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Chapter 3

Ethnicity as Myth

Ethnicity is never what it seems. What some see as ancestral atavism, others see as a typically modern phenomenon, anchored in colonial rule. Where neo-Marxists detect class interests parading in traditional garb, mainstream scholars unveil imagined communities. And whereas many see ethnicity as the bane of the African continent, others think that it could provide the basis for a moral social contract and that it contains within itself the seeds of openness and accountability.

So overwhelming is the evidence that points to the demonic face of ethnicity that it is tempting to forget its more benign traits. Yet not everything about ethnicity translates into bloodshed and genocide or into frenzied ethnic cleansing. Ethnic communities also generate responsible, civic-minded leaders, anxious to speak on behalf of their constituents and willing to protect them against the abuses of the state. The sense of belonging to an ethnic community need not be synonymous with conflict and competition. John Lonsdale's argument about the significance of “moral ethnicity” readily comes to mind. Drawing a distinction between “political tribalism” and “moral ethnicity,” he defines the former as “the use of ethnic identities in political competition with other groups” and the latter as “a positive force which creates communities from within through domestic controversy over civic virtue.”¹ Moral ethnicity, he wrote, is an expression of “the common human instinct to create out of the daily habits of social intercourse and material labor a system of moral meaning and ethical reputation within a more or less imagined community.”²

Ethnicity does not necessarily mean conflict, nor is conflict everywhere traceable to politicized ethnicity. Illustrating this point are the violent struggles in Somalia, one of the most conflict-ridden states anywhere in the continent, and the class-based intra-Zulu confrontations that have punctuated the recent history of Natal. Similarly, the recent war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo cannot be reduced to ethnic polarities. Even where mass murder is clearly aimed at a specific ethnic community, as in Rwanda during the 1994 genocide, it is not easy to pin the blame on ethnicity. What, indeed, does ethnicity mean when the groups in conflict share the same language, the same national territory, the same customs, and have for centuries lived more or less peacefully side by side?

Clearly then, ethnicity can be many things, both good and bad. The crucial question, therefore, for anyone attempting to understand its role in conflict is, What causes it to become a force for evil? What, in other words, accounts for the transformation of moral ethnicity into political tribalism, and tribalism into genocide? What are the mechanisms through which peaceful ethnic cohabitation gives way to death and destruction?

John Lonsdale gives us a clue: “Tribalism,” he writes, “remains the reserve currency in our markets of power, ethnicity our most critical community of thought.”³ In the market place of electoral competition, tribalism is the bad currency that drives out the good currency, in a kind of Gresham's law of ethnic politics. Moral ethnicity is the first casualty of the inflationary spiral of ethnic claims and counterclaims. Nonetheless, to invoke political tribalism in an attempt to explain genocide leaves out a crucial dimension of ethnicity. Ethnicity has a capacity to be manipulated for the pursuit of preeminently immoral goals, to profoundly alter collective perceptions of the “other.” It can be distorted using images whose purpose it is to draw rigid boundaries between good and evil, civic virtue and moral depravity, freedom and oppression, and foreigners and autochthons.

This chapter focuses on the effect of mythmaking on ethnic strife in the Great Lakes region of Africa. After an examination of the meaning of ethnicity, attention is given to the origin and development of myths in central Africa, especially to the traditional Rwandan myths of origins and the so-called Hamitic hypothesis, a myth started by the Europeans. The last part of the chapter is devoted to a consideration of how and why these myths were turned to genocidal purposes. It is my contention that the history—in whose name hundreds of thousands of innocent Tutsi men, women, and children were slaughtered—is, in large part, myth. So is the view of the past that lies behind Rwanda's claims to huge chunks of North and South Kivu. And so, also, is the reading of history implicit in the construction of new identities in eastern Congo, the so-called Banyamulenge. Mythmaking, in sum, is what transforms social conflict into irreconcilable moral standoffs.

Ethnicity: Invented, Imagined, or Mythologized?

In order for ethnic entrepreneurs to make capital out of tribalism, a tribe must exist. The term tribe, however, as has been emphasized time and again, is hardly appropriate to describe communities whose pedigree is traceable to the accidents of colonial rule. The tribal names that have passed down into modern usage are, in most instances, misnomers. The tribes were born of European ignorance, with their existence given formal recognition in statistical records or in the writings of early European administrators, explorers, and missionaries. Prior to these European records, they had no real existence.

ETHNICITY INVENTED

Should we speak then, not of tribes but of “invented” communities? Examples abound of ethnic entities whose birth certificate bears traces of an “invented tradition,” to use Terence Ranger's phrase. The classic example is the case of the Bangala of northern Congo. First “discovered” by Henry Morton Stanley, who called them “unquestionably a very superior tribe,” the Bangala, as Crawford Young reminds us, “were accorded official anthropological recognition when an entire volume was devoted to them in 1907 in the first ethnographic survey of the Zaire peoples.”⁴ The Dinka of the Sudan, likewise, derive their ethnonym and thus part of their collective identity from a similar misreading of the facts by a European explorer who took the name of a local chief to designate a collection of quite separate communities.⁵ The Acholi of northern Uganda are another example. According to Atkinson, the term Acholi was invented by Arab traders (Kutoria) from the Sudan to refer to a variety of Luo-speaking lineages and chiefdoms.⁶ Even as late as the 1930s, “the Acholi were referred to as ‘Gangi’ or ‘Shuli’ and they had no fixed territorial boundaries.”⁷ Each of these invented communities, along with many others, would not have been out of place in the volume edited by Ranger and Hobsbawm on The Invention of Tradition.8

ETHNICITY IMAGINED

Evocative though it is, the term invention does not do justice to the diversity of voices that contribute to the making of a community. To speak of an invented tradition does little to illuminate the ideological orientation or normative underpinnings of such a group. Nor does it bring out the different constructions placed upon it by different categories of social actors at different moments of history. Ranger himself came to recognize the limitations of the term invention and to prefer the notion of imagination. Drawing from the insights of Feierman and Lonsdale, he noted that the word imagining has the advantage of stressing ideas, images, and symbols, which are useful vehicles for understanding how traditions are formed.⁹ The history of any modern tradition, Ranger emphasized, is immensely complex. It is not the product of one, but of many, conflicting imaginations. Over time, the meaning of the imagined is defined and redefined. In Africa, as Ranger explained, traditions imagined by whites were reimagined by blacks; traditions imagined by particular interest groups were reimagined by others.

We should therefore, perhaps, speak of imagined communities rather than invented ones. Ranger's understanding of the exegesis of tradition certainly seems to apply to the Great Lakes region of Africa. Here, Africans appropriated the Hamitic tradition imagined by Europeans. This same tradition was again reimagined by Hutu intellectuals to forge ideological weapons directed at the Tutsi minority. To describe Hutu and Tutsi as “invented communities” is hardly appropriate. Both existed long before the advent of colonial rule. To see them as imagined identities does point to the changing perceptions of one group by another, as well as to the processes involved in the emergence of a new “tribe” in eastern Congo, the Banyamulenge.

ETHNICITY MYTHOLOGIZED

Yet there is surely more than political imagination at work in the continuing carnage in the Great Lakes. What gives ethnic conflict in the region its peculiarly savage edge are the myths that have grown up around Hutu and Tutsi. Behind the twisted memories, distorted histories, and demonized ethnicities that have contributed to the bloodshed lie mythologies, which have thus been summoned to legitimize the butchery. Ironically, in Rwanda, it is the very thing that should have welded the people together that has served to do the most to tear them apart. The Rwandan myth of origins, at least in its original conception, conjures up a normative charter-holding society together in a unified trinity of Tutsi, Hutu, and Twa. And yet, in time, this very myth of origins became the quarry for destructive ideologies.

In the context of this discussion, myth is used in both its conventional and metaphorical senses. In its conventional sense, a myth is a legend. Mythmaking may thus simply refer to the creation of such a legend. In such an instance, the purposes of mythmaking are often benign. Myths of origins, for example, are not uncommonly designed to foster social cohesion. Mythmaking may, by contrast, carry far more negative connotations. In the metaphorical sense, mythmaking involves the deliberate denial or distortion of historical reality in a situation of crisis and conflict. The aim of mythmaking of this sort is to inspire division and to inflame ethnic passions.

The Origin and Transformation of Rwandan Myths

Ancient Rwanda had a rich collection of myths and ideologies long before the coming of Europeans. The traditional myths of origins, which provided a virtual charter of Tutsi supremacy, continue to play a central role to this day, though their meaning has radically changed over time. They are still the main frame of reference for conservative Tutsi elites, but since the early fifties, they have been given a quite different symbolic meaning by Western-educated Hutu elites.

These myths have been studied by Marcel d'Hertefelt,¹⁰ who identified five essential themes: the celestial origins of the Tutsi; the fundamental and “natural” differences among Tutsi, Hutu, and Twa; the superior civilization that the Tutsi brought to Rwanda; the threat of divine sanctions against those brazen enough to revolt against the monarchy; and the notion of divine kingship.

The first of these themes finds expression in the story of Kigwe, the founding hero of the royal clan, who descended from heaven, accompanied by his bother Mututsi and his sister Nyamparu. The second is the subject of numerous folktales and dynastic poems. A typical story is that of the stratagem used by God to determine who should rule over whom. So as to test their dependability, God decided to entrust Gahutu, Gatutsi, and Gatwa each with a pot of milk to watch over during the night. When dawn came, gluttonous Gatwa had drunk the milk; Gahutu had gone to sleep and spilt his milk; only the watchful Gatutsi had stayed up through the night to keep guard over his milk. The third is the theme of Tutsi civilization as inherently superior. Nowhere is this theme more tersely summed up than in the opening statement of a folktale of central Rwanda: “Dead are the dogs and the rats, giving way to the cows and the drum.” (The cows here allude to the Tutsi, who, according to legend, introduced pastoralism; the drum was a symbol of power.) Rwanda has no official history before the arrival of the Tutsi. Just as in the dark ages of pre-Islamic civilization ( jahiliya), it is assumed that until the Tutsi arrived, there was little worth remembering, much less recording.¹¹

Why did these early myths take this shape? “The function of myth,” says M. I. Finley, “is to make the past intelligible and meaningful by selection, by focusing on a few bits of the past that thereby acquire permanence, relevance, and universal significance.”¹² Rwanda's myths of origins did more than make the past intelligible. Their function was also to make the present legitimate in the eyes of both Hutu and Tutsi.

In time, legends became reality. The myths gained a life of their own and came to be not so much fictitious stories but rather “a statement of a bigger reality.” Its precedents, laws, and morals were, as Bronislaw Malinowski put it, “partially alive,”¹³ and provided powerful moral justification for the all-encompassing “premise of inequality.”¹⁴ Indeed, it was this very ability of these myths to validate oppression that eventually led Hutu politicians to recast them in a radically new light.

Nineteenth-Century European Mythmaking:

The Hamitic Hypothesis

By then, however, another myth had taken hold, one imported from nineteenth-century Europe that placed yet another construction on the history of Tutsi hegemony. Like its precolonial counterparts, the Hamitic myth underwent fundamental changes of substance and meaning; it therefore came to be seen and interpreted in very different ways by Hutu and Tutsi. It is indeed an ironic commentary on the malleability of myths that the same “Hamitic hypothesis”¹⁵ should have provided European administrators and missionaries with a powerful argument in support of Tutsi domination, and thus subsequent generations of Hutu politicians with the most devastating ideological ammunition against it.

For the early Christian missionaries, the Tutsi stood as the finest example of the Hamitic race, described by Seligman as “pastoral ‘Europeans,’ arriving wave after wave, better armed as well as quicker witted than the dark agricultural Negroes.”¹⁶ In the eyes of these Christians, the Tutsi clearly belonged to a higher order of humanity than the Hutu. For this reason, they were seen as ideally equipped to act as the privileged intermediaries between the European colonizer and the “dark agricultural” masses. Tutsi superiority was manifested in their tall, arresting physique, their extraordinary capacity for self-control, and their ability to exercise authority.

The “scientific” authority of Diedrich Westerman, among others, also was cited in support of the view that the Tutsi were an exceptionally gifted and attractive race: “The Hamites are light skinned, with a straight nose, thin lips, narrow face, soft, often wavy or even straight hair, without prognathism.…Owing to their racial superiority they have gained leading positions and have become the founders of many of the larger states in Africa.”¹⁷ What made the Tutsi even more attractive was the fact that they were presumed to be of Ethiopian origin. This ancestry meant that at some point in the distant past, they must have been exposed to biblical influences, which would also explain why they were disposed to embrace Christianity. As Ian Linden puts it, “It seemed to the missionaries that Hamitic history had involved the progressive dilution of some religious essence preordained to flower into the fullness of Christianity.”¹⁸ All of this history and speculation was entirely consistent with the prejudices and preconceptions of nineteenth-century European ethnology, but it was also perfectly compatible with the view that some Tutsi had of themselves. Hamitic theories showed an uncanny fit with the mythologies of traditional Rwanda; once incorporated into the work of historiographers, it became increasingly difficult to tell them apart.

Reimagining the Myth in the Early Twentieth Century

Through much of the 1920s and 1930s, Rwandan historiography was cross-fertilized by the confluence of two complementary streams of mythologies: one specific to Rwandan society, the other borrowed from nineteenth-century European race theories. Court traditions gave Christian missionaries a striking illustration of the Hamites as “born rulers, superior in every respect to the ‘dark agricultural’ masses.” The Hamitic frame of reference gave scientific respectability to the work of Tutsi historiographers. In the meantime, the coincidence of views between European and Tutsi historians gave European administrators a rationale for the most extreme and extensive application of indirect rule.

This said, it would be highly misleading to view the “invention” of Rwandan traditions as a straightforward, linear transfer of the Hamitic myth to historiographers and ultimately to African ideologues. If one can speak of “invention by tradition,” then it is important to consider the twists and turns that have accompanied the reinterpretation of traditions. The work of Alexis Kagame is a perfect example. Kagame was a Tutsi historian of considerable reputation, as well as a social actor with strong political commitments. In this latter capacity, his endorsement of the Hamitic frame of reference is not nearly as significant as his attempt to put a modern, Eurocentric construction on Rwandan traditions by casting them in a juridical mold. His Code des institutions politiques du Rwanda pré-colonial, published in 1952, is a case in point.¹⁹ Precolonial Rwanda was not just a “royaume Hamite,” to use the title of a celebrated work by Father Pagès.²⁰ It was a traditional state system regulated by codes of laws, juridical norms, and unwritten rules. Just as the rituals of kingship were described as the “code ésotérique de la monarchie,” ²¹ Rwanda's precolonial institutions were carefully regulated by customary laws, much in the same way that in prerevolutionary France, the “fundamental laws of the realm” imposed specific restrictions on the king's authority. What made traditional Rwanda eminently modern and susceptible to constitutional transformation was not the plasticity of its traditions, but the fact that they were so carefully codified.

Kagame's intellectual processes speak volumes for his political goals. Both are excellently analyzed by Claudine Vidal. “If there is only one word to describe Kagame's philosophy of history,” she writes, “it is ‘le juridisme.’ ” Kagame systematically draws analogs between Rwandan and European institutions. Thus, for example, he assimilates personal power to administrative functions, relations of subordination to contracts, and royal decisions to fundamental laws. In so doing, Kagame identifies precolonial Rwanda with a European nation that has gone beyond the stage of feudalism. He creates an image of it as an absolute monarchy tempered by a military code and offering safeguards against social injustice.²² Kagame had no interest in exalting the merits of an arbitrary, omnipotent kingship. His overriding concern was to show that the institution of kingship, by virtue of its rich array of customary codes, was remarkably well equipped to evolve into a constitutional monarchy. Kagame's history, in short, was designed to get Europeans to see that Rwandan traditions were neither arbitrary nor decadent. To the contrary, they contained within their folds the promise of a democratic renewal. Kagame's painstaking reinterpretation of traditional Rwanda was consciously designed to influence the basic constitutional choices facing the Belgian trust authorities in the decade preceding independence.

As a politically committed intellectual, determined to save the monarchy from itself, Kagame showed unusual foresight and imagination. As an historian, however, he showed little inclination to depart from the basic tenets of the Hamitic tradition; pre-Tutsi traditions went virtually unnoticed. Not until 1962, with the publication of Jan Vansina's path-breaking work, L'évolution du royaume rwanda dès origines à 1900, did the flaws in Kagame's writings, and much of the historical literature on Rwanda, come to the attention of Rwandan historians.²³ The history of Rwanda as the story of exceptional men performing exceptional feats just did not stand up to the historical record. What was left out was the rich history of preconquest Hutu states, some of which survived until the 1920s, and some of whose customs, rituals, and conceptions of authority were assimilated by Tutsi clans (and all this happened long before the term Tutsi gained currency in the area).²⁴ Rather than a superior civilization imposing its rule on an inferior one, the evidence revealed a far more complex story. Ironically, much of what made the Hamites so captivating in the Europeans' eyes turned out to be the result of selective cultural borrowing from the supposedly inferior agricultural societies.

Here, then, was a view of history that came as close as any to reflecting Ranke's ideal of “how things really were.” More important, it could provide a meaningful rationale for cooperation and mutual respect between Hutu and Tutsi. This possibility was not to be realized, however. As independence loomed on the horizon, confronting Hutu and Tutsi (and Europeans) with basic tactical decisions, the Hamitic view of history reasserted itself with a vengeance, but not without undergoing some extraordinary changes in meaning and substance.

The Politics of Memory in the Historical Present

Commenting on the distinction between myth and ideology, Benjamin Halpern makes the argument that “the study of myth is a study of the origins of beliefs out of historic experience,” whereas “the study of ideology is the study of moulding of beliefs by social situations.”²⁵ Though analytically distinct, the two are intimately linked to each other.

It was in Rwanda during the social revolution of 1959 to 1962 that the efforts of both Tutsi and Hutu to remember their past entered into their political agendas with unusual bluntness and profoundly divisive consequences. For the conservative Tutsi associated with the court, history ruled out reconciliation: “Since our kings have conquered the land of the Hutu by killing their kinglets (bahinza) and turning them into serfs, how can they now pretend to be our brothers?”²⁶ For the Hutu, however, it was precisely this kind of outlook that made revolutionary change imperative.

In the remainder of this chapter, we shall turn our attention to four examples of mythmaking, where memory operates selectively and in so doing, creates not just “imagined” communities but communities of fear and hatred. The first example of divisive mythmaking can be seen in the resurrection of the Hamitic myth in the political discourse of Hutu elites in Rwanda and Burundi. The second is to be found in the denial of genocide by both Hutu and Tutsi (the first in Rwanda, the second in Burundi). A third example of mythmaking is to be found in what might be called the Rwanda irredenta phenomenon. By this, we mean the efforts of postgenocide Rwanda to legitimize its claims to eastern Congo by rewriting the precolonial history of the region. A fourth concerns the emergence of a new “tribe” in eastern Congo, the so-called Banyamulenge.

MYTH #1: THE RESURRECTION OF THE HAMITIC HYPOTHESIS

Of these four myths, the first is evidently the most critical to an understanding of the other three. More than any other, it is the Hamitic myth that has had the most devastating impact on the texture of Hutu-Tutsi relations through much of the Great Lakes region, in effect providing ideological ammunition for the elimination of “Hamites” by “Bantus.” Viewed through the lens of mythical representations, historical memory thus creates its own universe of death and destruction. “Men do not find truth,” wrote Paul Veyne, “they create it, as they create their history.”²⁷

Initially fashioned by colonial historiography, the Hamitic hypothesis provided a simple model for understanding perceived distinctions between lower and higher orders of humanity. Recast in the form of an ideological weapon to discredit allegations of Tutsi supremacy, it reemerged with extraordinary virulence during the 1994 genocide.

Filtered through the prism of antimonarchical ideology, the Hamitic phantasm eventually morphed into a militantly anti-Tutsi vision. Already in 1959, the Hutu elites seized upon the myth and profoundly altered its meaning. They invoked the same mythical themes once taken to prove Tutsi superiority, but now used them to prove Tutsi foreignness and depravity. The Hamitic race, believed by Europeans to embody all that was best in humanity, was now presented by Hutus as the embodiment of the worst. Hamites represented cruelty and cunning, conquest and oppression. Where missionaries had invoked Semitic origins to suggest racial superiority, Hutu ideologues invoked them to argue that “the Tutsi are all originally bad.” Where anthropologists had detected contractual exchange between Hutus and Tutsi, Hutu saw only proof of compulsion. That the native Hutus had adopted customs from the Tutsi was seen as the result of social domination, enforced by ruse and coercion. Even physical attributes once seen as marks of worthiness were denounced: what some perceived as Tutsi feminine grace was now vilified as yet another ploy designed to subjugate the unsuspecting Hutu.

In retrospect, early references to the féodalo-Hamites by Hutu revolutionaries seem relatively mild compared to the murderous frenzy of antiTutsi propaganda and the blatantly racist iconography that was diffused by the Hutu-controlled media on the eve of the genocide.²⁸ The cartoon in Figure 1 is a chilling example of how recent events in Burundi were recast in the frame of historical traditions with a view to casting aspersions on Tutsi cruelty: the death of the Hutu President Melchior Ndadaye (assassinated by elements of the Tutsi army in October 1993), is represented as involving a typically Tutsi-inspired martyrdom (impalement); watching his agony are soldiers of the RPF severing Ndadaye's vital parts, for the purpose of attaching them to the royal drum (Kalinga), as used to be the custom in traditional Rwanda.

Anti-Tutsi propaganda must be seen in the context of the pervasive fear created among Hutu by the RPF invasion of northern Rwanda on October 1, 1990. Another major background factor was the legacy of the Burundi genocide of 1972 that resulted in the extermination of at least 200,000 Hutu civilians.²⁹ The impact of the Burundi bloodbath on subsequent developments in both Burundi and Rwanda cannot be overemphasized. It is not a matter of coincidence that the few Hutu elites who survived the Burundi carnage were the first to articulate a stridently anti-Tutsi ideology, explicitly grounded in a Hamitic frame of reference. Formalized by the founder of the Palipehutu, Rémi Gahutu, this ideology flourished among a small group of Hutu exiles in Rwanda in the years immediately following the Burundi slaughter. The main themes are depressingly familiar. We learn that Tutsi domination over the Hutu can only be explained by taking into account the moral depravity of the Hamites. We hear of their consummate skill in the use of cunning and deceit; using, for example, poisoned gifts (beautiful women and cows) to reduce the Bantu into bondage. The Hutu exiles also stressed the unspeakable cruelties perpetrated during the 1972 genocide. They presented them as irrefutable proof of Hamitic perversity.³⁰

Figure 1. Melchior Ndadaye's assassination reinterpreted through the phantasms of extremist anti-Tutsi propaganda, from Le Médaille-Nyiramacibiri, no. 17 (November 1993): 10. Reproduced from Jean-Pierre Chrétien, ed., Rwanda: Les medias du génocide (Paris: Karthala, 1995), p. 365.

The Kinyarwanda text reads as follows:

Supervisor: Finish up that stupid Hutu and make sure his genitals are attached to our drum.

Ndadaye: You can kill me, but you cannot wipe out the other Ndadayes in Burundi.

Kagame: Finish him off quickly. Remember what a good job we did in Ruhengeri and Byumba. We have torn the children from their mothers and torn eyes from the men.

From the narratives collected by Liisa Malkki in refugee camps in Tanzania, one gets an idea of the extent to which these ideas took hold among the Hutu survivors:

In the past our proper name was Bantu. We are Bantu. “Hutu” is no tribe, no nothing! The Kihamite is the national language of the Tutsi. Muhutu is a Kihamite word which means “servant.” Having been given cows as gifts by the Tutsi, the Hutu were used as a slave. It is indeed here that the Hutu were born.…We are not Hutu we are Bantu.³¹

From 1990 to 1994, much the same themes would emerge in the pages of Kangura, one of the most stridently anti-Tutsi of the forty-odd newspapers published at this time in Rwanda. The following are a few random examples:

• “The Tutsi have created out of whole cloth a tribe which does not exist: the Banyarwanda. The Banyarwanda exists nowhere in Africa; it is only mentioned to create confusion.”

• “Public opinion must know that the only language of the Hutu is Kihutu, just as the Nande speak Kinande, the Hunde Kihunde.”

• “Try to rediscover your ethnie, for the Tutsi have taught you to ignore it.”³²

What made the ideological climate of pregenocide Rwanda pregnant with intimations of disaster was the sheer force and frequency of appeals to racism diffused through the media, the extensive use of a racist iconography, and the systematic elaboration of Hamitic mythologies into a coherent body of categorical imperatives. This is nowhere more chillingly evident than in the “Ten Commandments of the Hutu,” first published by Kangura33 in December 1990. This doctrine is a veritable catechism of racist principles. At the heart of this ideology are a series of axiomatic truths:

• The Tutsi are the embodiment of malice and wickedness. “You know the trick they employed when they came to Rwanda: they pretended to have descended from heaven; in fact they came from the north of Africa. In Rwanda they found the pastures they needed for their cows. They approached the Hutu kinglets (bahinza), and with their customary malice they offered them women and cattle, until they overthrew the Hutu, seized power and kept it until the 1959 revolution.”³⁴

• The Tutsi never change—a point put across in a Kangura article titled “A Cockroach (inyenzi) Cannot Give Birth to a Butterfly.” Thus, “history shows that the Tutsi have remained identical to themselves, they haven't changed; their malice and wickedness is what we have experienced throughout history.” Typical of their deviousness is the fact that some “changed their identity in order to gain access to positions reserved to the Hutu,” which is why they have gained a dominant position in “the administration, commerce and the health sectors.”³⁵

• Their long-term strategy is the creation of a Hima empire in the heart of the continent. The Tutsi master plan, we are told, is a diabolical scheme “to restore the dictatorship of the more extremists of the Tutsi minority through genocide and the extermination of the Hutu; to institute in the bantu region of the Great Lakes (Rwanda, Burundi, Zaire, Tanzania and Uganda) a vast Hima-Tutsi empire, under the guidance of an ethnie that considers itself superior, like the Aryan race, and whose symbol is Hitler's swastika.”³⁶ The killing of President Melchior Ndadaye in Burundi at the hands of an all-Tutsi army is thus seen as unmistakable evidence of Hamitic imperial ambitions, along with the fact that the RPF fought its way into Rwanda with the help of “the Tutsi Museveni.”

• Given the mortal threat facing the Hutu majority, it is imperative to delineate tribe from nation and for the Hutu to rediscover their true identity as Bantu.Again to quote from Kangura: “The nation is artificial, only ethnicity (ethnie) is natural.”³⁷ “You (the Hutu) are an important ethnie within the Bantu group,” yet numbers alone may not suffice; what you must realize is that “a conceited (orgueilleuse) and bloodthirsty minority is working to create divisions among you, the better to dominate you and kill you.”³⁸

• In these conditions, vigilance is the key. Watch out for spies and be particularly wary of Tutsikazi (Tutsi females). In the words of the first of the “Ten Commandments,” “Every Hutu must know that any Tutsikazi, regardless of where she works, is in the pay of her Tutsi ethnie. Consequently, will be treated as a traitor any Hutu who marries a Tutsikazi, or makes her his concubine or his protégée.” The second commandment stipulates that “every Hutu must know that our women (Hutukazi) are more dignified and more conscious of their roles as mothers and wives,” and the third enjoins Hutu females “to remain vigilant and bring back (their) husbands, brothers and sons to reason.”³⁹

Tutsi women, indeed, play a disproportionate part in Hutu discourse (and iconography). As the foregoing shows, the first three of the Ten Commandments are concerned exclusively with the threats arising from the presence of Tutsikazi among the Hutu communities. Tutsi women, furthermore, were a favorite target of Hutu cartoonists in search of pornographic effect. Warning against the dangers of potential Mataharis among Tutsi females was evidently a major objective of the Hutu-controlled press. The more outrageous caricatures gleaned from the pages of Power and Kangura-Magazine⁴⁰ suggest, however, a deeper motivation. They reflect the seething anger and frustrations of many Hutu who saw in the greater attractiveness to Europeans of the typical Tutsikazi body a slur against their own “race.” How the media exploited the legendary attractiveness of Tutsikazi to discredit both Tutsi women and the United Nations Mission in Rwanda is nowhere more shockingly illustrated than in the cartoon in Figure 2, published in Power, no. 2 (December 1993): 12.

Figure 2. Extremist anti-Tutsi propaganda directed at Tutsi women and Belgian paratroopers in the MINUAR (the French acronym for the UN Mission in Rwanda). “The Force of Sex and the Belgian Paratroopers,” from Power, no. 2 (December 1993): 12. Reproduced from Jean-Pierre Chrétien, ed., Rwanda: Les medias du génocide (Paris: Karthala, 1995), p. 366.

What all this adds up to is a sustained and deliberate effort to recast the Hamitic frame of reference in such a way as to throw moral discredit on an entire ethnic community. By 1994, it was almost as if every Tutsi in sight was by definition an ally of the RPF and hence an enemy of the Hutu nation.

MYTH #2: THE DENIAL OF GENOCIDE

As an ideological construction designed to justify the annihilation of the Tutsi minority, the Hamitic myth must be seen as the central element behind the 1994 genocide. In the denial of genocide by some of its perpetrators lies another extraordinary form of mythmaking.

The term genocide has now become the most overused and arbitrary word in the political discourse of Hutu and Tutsi in Rwanda and Burundi. In both states, it is among the perpetrators that one encounters the most vigorous denial of involvement in ethnic massacres. Although many of the killers who are now in custody in Kigali or Arusha have admitted involvement in the Rwandan massacres, many more refuse to acknowledge their deeds. In flagrant contradiction of the facts, the argument one hears most often is that the killings were the result of a spontaneous outburst of collective anger, not the outcome of a planned annihilation.

Much the same sort of role reversal can be seen in Burundi, where the perpetrators are cast as victims. To this day, the 1972 genocide of Hutu by Tutsi has been virtually obliterated from the consciousness of most Tutsi. Radical Tutsi ideologues officially recognize only one genocide, the killing of thousands of innocent Tutsi civilians in October 1993, in the wake of President Melchior Ndadaye's assassination. They see this carnage as planned annihilation, even though it might better be described as an explosion of collective fear and anger, set off by a murder that conjured up haunting memories of the 1972 killings. They do not mention the subsequent repression of the Hutu by the Tutsi-controlled army that led to the death of thousands of Hutu and the exodus of some 300,000 of their kinsmen to Rwanda. Although, historically, the group that has suffered most from genocidal killings in Burundi are the Hutu, today it is the 1994 Rwanda genocide that impresses itself most forcefully on the mental retina of Tutsi politicians. The genocide brings into focus a simple equation: majority rule equals Hutu rule; Hutu rule equals the threat of Tutsi annihilation.

Both Hutu and Tutsi have been victims of genocide—most conspicuously and massively, the Hutu in Burundi and the Tutsi (and not a few Hutu) in Rwanda. Yet ironically, for many Tutsi, only they, as victims, have a proprietary right to genocide. A useful comparison might be made to the Serbs in former Yugoslavia, who see themselves as the perennial victims of historic massacres. “Deployed in this way,” writes Roger Cohen, “genocide was no longer a horror but a form of immunity. It was a passe-partout allowing the eternal Serbian victim to butcher with impunity.”⁴¹ That there is more than a superficial parallel here with the situation in Rwanda has been made abundantly clear by the Kibeho massacre of Hutus in 1995 and the killings of tens of thousands of Hutu refugees in eastern Congo in 1996 and 1997.

MYTH #3: THE INVENTION OF GREATER RWANDA

Besides putting historical imagination in the service of genocide, perceptions of the past have played a crucially important role in “fixing” (in both senses of the word) geographical boundaries. This kind of myth-making has had equally destructive political consequences. An apt example of this sort of distortion may be seen in the efforts of the Rwanda government to summon the precolonial past on behalf of its territorial claims to North and South Kivu.

Shortly after the search-and-destroy operation mounted by the RPA against the refugee camps in eastern Congo, President Pasteur Bizimungu held a press conference. Armed with maps of precolonial Rwanda, he informed his audience of the extent of the territorial conquest of Mwami Rwabugiri (1853–95) north and west of Rwanda's present borders. Stretching from Lakes Rweru and Cyohoha across the Virunga volcanoes all the way to Lake Albert and beyond, precolonial Rwanda, according to Bizimumgu, incorporated within its national boundaries much of eastern Congo.⁴² The message, clearly intended to give legitimacy to the presence of RPF troops in North Kivu, could not have been clearer: much of the area included in eastern Congo was part and parcel of the precolonial kingdom.

By all accounts, however, Bizimungu's claims simply do not stand up to the historical record. This observation, however, is not to deny that raids were conducted by Rwabugiri in North Kivu, but it is patently at odds with the facts to claim that such raids were instrumental in cementing the political control of the monarchy. Even where tributary relationships were temporarily established with local authorities, the writ of the Rwanda monarchy was precarious at best.⁴³ Nor did the presence of Kinyarwanda speakers in eastern Congo, “Hutu and Tutsi,” mean that they came under the effective control of the monarchy; in many instances, it meant precisely the opposite. The point is convincingly argued by David Newbury. The Kinyarwanda speakers, he argues, were “refugees, fleeing the expansion of the Nyiginya dynastic state at a time of intense competition among diverse political units in Rwanda. Thus, rather than being subjects of the royal court, these migrants were its opponents; their presence in Itombwe (South Kivu), in fact, represented the lack of state power in that region, not its presence.”⁴⁴ Precolonial boundaries were anything but fixed. Even within Rwanda, relations between the Rwanda court and the Hutu communities in the north and the west were remarkably fluid. Many such communities remained virtually independent until brought into the fold of the monarchy by colonial troops. So far from restricting the scope of authority of the ruling dynasty, colonial rule had the opposite effect within Rwanda. As David Newbury points out, “The effect of European boundary agreements was to expand, not contract, the reach of the Rwanda state; in fact, with the help of European power, Nyiginya dynastic structures were extended to many areas that formerly had successfully resisted Rwandan expansion.”⁴⁵ The historical evidence, in short, lends little credibility to Bizimungu's claims. They are entirely consistent, however, with the Rwanda government's definition of its security interests in eastern Congo. Though at odds with historical facts, the president's illusions had a clear political objective. Bizimungu was not satisfied with maintaining a military presence in eastern Congo to ward off the threats of crossborder raids. He felt that the military presence also had to be legitimized by history. Only by restoring the territorial integrity of precolonial Rwanda could the sovereignty of the new Rwanda be fully established.

MYTH #4: THE BANYAMULENGE: ETHNOGENESIS AS MYTHMAKING

The Banyamulenge are not pure invention. The term initially referred to “the people of Mulenge.” These were a small group of predominantly Tutsi pastoralists whose traditional habitat was in Mulenge, a locality situated on the high-lying Itombwe plateau, south of Uvira (South Kivu).⁴⁶ The ancestors of the people of Mulenge were renegades from Rwanda. Having fallen foul of the ruling Niginya dynasty, they moved to the Itombwe area in the late nineteenth century. Others followed in search of greener pastures, some from Rwanda, others from Burundi.

Although they formed a culturally and linguistically distinct community, their name never appears in colonial records. Their political significance became apparent in the years following the independence of the Congo, when they found themselves embroiled in the so-called Muleliste rebellion of 1964 to 1965 in eastern Congo. Unlike many Tutsi who had fled Rwanda during the revolution of 1959, the Banyamulenge, upon realizing that their cattle was being slaughtered to feed the rebel army, refused to cast their lot with the Mulelistes. Instead, they joined the ranks of the National Congolese Army (NCA), a fact that further contributed to distinguish them as a separate community.

The “myth” of the Banyamulenge has two sides, both at odds with the historical record and both intended to serve a specific political objective. To begin with, there is what might be called the “foreigner in native clothes” version. For many “native” Congolese, the Banyamulenge are indeed Rwandan Tutsi in disguise. Their precolonial roots are vehemently denied, and so also are their claims to citizenship rights. They are seen as the Trojan horse of the Rwanda regime. Rwanda is where they belong.

The opposite version aims at reinforcing the claims of “indigeneity” of all Tutsi residing in North and South Kivu. From a small, highly localized Banyamulenge community, numbering no more than fifty thousand people, the term has come to designate perhaps as many as 130,000 ethnic Tutsi, irrespective of their place of residence or historical roots. Lumped together under the same ethnic rubric are those Tutsi who lived in North and South Kivu long before the advent of colonial rule, those who migrated to the area during the colonial period, and the tens of thousands of refugees who crossed into eastern Congo in the early 1960s during and immediately after the Rwanda revolution. There are no parallels in the continent for such an instant and extensive ethnogenesis.

Although this chapter is hardly the place for a detailed discussion of the singularly tragic history of the Banyamulenge, their tale is a notable one of hopes betrayed, alliances undone, and vicious factional struggles. Suffice it to say that their initially very close relationship with Kagame's Rwanda was predicated on the assumption that Rwanda would in time offer protection against the mounting threats to their security posed by self-styled “native” Congolese. Rwanda, in turn, quickly grasped the strategic advantage to be gained from this pool of potential allies. There is little question that the Banyamulenge played a significant auxiliary role during the destruction of the Hutu refugee camps in North and South Kivu in November 1996. This operation was conducted with extreme brutality by units of the RPA, assisted by hundreds if not thousands of ethnic Tutsi from eastern Congo, those very elements who today call themselves Banyamulenge. The high point in the convergence of interests between the Rwandans and the Banyamulenge came in 1998, with the creation in Kigali of the RCD. Despite or because of its subservience to Rwanda, many leading Banyamulenge joined the movement. The RCD, however, has been wracked by intramural disputes, the most serious being the dissidence of a large number of Banyamulenge troops in early 2002, led by a certain Musunzu. Only after a bloody repression by units of the Rwandan army was the rebellion finally quelled. But this has only reinforced the conviction of a growing number of Banyamulenge that they have been “instrumentalized”—their standard phrase—by Rwanda. As peace talks loom on the horizon, a growing number of Banyamulenge are trying to distance themselves from their former Rwandan patron, if only to evade the retribution that could be forthcoming if and when the Rwandan army withdraws from eastern Congo.

Partnerships dissolve, yet the myth persists. For most Banyamulenge, the label validates their claims to being authentically Congolese, and it refutes accusations that they might have acted as Rwanda's “fifth column” in the Congo. By the same token, the term settles once and for all the nationality question: an issue that during the Mobutu years lay at the heart of Tutsi grievances against Kinshasa. No longer is citizenship conditioned by length of residence. All Tutsi are now Banyamulenge and hence authentic Congolese citizens.

Is this a case of political tribalism, as John Lonsdale would put it, “flowing down from high-political intrigue”? Or is it an example of “moral ethnicity creating communities from within through domestic controversy over civic virtue”? It is possibly both. In North and South Kivu, as elsewhere in the region, history's myths are in violent conflict with history's realities. Adjusting one to the other is what much of the violence in the Great Lakes is all about.

Conclusion

Reflecting on the fortunes of the Hamitic hypothesis, Edith Sanders noted thirty years ago: “The word [Hamitic] still exists, endowed with a mystical meaning; it endures through time and history, and like a chameleon changes its color to reflect the changing light. As the word became flesh it engendered many problems of scholarship.”⁴⁷ How one wishes the problems had remained restricted to the field of scholarship!

Amid all the bloodshed caused by the extension of civil war to the whole of the Congo, the myth has proven remarkably resilient. Bantu and Hamitic identities have now crystallized on a wider scale than ever before. The language used on all sides is clearly inspired by racist stereotypes. Hundreds, possibly thousands of ethnic Tutsi or Tutsi-looking Africans are reported to have been massacred in Kinshasa and other localities in the name of a threatened Bantu identity. The enemy can be easily identified by its physical markers, as warned by the national radio: “Watch the nose, it's thin and narrow, and the height: Tutsi are tall!” As one observer noted, “There was nothing subliminal about Kabila's messages. Like the infamous radio broadcasts that primed Rwanda's Hutu for the massacre of more than five hundred thousand Tutsi in 1994, the invitation was to kill.”⁴⁸ Never before has the common imagination generated a more deadly potential for regional instability.

The final word must be left to Leszlek Kolakowski:

A myth may grow like a tumor; it may seek to replace positivistic knowledge and laws, it may attempt forcibly to take over all areas of culture, and may become encrusted in despotism, terror and mendacity. It may also threaten to relieve its participants of responsibility for their own situation, drain away the desire for freedom, and bring the value of freedom as such under suspicion.⁴⁹

Such is the bitter lesson we have learned from the endless bloodshed in the Great Lakes, where the Hamitic myth is indeed growing like a tumor, with few signs of remission.