well and truly democide. Most of the deaths on Nigeria’s roads can only be described as democide. The majority of deaths in Nigerian hospitals is democide, the kind of deaths a doctor friend of mine in Lagos describes as avoidable. Nigerian Police’s senseless and frequent shooting of innocent Nigerians is democide. The 500-odd people who died during the Jos riots were victims of democide. Democide is the obverse consequence of every act of thievery and graft committed by Nigeria’s leaders. Every death that proceeds from impoverishment is democide.

I shall end this essay on a rather light note, though, with the thought I had in the car of the wry facebookish ‘friendicide.’ I would like to impart it to anyone who might find it in his heart to murder his best friend that he would be charged to court for philicide. Or is it amicide? As we are all aware, Latin lends itself to legalese than Greek.

Robot  # 1 | 22.12.2008 06:39

There is a little to choose between Democide and Genocide. Or is there more than alittle?...Read the full article.