by Robert Guest
He said he would love to return home but saw little hope that he ever could. “My children,” he sighed, “will always be in danger. Hutus hate them because they have a Tutsi mother. Tutsis hate them because they have a Hutu father.” There is a local saying: “The son of a snake is a snake.”
The perils of tribalism
Other people’s tribal quarrels never make much sense. Can you recall why the Tamils and the Sinhalese of Sri Lanka don’t get along? Me neither. I once tried to explain to a Japanese friend what the troubles in Northern Ireland were about, and I remember thinking how fatuous it sounded. What’s the difference between a Catholic and a Protestant? Well, 500 years ago, there was a split in the Christian church, with some people arguing that you could find salvation through faith alone, while others maintained that you had to submit to the authority of the Pope in Rome.… My friend nodded politely and said: “Ah … I see” from time to time, but I could see that she had no idea what I was talking about.
European history in the first half of the twentieth century is largely a story of tribal bloodletting, and recent years have seen carnage in the Balkans. Asia and the Americas have had also their troubles, from the Pacific War to the periodic pogroms of Chinese people in modern Indonesia. But these days it is in Africa that ethnic strife seems most acute. Memories of the Rwandan genocide of 1994 are still fresh, and Burundi’s civil war shows few signs of ending. Ethnic or religious differences have been the pretext for violence in Sudan, Nigeria, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Kenya, Liberia, Côte d’Ivoire, Uganda, Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea, both Congoes – the list goes on.
Africa’s ethnic conflicts are often imagined to be the spontaneous expression of ancient hatreds. Tribal animosity certainly exists, but it rarely erupts into large-scale bloodshed unless deliberately inflamed by unscrupulous leaders. In pre-colonial times, tribes often fought over such things as pasture and water, but their battles were usually brief, local, and not especially bloody. Today, tribes fight for control of a much larger prize: the nation-state. And many more die in the struggle.
The historian Basil Davidson has written a whole book on “Africa and the curse of the nation-state.” He argues that because post-colonial states were alien transplants, based usually on British or French models rather than old indigenous institutions, they “failed to achieve legitimacy in the eyes of a majority of African citizens, and soon proved unable to protect and promote the interests of those citizens, save for a privileged few.” Against this illegitimate state, he says, “the majority have sought ways of defending themselves. The principal way they have found of doing this is through ‘tribalism’, perhaps more accurately, clientelism: a kind of Tammany Hall-style patronage, dependent on personal, family and similar networks of local interest. Insofar as it is a ’system’, clientelism has become the way politics in Africa largely operates. Its rivalries naturally sow chaos.”1
It is not tribal feelings themselves that cause trouble; it is their politicization. Most of Africa’s ethnic strife has its roots in the manipulation of tribal loyalties by the colonial authorities. And most of today’s conflicts owe their persistence to modern politics, not primordial passions.
In attempting to analyze the interplay between politics and tribalism in Africa, it helps to use a broader definition of tribalism than most dictionaries would allow, one that amalgamates tribalism, racism, and sectarianism. I know they are not the same, but I think the similarities matter more than the differences. The theme is bigotry: treating individuals badly, not because of something they have done, but because they belong to a particular group. People find all sorts of unjust reasons to hate, and unjust governments exploit them all.
To illustrate this argument, I am going to concentrate on the modern histories of Rwanda, Nigeria, and South Africa. Knowledgeable readers may object that these three countries are so different that it makes no sense to squash them all into the same chapter. It is a reasonable objection. They are indeed very different, and there is not enough space in a single chapter to do justice to the complexities of culture, tradition, and colonial experience that make them what they are today.
But I would like to argue that what these places have in common is both interesting and important. In all three countries politicians have at times sought to stir up, rather than soothe, ethnic passions. In all three, governments have made laws that explicitly discriminate against their own citizens on tribal or ethnic grounds. And in all three, the results have been either woeful or, in Rwanda’s case, catastrophic.
Rwanda’s holocaust
From 6 April 1994, a government dominated by Hutus tried to exterminate the Tutsis. The killings were carried out mainly with simple tools: machetes and clubs studded with nails. To be chopped or bludgeoned to death takes time; some Tutsis paid to be shot instead. Sometimes the task of killing all the Tutsis on a particular hillside took several days. The executioners had to rest each evening, and so victims had their Achilles tendons cut to prevent them from running away. The killers drank gallons of beer to cool their throats and dull their consciences. At night, they feasted on the cows they stole from the dead.
The piles of bodies grew so large that city councils had to remove them in garbage trucks to avert the spread of disease. Many corpses were simply thrown in rivers: about 40,000 were fished out of Lake Victoria by the authorities downstream in Uganda. In all, about 800,000 people – a tenth of the population – were killed in six weeks. This was a rate of slaughter roughly five times that of the Nazi extermination camps.
Visitors to Kigali, the Rwandan capital, in late 1994 were struck by the fact that there were no dogs in the streets. Most African cities teem with dogs, so the lack of barking made Kigali seem eerie. Why were there no dogs in Kigali? The gruesome answer is that after the genocide, when there were piles of human bodies everywhere, Rwanda’s dogs started gnawing on the corpses. Soldiers grew so sick of the sight that they shot them all.2
There is a common assumption that Rwanda’s holocaust was simply an explosion of bigotry. The Hutus hated the Tutsis, so they tried to kill them all. The Hutus have always hated the Tutsis, and vice versa. That’s just the way it is in central Africa. But this explanation simply won’t do. Many Hutus do indeed hate Tutsis, but this is not an ancient, immutable fact of nature. It was only in the last forty years that large-scale ethnic killing began in Rwanda and Burundi. Hutus and Tutsis have only thrown themselves at each other’s throats since their political leaders started urging them to. The genocide was carefully planned by a small clique of criminals to maintain their grip on power.3 They were not forced to carry it out by passions beyond their control or by the irresistible tide of history. They had a choice. And they chose to try to create an ethnically pure Rwanda, ruled by themselves. They nearly succeeded, too.
The roots of the Hutu–Tutsi conflict can be traced back to colonial times. (The same is true of most aspects of modern Rwandan society, as few problems spring from nowhere, and the colonial period was when written records began.) When Europeans first arrived in Rwanda and Burundi in the nineteenth century, they found two large tribes and one small one. The Hutus were mostly peasant farmers, the less numerous Tutsis largely tended cows, and the Twa, a group of pygmies who were only 1 percent of the population, lived mainly as hunter-gatherers.
They all seem to have gotten along reasonably well. They lived on the same hills, spoke the same language, and intermarried freely. When a Tutsi woman married a Hutu man, their children were considered Hutu. Hutus could sometimes become Tutsis, too. There were tensions: Tutsi chiefs sometimes forbade Hutus from owning cows, and small wars were common. But these wars were not terribly bloody because there were traditional mechanisms for ending them. And Hutus, Tutsis, and Twa often fought side by side to repel invaders or steal cattle from neighbors.4
Rwanda and Burundi were German colonies for a couple of decades until the First World War, when Belgium seized them. In keeping with the nineteenth-century European obsession with race, the c
olonists saw great significance in the divide between Hutu and Tutsi. They surmised that the Tutsis were a Nilotic people, immigrants from the north, more intelligent than the native Hutus and a “natural” ruling caste. They toppled Hutu chiefs, replaced them with Tutsis, and turned a blind eye when these Tutsis stole large tracts of Hutu land. They favored Tutsis in admission to colonial schools and set Hutus forcibly to work digging ditches, planting trees, and building roads, often under the cruel eye of a Tutsi overseer. They even introduced ethnic identity cards. Where it was not possible to determine someone’s tribe, the Belgians counted his cows. Those with ten or more were classified as Tutsi; those with fewer were condemned to be Hutu.5
The Europeans’ tribal policies had two effects. First, the Hutus grew to resent their Tutsi overlords as never before. Second, both tribes came to believe the myth that they were utterly distinct. Tutsis, even the poor ones, took pride in their alleged racial superiority. Hutus began to see all Tutsis as “feudal exploiters,” even the ones who lived in the same rags and ate the same scraps as they did.
After independence, politics split along ethnic lines. The main Hutu party in Rwanda easily won an election in 1960, organized by the Belgians as they prepared to leave. The first Hutu government tried to enforce ethnic quotas: since Tutsis were estimated to be 9 percent of the population, no more than 9 percent of school places were to be held by Tutsis, and no more than 9 percent of salaried jobs, whether in the civil service or in private companies. Businesses did their best to ignore the rules because they needed skilled workers and the Tutsis were, on average, better educated. But occasional purges kept the civil service strongly Hutu.
In 1973, a Hutu major general called Juvenal Habyarimana seized power and established a police state. He banned all opposition and set up his own party, the National Revolutionary Movement for Development (MRND), which all Rwandans were obliged to join, including babies. Party spies watched every hilltop village, moving house required official permission, and “loose women,” such as the Tutsi girlfriends of European aid workers, were arrested.
Habyarimana’s only claim to democratic legitimacy was that he was a Hutu. He often repeated the slogan “rubanda nyamwinshi” (literally, “the majority people”), implying that any government dominated by the ethnic majority was ipso facto democratic. Many Hutu peasants swallowed this ludicrous idea. French author Gérard Prunier observed that just as poor Tutsis under the old order “felt proud of belonging to the ‘ethnic aristocracy’, although it brought them very little beyond [a] sense of superiority,” so now the Hutus “fell prey to the same error and mostly persuaded themselves that because the government was Hutu, they, the humble peasants from the hills, somehow shared in that power.”6
Habyarimana did his best to exclude Tutsis from public life. From the time of the coup until his assassination in 1994, he allowed only one Tutsi officer in the army and forbade Hutu soldiers from marrying Tutsis. Local governors, called bourgmestres and prefets, were all Hutu, with one exception, who was killed in the genocide. There were only two Tutsi members of parliament and only one Tutsi cabinet minister.7
The Tutsis did not like living under Habyarimana’s dictatorship, and by 1990 about 600,000 or 700,000 of them had fled the country. In October that year, some of these Tutsi exiles, calling themselves the Rwandese Patriotic Front (RPF), invaded Rwanda but were beaten back. There followed four years of sporadic fighting, during which neither side prevailed. France provided Habyarimana with money and weapons because although odious he did at least speak French.8
To begin with, Habyarimana used the war as an excuse to lock up and torture his opponents, but French diplomats pressed him to stop embarrassing them, and he was eventually persuaded to unban opposition parties. The slighty less dictatorial atmosphere allowed many groups to flourish, but unfortunately some of the most influential were even more bigoted than Habyarimana. A new party called the Coalition for the Defence of the Republic lambasted the government for being too soft on the Tutsis and indeed on Hutus who favored ethnic tolerance. A bold and chillingly well-written paper called Kangura demonized Tutsis, and Radio Mille Collines mixed funky music with incitement to murder.
The editor of Kangura published ten “Hutu commandments.”
Hutu men, said the paper, should never marry or befriend Tutsi women, for they were all Tutsi agents. Every Tutsi, the paper continued, was a cheat, so any Hutu doing business with Tutsis was a traitor. It was essential that “all strategic positions, political, administrative, economic, military and security,” be controlled by Hutus. The eighth commandment was “Hutus must stop having mercy on the Tutsis.” These commandments were widely copied and frequently read aloud by Hutu headmen at village meetings.
Throughout the early 1990s, there were signs that something was brewing. Army officers started diverting weapons to the Interahamwe, an anti-Tutsi militia. Hutu officials started firing up peasants for the task ahead, portraying the Tutsis of the RPF as demonic creatures with tails, hooves, horns, and red eyes that glowed in the dark. After RPF attacks, they organized small retaliatory massacres in which peasants were encouraged to take part. Hacking men to death was referred to as “bush clearing”; killing women and children was “pulling out the roots of the bad weeds.” Tutsis were called “cockroaches,” and those who helped exterminate them were sometimes rewarded with the victims’ land or cows.
Meanwhile, pushed by the French, President Habyarimana was talking peace with the Tutsi rebels, the RPF. On 6 April 1994, he was assassinated. His private plane was hit by two missiles as it approached the runway at Kigali airport and crashed, killing all aboard.
“Hutu power” apologists blamed the RPF. The RPF blamed the Hutu power fanatics. Whatever the truth, within forty-five minutes of the crash, Interahamwe road blocks were thrown up all around Kigali. The killings began almost immediately.
That the genocide was premeditated is not in doubt. On 3 April, Radio Mille Collines broadcast that “On the third, fourth, and fifth, heads will get heated up. On the sixth of April, there will be a respite, but ‘a little thing’ might happen. Then on the seventh and eighth and the other days in April, you will see something.”9
The first to die were those on pre-prepared lists of “enemies”: politicians, journalists, lawyers, and businessmen who held liberal views. To begin with, the killing was carried out mainly by the presidential guard, a 1,500-strong elite corps based in Kigali, and the Interahamwe and other militiamen, who numbered perhaps 50,000. Jobless urban Hutus soon joined in. The most senior army leaders hesitated for a couple of days but then went along with the bloody flow.
From the capital, orders were swiftly sent to officials in the countryside. In almost every village peasants were called together to murder their Tutsi neighbors. Since Tutsis were only a small fraction of Rwanda’s population and both tribes lived intermingled, most Tutsi peasants had Hutu neighbors on all sides. This made it nearly impossible to escape.
All the while, Radio Mille Collines called for more blood, shrieking that “the graves are not yet quite full” and asking, “Who is going to do the good work and help us fill them completely?”10
Anyone stopped at a road block who could not produce an ethnic identity card was assumed to be a Tutsi and killed. Those who had cards identifying them as Hutus but who looked too pale or long-nosed were often killed, too. Hutus who refused to take part in the slaughter were denounced as allies of the enemy and killed. Professionals, students, and anyone who looked educated or prosperous was at risk. In the words of one survivor, “the people whose children had to walk barefoot to school killed the people who could buy shoes for theirs.”11
The outside world did almost nothing to help. The genocide only stopped when the Tutsi rebels of the RPF won the war and stopped it. They found it unusually easy to march across the country, largely because the Rwandan army was distracted by the business of killing civilians. In July, the RPF took Kigali. As they gained control of the countryside, which they did with
considerable brutality, the génocidaires lost heart and fled into Zaire, along with nearly a million other Hutus who feared reprisals.
The rebels were victorious, but the land they had conquered was shattered. Tutsis who had survived the genocide emerged from church vaults and septic tanks to find their huts burned, their cows eaten, and their villages deserted. Hutus who had risked death by resisting the genocide were sometimes killed by the RPF; in the confusion no one knew for sure who was guilty and who was not.
Rwanda has regained a measure of stability under a Tutsi strongman, Paul Kagame. With help from foreign donors, Kagame’s government has done a good job of rebuilding the country. Average incomes are now all but back to their pre-genocide level, but the psychological wounds of the genocide are, unsurprisingly, far from healed.
When I visited Rwanda in August 2003, I was struck by how frightened everyone was. The people were afraid of their government, and the government, despite its strenuous denials, was afraid of the people.
I was there to watch the first presidential election since the genocide. Kagame was already president but had decided, under pressure from donors, that he wanted to be a directly elected one.
On the night before the polls, I spoke to the main challenger, Faustin Twagiramungu, a moderate Hutu, in the little flat that served as his campaign headquarters. He was in despair. His party had been banned for promoting ethnic “divisionism” – an odd charge to level at a man who had lost thirty-two relatives during the genocide, but one Kagame seemed to aim at all serious rivals. Twagiramungu had barely been allowed to campaign: his pamphlets had been confiscated; his supporters threatened. As we spoke, some of his provincial campaign managers, all twelve of whom had been arrested the previous day, were paraded on the television news, denouncing their former leader. Twagiramungu showed me a letter which he said was from one of them. The message, he said, was: “I’m so sorry, but I have to stay alive.”
