"My story from birth?" Odette Nyiramilimo said.Odette was talking to Philip Gourevitch, an American journalist who was traveling around the world doing different stories. This book is what comes out of his travels to Rwanda over the course of three years. At almost 400 pages long, it is laden with harrowing accounts of the 1994 genocide. I knew I would need time to digest this book. I had time.
"Do you really have time for that?"
I said I had time. (p63)
Gourevitch opened the book with his visit to Nyarubuye, asking himself why he would want to do that. I realized he was preempting my question; I was asking myself whether my decision to read this book meant that I was objectifying the genocide victims for my voyeurism.
"I stepped up into the open doorway of a classroom. At least fifty mostly decomposed cadavers covered the floor. Macheted skulls had rolled here and there. The dead looked like pictures of the dead. They did not smell. They had been killed thirteen months earlier, and they hadn't been moved.
I had never been among the dead before. What to do? Look? Yes. I wanted to see them, I suppose. I didn't need to see them. I already knew, and believed what had happened in Rwanda.
I presume that you are reading this because you desire a closer look, and that you, too, are properly disturbed by your curiosity. Perhaps you hope for some understanding—a moral, or a lesson. But when it comes to genocide, you already know right from wrong. The best reason I have come up with for looking closely into Rwanda's stories is that ignoring them makes me even more uncomfortable about existence and my place in it. The horror, as horror, interests me only insofar as a precise memory of the offense is necessary to understand its legacy." (p15-16, 19, abridged.)
Drivers and Powers
But what drove Rwanda to genocide? Scholars tend to agree that Hutus and Tutsis cannot be properly called distinct ethnic groups. Hutus and Tutsis spoke the same language, followed the same religion, intermarried, intermingled (p47).
Still, there was an old difference between the two groups: Hutus farm and Tutsis herd cattle. Cattle are more valuable, so Tutsi became synonymous with the elite class. When a Tutsi chief (Rwabugiri) ruled precolonial Rwanda in the 19th century, this stratification accelerated. Hutus began to be defined by whatever Tutsis were not, even if no one can really tell the two apart.
Then came the Europeans. This being the heyday of eugenics, "scientists" were too ready to propound baseless hypothesis that exaggerate minutiae physical differences as a divine ordinance towards class structures. One of them was John Speke, who propounded the biblical myth that the Tutsis descended from Ham-son-of-Noah who came from Abyssinia/Ethiopia, and this made them "the superior race" to the native Negroid.
When Germany set up its administrative posts in Rwanda after the death of Rwabugiri, the feuding Tutsi elites used their support to pursue their interests and further subjugates the Hutus. Then when Belgium won Rwanda as a spoil of World War I from the German, the Belgians made the Hutu-Tutsi polarization the basis of their colonial rule. The Hamitic myth served them well. In 1934 the Belgians issued identity cards that label Rwandan as either Hutu (85%) or Tutsi (14%). This allowed them to administer an apartheid state that shuts out Hutus' opportunities for advancement.
When Rwanda gained independence, the overthrow of colonialism also brought down the Tutsis. The Hutu intellectuals "argued for democracy not by rejecting the myth but by embracing it. If Tutsis were foreign invaders, then Rwanda was by rights a nation of the Hutu majority." (p58) This led to a bloody revolution in 1959, which was a precursor to the 1994 genocide.
Still, there was an old difference between the two groups: Hutus farm and Tutsis herd cattle. Cattle are more valuable, so Tutsi became synonymous with the elite class. When a Tutsi chief (Rwabugiri) ruled precolonial Rwanda in the 19th century, this stratification accelerated. Hutus began to be defined by whatever Tutsis were not, even if no one can really tell the two apart.
Then came the Europeans. This being the heyday of eugenics, "scientists" were too ready to propound baseless hypothesis that exaggerate minutiae physical differences as a divine ordinance towards class structures. One of them was John Speke, who propounded the biblical myth that the Tutsis descended from Ham-son-of-Noah who came from Abyssinia/Ethiopia, and this made them "the superior race" to the native Negroid.
When Germany set up its administrative posts in Rwanda after the death of Rwabugiri, the feuding Tutsi elites used their support to pursue their interests and further subjugates the Hutus. Then when Belgium won Rwanda as a spoil of World War I from the German, the Belgians made the Hutu-Tutsi polarization the basis of their colonial rule. The Hamitic myth served them well. In 1934 the Belgians issued identity cards that label Rwandan as either Hutu (85%) or Tutsi (14%). This allowed them to administer an apartheid state that shuts out Hutus' opportunities for advancement.
When Rwanda gained independence, the overthrow of colonialism also brought down the Tutsis. The Hutu intellectuals "argued for democracy not by rejecting the myth but by embracing it. If Tutsis were foreign invaders, then Rwanda was by rights a nation of the Hutu majority." (p58) This led to a bloody revolution in 1959, which was a precursor to the 1994 genocide.
In discussions of us-against-them scenarios of popular violence, the fashion these days is to speak of mass hatred. But while hatred can be animating, it appeals to weakness. The "authors” of the genocide, as Rwandans call them, understood that in order to move a huge number of weak people to do wrong, it is necessary to appeal to their desire of strength—and the gray force that really drives people is power. Hatred and power are both, in their different ways, passions. The difference is that hatred is purely negative, while power is essentially positive: you surrender to hatred, but you aspire to power. (p 128)Link to the book on Goodreads: here. This note was originally written in 2018.
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