Creating Genocide

Creating Genocide August 12, 2015

Emmanuel Katongole (A Future for Africa, 98-101) argues, as others have, that the racial division behind the Rwandan genocide was forged during Western colonization. “Before the colonial occupation of Rwanda,” he writes, “the Hutu and Tutsi were not ‘clearly distinct and rigidly separated ethnic groups.’” The distinction existed, but it was fluid and based more on economic status and power relations.

Europeans treated the difference as “an essential racial difference; one that reflected ontological superiority and inferiority, and one that came to play out historically as the conflict between invaders and natives.” The Tutsi were a civilizing race, “Caucasians in black skin” who had originated in the north. One writer described them as being from “the semi-Shem-Hamitic of Ethiopia . . . Christians of the greatest antiquity.”

This distorted biblical mythology “became the unquestioned canon governing the decisions of German and later Belgian colonialists in the administration of Rwanda. The story played a particularly crucial role during the reforms of 1927-1936, through which Belgian colonial power turned the Hamitic racial supremacy into an institutional fact, by making it the basis for reforms and changed in political, social, and cultural relations. The reforms were capped with a census that classified every citizen as either Tutsi, Hutu, or Twa, and issued each group an identity card reflecting one’s race. In this way, Rwandan society not only became racialized – the key institutions of Rwanda’s social, cultural, religious, and political life came to be dominated by the Tutsi, who as the Hamitic assumption went, were ‘the natural born leaders.’” As one scholar put it, “the Belgians had made ‘ethnicity’ the defining feature of Rwandan existence.” This provided a rationale for the colonial presence in Africa. Groups so deeply divided by race needed the paternal guidance of wise Europeans.

In this case at least, “tribalism” isn’t a holdover of ancient patterns of social life, but a modern creation. The conflict between Hutu and Tutsi “is neither grounded in natural differences nor naturally arises out of differences in their respective cultural histories. Rather, it is the effect of a particular history of state formation” that depends on “myths, political assumptions, and stories,” a creation of a European political imaginary.


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