Making the other a stranger

Othering is the process by which a person or a group is constructed as "other": different, foreign, often inferior, in relation to a norm that the majority does not even name. Skin colour, accent, religion or language become labels that reduce someone to a single identity.

The thinker Edward Said gave this mechanism one of its most famous analyses. In Orientalism, published in 1978, he shows how Western societies manufactured images of the "Orient" in opposition to themselves, an other presented not only as different but as inferior. Britannica counts it among the most influential scholarly books of the 20th century.

Othering often starts small, with a look or a remark. At its extreme, it leads to dehumanization. In Rwanda, in the months before the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi, the newspaper Kangura referred to them as inyenzi, "cockroaches." On December 3, 2003, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda convicted three media leaders of genocide, including the founder of Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines.

Ubuntu does not ask us to erase differences. It refuses to let them become walls. Recognizing others in all their complexity is also a way of protecting ourselves: a society that learns to dehumanize spares no one.