The BN Village - View Single Post

RESPECT · (#2 (**permalink**))

19TH CENTURY SEEDS OF A TRAGEDY

Having said that, we now come to two of the great culprits in this tragic saga. From 1895 to 1916, Rwanda was a German colony. In 1916, in the midst of the First World War, Germany was forced to retreat from its east African territories and was replaced in Rwanda and Burundi by Belgium. For the next 45 years, the Belgians controlled the destinies of Rwanda, Burundi, and the Congo. Virtually all authorities (including both Hutu and Tutsi) agree that first Germany, but above all Belgium, organized the colony very much along the lines that Mwami Rwabugiri had drawn, though the colonizers made those lines far more rigid, inflexible, and self-serving. But the point to be noted is that they did not have to do so. The interpretation that the European powers were merely maintaining the status quo as they had found it ignores their power to impose on their new African acquisitions more or less whatever form of governance they chose.

2.9. This was the first defining moment in the modern history of the country, a building block upon which all others would stand and, eventually, fall. It served the purposes of the colonizers to recognize the King and the Tutsi rulers surrounding him and to assign to them significant if always subservient political power and administrative duties. Through the classic system of indirect rule, a mere handful of Europeans were able to run Rwanda in whatever manner they deemed most beneficial to imperial interests. They also shared the Tutsi aristocracy's interest in extending its control over the small Hutu kingdoms in the northwest that had resisted this fate until now and in bringing the other peripheral regions of the country more tightly under central command. At the same time, the colonizers did not hesitate to change any aspect of society they found wanting. These included making the King subject to his colonial masters and reducing the influence of the remaining Hutu sub-chiefs.

2.10. Colonizer and the local elite also shared an interest in endorsing the pernicious, racist notions about the Tutsi and the Hutu that had been concocted by missionaries, explorers, and early anthropologists in that period. The theory was based both on the appearance of many Tutsi generally taller and thinner than were most Hutu and European incredulity over the fact that Africans could, by themselves, create the sophisticated kingdom that the first white men to arrive in Rwanda found there. From the thinnest of air, an original racial fantasy known as the Hamitic hypothesis was spun by the first British intruders. It posited that the Tutsi had sprung from a superior Caucasoid race from the Nile Valley, and probably even had Christian origins. On the evolutionary scale then all the rage in Europe, the Tutsi could be seen as approaching, very painstakingly, to be sure, the exalted level of white people. They were considered more intelligent, more reliable, harder working, and more like whites than the Bantu Hutu majority.[4]

2.11. The Belgians appreciated this natural order of things so greatly that, in a series of administrative measures between 1926 and 1932, they institutionalized the cleavage between the two races (race being the explicit concept used at the time before the milder notion of ethnicity was introduced later on), culminating in identity cards that were issued to every Rwandan, declaring each to be either Hutu or Tutsi. This card system was maintained for over 60 years and, in a tragic irony, eventually became key to enabling Hutu killers to identify during the genocide the Tutsi who were its original beneficiaries.[5]