Alex Dauge-Roth, associate professor of French and francophone studies, gives the Kroepsch Lecture on March 18, 2015. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

What shapes a meaningful conversation with people whose sense of self has been fractured by witnessing the horrors of genocide? In such conversations, who controls what is meaningful and worthy of discussion, remembrance and action?

Alexandre Dauge-Roth, recipient of �ֲ���ý’ 2015 Kroepsch Award for Excellence in Teaching, devoted his Kroepsch lecture on March 18 to a thorough analysis of those questions — specifically as they pertain to his decade of engaging �ֲ���ý students with survivors and their stories of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda.

And whether or not he ever used the words “power” and “ownership” during his late-afternoon lecture, those concepts were the floor his talk stood on.

How do power relationships play out in the dialogue between a trauma survivor and that person’s interlocutor? Who owns the survivor’s story, the space in which it’s heard and its retellings? Most important, what is the interlocutor’s ethical and civic obligation to the survivor?

Associate professor in French and francophone studies, Dauge-Roth is internationally known for his research into personal narratives from the genocide, work represented by his 2010 book, Writing and Filming the Genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda: Dismembering and Remembering Traumatic History (Lexington Books).

Dozens of students, colleagues and friends offered a warm welcome to this scholar and teacher who, in his 10th year at �ֲ���ý, “received many, many nominations for the Kroepsch,” as Dean of the Faculty Matt Auer said in introducing Dauge-Roth.

Recipients of the award are nominated by current students and recent graduates, and the honoree is selected by a panel of recent recipients. Auer quoted a nominator who had taken part in Dauge-Roth’s Short Term course in Rwanda. That person praised Dauge-Roth for teaching not only academic aspects of the genocide, but the “importance of being understanding, nonjudgmental and sensitive with the [Rwandans] we worked with.” (Another nominator drew laughter by calling Dauge-Roth “the thesis adviser I needed, not the thesis adviser I deserved.”)

Dauge-Roth’s talk was titled The Transformative Power of Literary and Testimonial Encounters. Revealing a mentality scrupulous in both its morality and its attention to the ramifications of an idea, the hour-long talk traced an arc from Dauge-Roth’s own studies, in his native Switzerland and at the University of Michigan, to the thinking behind signature courses that he introduced at �ֲ���ý.

Both courses, “Documenting the Genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda” and “Learning with the Orphans of the Genocide in Rwanda,” were driven by interaction between Dauge-Roth’s students and genocide survivors. The latter, a Short Term unit, has twice brought students to Rwanda.

Together, Sarah Bravmann ’12 and Alexis Mutimukunda face a genocide exhibit of human skulls at the Ntarama Memorial in Rwanda during the Short Term course “Learning with Orphans of the Genocide in Rwanda” in 2009 led by Alex Dauge-Roth, associate professor of French and francophone studies.

As he designed these courses, he recounted, a central issue quickly emerged. “What are the informative — but more importantly the potentially transformative — places, voices and roles, that we as an academic community are willing to offer to members of another community whose history we are studying?”

“My hope was that a polyvocal and decentered mode of teaching would open up challenging spaces of dialogue, inviting students to re-evaluate the borders of academia; to reflect on their civic role when exposed to histories of pain; and to question the understanding, circulation and production of knowledge about others.”

Inspired by research conducted for his graduate degrees, notably his work at Michigan with the personal testimony of people living with AIDS in France, Dauge-Roth focused on the literature of survivors of the genocide — biographies, diaries, oral history and film.

“Interactions with survivors of genocide is not only about the past and grievance but also about sharing laughter within the present despite of it all,” says Dauge-Roth. Here, �ֲ���ý students and survivors of the genocide in Rwanda gather for music and fellowship during Short Term in 2013. The survivors live at Tubeho, a collective of houses in Kigali where orphans of the genocide live in reconstituted families.

It was his dissertation director at Michigan, Professor of Comparative Literature Ross Chambers, who articulated the idea that reading survivors’ literature can’t be a passive act: Listeners, Dauge-Roth learned, need to “develop a critical self-awareness regarding their own agency and inadequacy as they respond to survivors’ stories.”

As he created his Rwanda-based courses for �ֲ���ý, Dauge-Roth drew on three consequential lessons from his graduate work. First, trauma causes what he calls a “fracture within the self,” a break between one’s pre- and post-trauma selves that must be negotiated.

Second, that negotiation is not just personal and internal, but social and cultural. Traumas such as AIDS or the Rwandan genocide become, or reflect, social preoccupations. So society dictates the terms of the discourse around them — often to the detriment of the traumatized, as in the bleak early years of the AIDS crisis, when sufferers were branded as “social parasites.”

“Third, I learned that testimonial literature forces on us a political discussion about the social representation of suffering and our civic role in its unfolding and aftermath,” Dauge-Roth said. Crucially, in the words of literature professor Antoine Compagnon, “what is at stake for us as readers is our willingness to be disturbed by, and ultimately transformed by, our encounter with another’s experience.”

In the audience at Alex Dauge-Roth’s Kroepsch Lecture were, from left, departmental colleague Kirk Read; Katherine Dauge-Roth, Alex’s wife; and their son, Aymeric Dauge-Roth. (Phyllis Graber-Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

As Dauge-Roth said in describing the Short Term course in Rwanda, his hope was to create “a space of encounter that would allow survivors to bear witness, on their own terms, and challenge us, their interlocutors, to explore what it means to be a listening community; and what responses we must forge as their painful histories are passed on to us.”

So what does it take to be a listening community? Dauge-Roth offered three tenets (“I’m French — everything goes by threes,” he joked). First, it requires that we move past pity and compassion, “since these are just part of the strategy for maintaining the status quo.” Second, it means incorporating into our own histories the history of pain that we encounter.

Third, it means that listeners “see themselves as indirect witnesses, whose responsibility is to develop a critical self-awareness regarding their own agency and inadequacy as they respond to survivors’ stories. Learning with the survivors” — not merely from; a key distinction for Dauge-Roth — becomes an “ethical gesture” that makes possible reciprocal relationships between survivors’ histories and our own.

“These courses have taught me and my students,” he concluded, “that listening to testimonies bearing witness to the genocide questions both our willingness to confront disconcerting human behaviors and our sense of cultural hospitality — when hospitality is understood as a transformative interruption of one’s self.”

“Facing the disturbing experience of genocide demands that we identify what role we play, and ought to play differently, in the social recognition and circulation of the histories of pain that community partners share.”

View a video of Alex Dauge-Roth’s Kroepsch Lecture:

Murambi Genocide Memorial, Rwanda. (Photograph by Aliza Luft)

Writing for the blog Political Violence @ a Glance, Aliza Luft ’06 probes the question of what led some Hutu to “evade participation and help Tutsi” during the genocide in Rwanda, which began 20 years ago this month.

And why, she asks, did some Hutu who killed Tutsi also, at other points, save Tutsi lives?

Luft examines this notion of “risky defections”

While it’s tempting to divide the actors of genocide into perpetrators and victims, “things are not usually so neat,” she writes. “We tend to think of genocides as black and white, or in the case of Rwanda, as Hutu vs. Tutsi. In reality, the truth is much more complicated.”

She writes:

Central to the way social scientists understand who participates in a genocide is the notion of dehumanization — the perception among killers that their victims are less than human. However, interviews often show how some Hutu civilians had nuanced perceptions of their victims, which led them to save some Tutsi, even as they continued killing others….[It] seems as if the process of dehumanization is actually an outcome of participation in killing rather than a precursor to it.

Aliza Luft ’06 is a Ph.D. candidate at University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Luft is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and a visiting research scholar at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

examines another act of “high-risk defection” from support for political violence.

In 1941 in France, the Assembly of Cardinals and Archbishops decided to formally support Vichy’s anti-Semitic policies, with one cardinal saying that “no one more than I recognizes the evil that Jews have done to France.”

Ten months later, some of those same clergy deviated from their support for Vichy France to help save Jews, despite the high personal and institutional costs associated with defection.

“I hypothesize that critical events, social networks and pre-existing ideologies informed French bishops’ deviations from the church,” Luft says.

At �ֲ���ý, Luft designed her own major in genocide studies, an interdisciplinary combining sociology, history and religion. Her �ֲ���ý honors thesis examined the relationship between Holocaust education and building social capital.

The 2013 Phillips Fellows, Asha Mohamud ’15 and Rachel Baumann ’14. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

“The next world is already on its way. College education in the U.S. faces the urgent task of getting ready for it,” �ֲ���ý President Charles F. Phillips told the incoming class during Convocation 1959.

Intersections between culture and medicine drew Asha Mohamud to Tanzania.

Phillips was referring specifically to Asia, which was just beginning its ascent to today’s global influence. But �ֲ���ý’ fourth president was getting at a broader notion as well: the educational importance of understanding cultures different from one’s own.

Since 1999, Phillips Student Fellowships have put that concept into action. Phillips Fellows create outstanding international or cross-cultural projects involving research, community-engaged learning or career exploration.

The program supports immersion in another culture, opportunities for intense meaningful work and unique prospects for intellectual and personal growth.

Meet Phillips Fellows Rachel Baumann ’14 and Asha Mohamud ’15.

The story of her grandparents’ escape from the Holocaust drew Rachel Baumann to Europe.

The student fellowships, along with faculty fellowships and professorships, are supported by the Phillips Endowment Program, a suite of awards, honors and opportunities funded by a $9 million bequest to �ֲ���ý by Phillips and his wife, Evelyn Minard Phillips.

“The fellowships take students out of their comfort zone in ways that are personally transformative, and prepare them to be citizens of the world,” says Kerry O’Brien, assistant dean of the faculty. “They really embody the mission of the college on several levels: educating the whole person, honoring diversity, cultivating intellectual discovery and civic action, and preparing future leaders.”

In 2013, seeking to understand experiences outside the U.S. that had changed the lives of people close to them, two �ֲ���ý students sought and were awarded Phillips Fellowships.

Fatima Sacko ‘17 of New York City models an outfit during the Inside Africa Fashion Show held Nov. 8, 2013. (Sarah Crosby/�ֲ���ý College)

Celebrating the depth and variety of African culture and art, �ֲ���ý College presents the third annual Inside Africa Fashion Show at 8 p.m. on Friday, Nov. 8, in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall, 75 Russell St.

The Africana Club, a student group, sponsors the event. It is free and open to the public, but tickets are required, available at . For more information, please contact nkanu@bates.edu.

While previous Inside Africa shows included song and modern-style dance, this year’s goes deeper in those directions and will include traditional dances as well as spoken-word poetry, says event founder Nicole Kanu, a �ֲ���ý junior from Little Rock, Ark.

Too many people see Africa as a single country, she says. “A lot of our participants wanted to see other art forms in the show as a way to emphasize the idea of diversity within Africa.” In addition, this year’s show focuses on fashion as it relates to social justice issues.

And the show is more timely than ever, given the growing African influence in Western fashion — witness J.C. Penney’s engaging of Nigerian designer Duro Olowu as the department store chain’s first seasonal designer in 2012.

This year’s Inside Africa will present 15 to 25 student models showcasing traditional and modern garb from a multitude of nations and walks of life. They will model to music from the country or region they are representing.

In total, about 10 students involved in the show are from Africa or of African descent while about 15 others are of Asian, Latin/Spanish and other European descent. Kanu, whose parents are Nigerian, started Inside Africa her first year at �ֲ���ý and looks forward to passing responsibility for the event along to underclassmen so they can make it their own.

“The first-years and sophomores are heavily invested in it and want to tell their own stories,” she says. As a rhetoric major, Kanu sees her role as being a person who renders the cultural themes of the event into artistic terms that both engage and inform.

Kanu hopes local residents will make a point of attending Inside Africa. “We welcome community members, especially considering the presence of the Somali community in Lewiston,” she says. Somali culture and fashion will have a place in the show.

By using fashion to shift the conversation toward cultural celebration, the Africana Club hopes to entice social scientists and fashionistas alike.

Albie Sachs.

South African human rights activist Justice Albert Sachs, a foe of apartheid and key player in overturning South Africa’s ban on gay marriage, offers a talk at �ֲ���ý at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 24, in the Edmund S. Muskie Archives, 70 Campus Ave.

Part of the Harward Center for Community Partnerships’ Civic Forum Series, Sachs’ talk is titled Ubuntu: An African Contribution to the Universality of Human Rights. Admission is open to the public at no cost.

The event is co-sponsored by the Office of Intercultural Education; the Multifaith Chaplaincy; the departments of politics, African American studies, anthropology and sociology; the divisions of social sciences and humanities; the Program in Women and Gender Studies; and the Justice for Women Lecture Series of the University of Maine School of Law.

For more information, please call 207-786-6202.

An African National Congress activist during the apartheid years in South Africa, Sachs went on to play an important role in the creation of the country’s first democratic constitution. He gained international attention again in 2005 as the author of the Constitutional Court’s holding that overturned South Africa’s ban on gay marriage.

In 1955, at the age of 21, Sachs opened a law practice. He represented South Africans charged under racial statutes and security laws, with many of his clients risking the death penalty. As a result of this work, his practice was restricted, he was arrested, and was put in solitary confinement for 168 days without a trial.

Sachs went to England in 1966, later moving to Mozambique to teach law. In 1988, while he was teaching in exile, South African agents planted a bomb in his car. The explosion killed a passer-by and cost Sachs an arm and the vision in one eye.

Though he never quit working against apartheid in exile, the bombing moved him to fully devote himself once again to effecting democracy in South Africa.

With regime change achieved in 1990, Sachs served on the Constitutional Committee and advocated strongly for the inclusion of a Bill of Rights and an independent judiciary, as well as rights to housing, health care and other essentials. In 1994, after the first democratic election, President Nelson Mandela appointed Sachs as a justice in the Constitutional Court.

Sachs led the creation of the 1996 South African post-apartheid constitution and was involved in several landmark rulings for the new country, such as the overturning of the gay marriage ban.

Sachs has traveled all over the world to speak about human rights and how to achieve them in partitioned societies. He juggles his passion for human rights with interests in art and architecture, and had a voice in the design of the Constitutional Court Building and the creation of its art collection.

He has written several books, including The Jail Diary of Albie Sachs (Harvill Press, 1966), published during his time in exile in England but banned in his home country. In 1991, Sachs won the Alan Paton Award for his book Soft Vengeance of a Freedom Fighter (University of California Press). His most recent title is The Strange Alchemy of Life and Law, published by Oxford University Press in 2009.

At �ֲ���ý College’s 2012 Inside Africa Fashion Show, sophomore Nerissa Brobbey models a Togolese boubou dress with matching head scarf. At right, Gulaid Abdullahi wears a traditional ma’awis and kofia hat. Photograph by Simone Schriger ’14/�ֲ���ý College.

Reflecting the influence of African fashion abroad as well as the diversity of the continent’s own apparel, the second annual Inside Africa Fashion Show at �ֲ���ý College starts at 8 p.m. Friday, March 15, in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall, 75 Russell St.

Sponsored by the Africana Club, a student organization, the event is open to the public at no cost. For more information, please contact nkanu@bates.edu.

Some 30 students will model apparel from more than 10 African nations, expanding this year to include Senegal, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Swaziland and Gambia.

The program also includes a Swahili song sung a cappella by members of the Africana Club and two dance numbers — a medley of dance styles from across Africa and a Ghanaian Azonto dance, the upbeat hand-gesture style that went viral in 2011.

“I am inviting �ֲ���ý students and the community to see Africa,” explains organizer Nicole Kanu. A sophomore from Little Rock, Ark., she is the daughter of a Nigerian couple. “Many look at Africa as one country and fail to see that it is a continent that contains many countries, cultures and backgrounds.”

In addition to presenting traditional garb, the show will look at the impacts of African fashion outside the continent. “A lot of clothes in America have African influences,” says Kanu, such as “tribal print” leggings and wildlife-print fabrics that are popular this season.

Inside Africa will “give students a chance to look at their closet and see — ‘hmm, where did this come from? What was the inspiration for this outfit?’ ” she says. “And oftentimes, if you research that designer or that line of clothing, you’ll see that it does stem from African fashion.”

Where last year’s show took the form of a fictionalized grand tour of the continent, this year’s edition will place more weight on fashion facts, says Kanu.

“It’ll be fun, definitely, but it’s meant to be informative and show a dimension of Africa that people don’t normally see here.”

Gilbert Ndahayo.

A Rwandan filmmaker dedicated to producing documentaries about the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, Gilbert Ndahayo visits �ֲ���ý College to show his new film, The Rwandan Night, at 7 p.m. Monday, March 4, in the Keck Classroom (G52), Pettengill Hall, 4 Andrews Road (Alumni Walk).

The event is open to the public at no cost. For more information, please contact adaugero@bates.edu.

The Rwandan Night is the sequel to Ndahayo’s autobiographical piece about the murder of his family, 2012’s Rwanda: Beyond The Deadly Pit, and is the second film in a planned trilogy about the tragic events of 1994.

This 70-minute ethnographic documentary explores the world of the oldest survivor of the genocide against the Tutsis in Rwanda. One night in 2006, the 51-year-old Sakindi bears witness to the genocide. Instead of living alone with the sorrow of losing his parents and other family members, he decides to speak for the first time before a large audience during a commemoration at Mumena Stadium in the capital city of Rwanda.

Ndahayo lost his parents and 52 other family members in the genocide. Today he is a candidate for a master’s degree in fine arts at Columbia University. His films as writer and director include the award-winning Scars of My Days (2007) and Behind This Convent (2008).

You might want to offer this African monkey a bouquet of arrowroot, its favorite snack.

He deserves it: Known as a lesula, the monkey was recently confirmed as a distinct species by Kate Detwiler ’95 and her fellow primate researchers, who gave it the scientific name Cercopithecus lomamiensis.

Say hello to a male of the newly identified species Cercopithecus lomamiensis. Photograph by Maurice Emetshu.

Published in the open-access science journal in 2012, the announcement of the new primate has prompted stories in the and , among many others. It’s only the second new species of African monkey to be confirmed in the past 28 years.

In addition to contributing key genetic data to the research paper, Detwiler is also the article’s corresponding author, meaning she was responsible for squiring the paper through the publication process and responding to inquiries about its results.

The lesula’s path to species-hood began in 2007, when it was noticed by a research team led by famed primate researchers John and Terese Hart, conservation biologists with the Lukuru Wildlife Research Foundation and Yale’s Peabody Museum.

So how do you pronounce “Cercopithecus lomamiensis“? Let Kate Detwiler tell you: /news/files/2013/02/detwiler.mp3

The Hart team was doing a biological inventory in the “heart of the heart of the Congo,” in Detwiler words, when they saw the monkey. Ironically, the animal wasn’t seen in the deepest African bush but in a village in central Congo, where it was leashed to a post as a child’s pet.

Over the next several years, the field researchers headed into the rainforest to observe the monkey and gather the heaps of information needed to prove that it was distinct from the very similar Cercopithecus hamlyni, or owl-faced monkey.

Detwiler and her fellow researchers were able to prove that Cercopithecus lomamiensis is genetically distinct from Cercopithecus hamlyni, the owl-faced monkey, seen here. Photograph by Noel Rowe.

Detwiler entered the picture later, after Hart sent an inquiry to the New York University Molecular Anthropology Laboratory, where she was completing a doctorate, asking for help with genetic testing.

An avid follower of the Harts’ fieldwork, Detwiler couldn’t believe her luck. It was as if Watson and Crick had called asking for a little help with a certain double helix theory.

“I put everything else on hold,” she said.

She did the genetic extractions and sequencing, and soon “realized that at the genetic level, we had something distinct” from C. hemlyni. “It was different, and uniquely different.”

She even allowed herself a shoutout in the lab. “We’ve got a new species!”

Additional evidence came from researchers’ assessments of the monkey’s morphology (its form and appearance).

“Our results,” Detwiler and her fellow researcher wrote, “unambiguously identify the new primate as a distinct species, Cercopithecus lomamiensis.”

While gratified by the media attention (much of it noting the monkey’s distinctive blue buttocks), Detwiler, who studied a similar monkey species for her �ֲ���ý honors thesis, hopes the story will energize efforts to protect the lesula and continue the inventory work that is a prerequisite to conversation efforts.

She has since traveled to the Congo to learn more about the field site and to develop the  collaborations needed for further research, including deployment of remotely activated cameras, known as camera traps.

“On a personal note, just being in the space and landscape of the Congo basin forest, which is so massive and remote, is so exciting,” she said. “On a global scale, it hopefully will excite us to protect the Congo’s unique wildlife and keep these inventories going.

“There are still places in the world that have not been explored, where we can make new discoveries.”

An image from the 2009 �ֲ���ý visit to Rwanda for the course “Learning with the Orphans of the Rwanda Genocide.”

In its story about teaching genocide, International Educator features the �ֲ���ý course “Learning with Orphans of the Rwandan Genocide,” taught by Associate Professor of French Alex Dauge-Roth.

Writer Dana Wilkie frames the challenge of teaching genocide this way: “How does a university program…address the power of political regimes and demagogues bent on inciting the sort of hatred that leads one people to commit atrocities against another?”

Dauge-Roth, who conducts ongoing research in Rwanda and directs the nonprofit , offers an answer by first noting that “we all have defenses that allow us to intellectualize” horrific acts like genocide.

“But when there’s more intimate proximity with the human effects of genocide, the way you relate to such events shifts radically,” he says.

In the case of Dauge-Roth’s course, he and students travel to Rwanda, where students partner with orphans of the 1994 genocide to create oral histories and other documentary resources.

Achieving this kind of “intimate proximity” (which is the title of the article), creates “ways to move on and to create connections and dialogues” to prevent future genocide.

• View story about Dauge-Roth’s course in �ֲ���ý Magazine, Fall 2009.

Lena Sene ’00

Savoy Magazine’s list of the most influential women in corporate America features Lena Sene ’00.

A managing director with Deer Isle Capital, is responsible for overall business development and for the firm’s Africa investment strategy.

Considered an expert on global investing in African nations, Sene in 2011 told a Harvard Business School conference that private-equity investing in Africa requires a more efficient operation than in other markets — more skills, more on-the-ground knowledge and more feasibility and research studies.

Last year, Sene, who is a �ֲ���ý trustee, served as campaign manager for Idrissa Seck, a former Senegal prime minister, during that country’s presidential election, won by Macky Sall.

Sene majored in economics at �ֲ���ý, then earned an M.B.A. from Harvard and a master’s degree in public administration fro mHarvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Born in the U.S., she was raised in Senegal, Russia and Ukraine.

Savoy describes its list as “the most comprehensive and accomplished list of African American Women executives ever assembled in a magazine.”