As an upshot, I identify in Orwell’s words many bad habits in my own writing, and I hone the edge of this new awareness on the whetstone of my students’ work. In the classroom I ask, “Why?” or “What does that actually mean?” at every opportunity, and these mental calisthenics benefit my own writing. However, I do secretly fear I am developing a screechy tick about economy of language, and unfortunately many students shrink from my zeal.
Orwell believed insincere language was corroding modern English because political language, which can only be understood as conscious attempts to muddle the truth or worse, was infectious and self-perpetuating. This decay springs from jargon, which destroys clarity and precision, and euphemism, which numbs visceral reactions to concrete actualities. Dead and maimed children become ‘collateral damage,’ torture becomes ‘enhanced interrogation,’ kidnapping becomes ‘rendition,’ arbitrary arrests and persecution become ‘enhanced security,’ human beings become ‘cockroaches.’ In Orwellian terms, modern English is a dangerous sham.
Rwanda is no stranger to jargon. Colonialism, imperialism, and the state post-independence have all relied on jargon. Violent and repressive policies require jargon because, as Orwell notes, precise language evokes graphically disturbing mental images. When imperialists, for example, spoke honestly, the effect of their words is chilling to contemporary ears. In the introduction to his book When Victims Become Killers, Mahmood Mamdani excerpts a passage from the German military publication Der Kämpf describing the violent suppression of the Herero population in German Southwest Africa at the hands of General Lothar von Trotha:
No efforts, no hardships were spared in order to deprive the enemy of his last reserves of resistance; like a half-dead animal he was hunted from water-hole to water-hole until he became a lethargic victim of the nature of his own country. The waterless Omaheke was to complete the work of the German arms: the annihilation of the Herero people.
Before Southwest Africa, Trotha had experience crushing resistance in German East Africa, including Rwanda. The excerpt’s brutal imagery of the Herero’s extermination is shocking to today’s reader, but it still relies on a common trick of political language. The Herero population was sub-human, described as a “half-dead animal” which was hunted by the German military, as if the Schutztruppe were on safari.
Today colonialism’s residue still fouls Africa. The stench now wafts from development aid, international financial instruments, propped-up autocrats, and unfair trade conditions. Even a cursory reading of reports from some of these foreign organizations reveals an unsettling reliance on meaningless pretense. For a pointed satire of this problem, see here. This affected language is designed to bolster an organization’s authority, but I think it makes them sound ridiculous. Basic materials, stuff in other words, become ‘modalities,’ do or enact becomes ‘operationlize,’ detail becomes ‘granularity,’ and so on. The important peculiarities of everyday work in Rwanda and other African states become obscured by this fluffy self-important jargon, while African solutions to African problems remain undervalued and dependency persists. Old urges have simply been rebranded in technocratic gobbledygook.
In my classroom, the Cambridge exams give students the opportunity to sharpen their mental defenses against such nonsense. I can only continue working with students to emphasize the necessity of quality writing, and more importantly, honest thought.
