Hutus Tutsis; Us and Them

When the tragic news of what was happening in Rwanda began to reach the outside world it seems that to many it was just more bad news from a continent from which they had come to expect nothing but bad news. I get a good sense of what our impression of Africa is in the west, when I ask my students to list ten things that they can remember seeing in the news that related to Africa. Most can't list ten, but almost without exception everything that they do list fits neatly into one of the following categories - War, disease, famine, corruption, political instability and poverty. Placed together on a chalkboard they paint a pretty grim portrait of the continent, but perhaps scarier is what happens if I ask my students why these types of things seem to happen so often in Africa. They are at a total loss, and not having any historical explanation they stray into the dangerous territory of negative stereotypes. Words like "savage ' and "primitive" get used, and the general consensus is that Africa is "messed up".

Whether one decries the media for its superficial or unbalanced coverage, or one blames our schools for inadequately teaching Africa, the fact remains that for most Westerners, Africa is still in the dark, outside of their realm of understanding. In our minds dozens of sovereign countries are reduced to homogeneous "Africans," interchangeable parts from Cape to Cairo. Africa is pictured as a backward economic and political failure in need of our help, and Africans are seen as culturally monolithic, yet somehow bent on something called "tribal violence". How many Americans think that Africa is in fact one country? As far as many are concerned, even if they know it is not, it might as well be. Then terrible events like what happened in Rwanda occur, and they are viewed through the prism of these stereotypes rather than with the necessary historical context. Perhaps this is in part due to the fact that when we dig a little deeper it seems like so many "African" problems have their roots closer to home.

The Colonial Legacy
Unlike most African states, Rwanda was not given artificial borders by their colonizers, it had been an established kingdom for many centuries. Because of its geographic isolation Rwanda was among the last regions of Africa to come under actual European influence, however when its time came it was at the strategic junction of three competing empires. Belgian's King Leopold II, who's personal acquisition of the Congo Free State had sparked the scramble for Africa, wanted the region for it's access to Lake Victoria and its link to Africa's east coast. Germany wanted the area to solidify its mittelafrika, or German central African empire. The British saw the territory as a necessary link in its dreamt of cape-to-Cairo railroad, essential in uniting British possession in the north and south of Africa. At the Berlin Conference of 1885, the fatefully meeting in which much of Africa's borders were haggled out, Rwanda was assigned to Germany as part of German East Africa (although at that stage no European had ever set foot within its borders).

When Germans finally did explore their new possession, they were surprised to find that their new colony included a centralized administration under the leadership of the Mwami, a Tutsi king. Germany concluded that the easiest way to bring the region under their influence was to offer military assistance to this Tutsi king, along with encouragement for him to launch a series of attacks on nearby autonomous Hutu settlements. So, promoting aggression between these two groups was a part of the original colonial strategy in Rwanda.

Prior to the arrival of Europeans, Hutus and Tutsis had occupied the same land for hundreds of years. Their main difference was that they held different economic roles, the Hutu being principally farmers, the Tutsi cow herders. The two groups had the same language, the same belief systems, they intermarried, and it was possible for one's identity to change from one group to the other during their lifetime.

The German tactic of divide and conquer was largely successful and territories that had not traditionally been, were consolidated under the Mwami's control. The German presence in Rwanda was short lived however, and during WWI their numbers were too few to prevent a Belgian takeover. Belgium followed the same pattern as Germany, using the tutsi aristocracy to administer the territory, but managed to increase their control by deposing the king, and putting his more manageable 18-year-old son on the thrown. Again, Rwanda's colonial rulers found it beneficial to create and exploit a divide between the Hutu and Tutsi populations. Schools were created through the subsidizing of missionary work, and were intended to create a class prepared to fill administrative positions - Tutsi only.

Perhaps the action with the most detrimental effect on Tutsi-Hutu relations, came in the 1930's with the Belgian effort to create a census of their colony and officially categorize the identities of the native inhabitants. Victims of this onslaught of calipers, measuring tapes, and scales were issued identity cards, and required to carry and be able to produce this mark of their ethnicity at all times. When, as often was the case, an individual's physical characteristics were not enough to determine their proper place, the Belgians simply counted those owning ten or more cattle as Tutsi. The result was the creation of a firmly entrenched ruling Tutsi class, with an unequal access to education, wealth, and positions of power.
It is no surprise that when the wave of independence that swept Africa in the 1950's and 1960's reached Rwanda, the country emerged as a nation boiling over with internal conflict. The decades leading up to the genocide can be categorized as ones filled with either ethnic group fearing political domination by the other. At the time of the genocide Hutus had a narrow hold on power in Rwanda, but a Tutsi army lay just outside its borders desperate to reclaim the country. The Hutu extremists that escalated the ethnic hatred to its extreme, did so out of fear that they would again by dominated by a Tutsi elite. It is worth noting that the difference between the two groups was apparently enough to warrant the wholesale slaughter of one at the other's hands, yet was not enough for those wielding the machetes and the clubs to tell who was who without first looking at their identification cards (the same identification cards that had been in use since the Belgian era).

Of course underscoring the role that Rwanda's colonial legacy had in widening the divide between Hutus and Tutsis does not admonish any of the guilty parties that carried out the individual terrible acts that took place there, but it is a necessary part of the picture, and one that has it's parallels in other "African" problems. So, when we in the West view the bad news that comes out of Africa, it may appear far removed, a part of the dark happenings of the dark continent, but its roots may reach closer to home than can be seen from the surface. 'tribal conflicts' are not due to any African predisposition towards violence, but a result of separate cultural groups, having been thrown together by artificial borders made by far away men, with eyes on resources and no understanding of, or concern for, the welfare of native inhabitants. The 'political instability' that plagues African nations today is not as much a result of any innate inability to govern, but is the natural outcome of once separate groups, now forced to compete with one another for control of a system that must now somehow serve the interst of both groups.