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We wish to inform you that we have heard that tomorrow we will be killed with our families.
This book on the Rwandan genocide is breaking my heart. I just want to be able to understand it.
“The people who did this,” Arcene said, “didn’t understand the idea of a country. What is a country? What is a human being? They had no understanding.”
Beware of those who speak of the spiral of history; they are preparing a boomerang. Keep a steel helmet handy. —RALPH ELLISON Invisible Man
Because of all this mixing, ethnographers and historians have lately come to agree that Hutus and Tutsis cannot properly be called distinct ethnic groups. Still, the names Hutu and Tutsi stuck. They had meaning,
Hutus were cultivators and Tutsis were herdsmen. This was the original inequality: cattle are a more valuable asset than produce, and although some Hutus owned cows while some Tutsis tilled the soil, the word Tutsi became synonymous with a political and economic elite.
Within the jumble of Rwandan characteristics, the question of appearances is particularly touchy, as it has often come to mean life or death.
By the time that the League of Nations turned Rwanda over to Belgium as a spoil of World War I, the terms Hutu and Tutsi had become clearly defined as opposing “ethnic” identities, and the Belgians made this polarization the cornerstone of their colonial policy.
Colonization is violence, and there are many ways to carry out that violence.
The identity cards made it virtually impossible for Hutus to become Tutsis, and permitted the Belgians to perfect the administration of an apartheid system rooted in the myth of Tutsi superiority.
Whatever Hutu and Tutsi identity may have stood for in the precolonial state no longer mattered; the Belgians had made “ethnicity” the defining feature of Rwandan existence.
Tribalism begets tribalism.
But the political struggle in Rwanda was never really a quest for equality; the issue was only who would dominate the ethnically bipolar state.
This was what passed for democratic thought in Rwanda: Hutus had the numbers. The Manifesto firmly rejected getting rid of ethnic identity cards for fear of “preventing the statistical law from establishing the reality of facts,” as if being Hutu or Tutsi automatically signified a person’s politics. Plenty of more moderate views could be heard, but who listens to moderates in times of revolution?
