IMAGINATION, THE HAMITIC MYTH AND : THE FOUNDATION OF DIVISION IN RWANDA ______

A Thesis

Presented to the

Faculty of

California State University, Fullerton ______

In Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements for the Degree

Master of Arts

in

History ______

By

Timothy Barrette

Thesis Committee Approval:

Professor Robert McLain, Chair Professor Nancy Fitch, Department of History Professor Steven Jobbitt, Department of History

Spring, 2016

ABSTRACT

Historians studying Rwanda largely focus on the devastating that claimed the lives of narrowly a million Rwandans within 100 days. This has led to fragmented conclusions for the causation of the genocide—much of which are used to push personal agendas. The debate within these circles, however, tends to focus solely on the genocide, and it misrepresents precolonial, colonial, and post-colonial history in order to make Rwanda’s history fit their contemporary narrative. With that, the thesis

Imagination, the Hamitic Myth, and Rwanda: The Foundation of Division in Rwanda takes on the challenge of analyzing the precolonial and colonial foundations that permitted a genocide to unfold. More specifically, it investigates precolonial division and economic strife, the colonial imagination, colonial uses of alienation in society, and the irreparable effects of misused science. Overall, the purpose of this is not to levy a claim of guilty to any one constituency involved in the genocide—as everyone was guilty to an extent—but to adjust the historiographic trajectory of Rwandan history making sure new research encompasses the complications within Rwandan society.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT ...... ii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... x

Chapter 1. THE WEIGHT OF MISUNDERSTANDING ...... 1

Introduction ...... 1 Historiography ...... 7 Methodological and Theoretical Approaches ...... 12

2. REALITY, IMAGINATION, AND UNFORESEEN DEVASTATION ...... 16

Introduction ...... 16 African Rwanda (16oos to 1896) ...... 17 Source of the and the Tribes of East Africa (1864-1894) ...... 24 The Hamitic Hypothesis ...... 31 Predetermined Greatness: Geographic/Topographic Speculations ...... 32 Imagined Rwandans ...... 38 Reconciling Imagination with Reality: ...... 43 Conclusion ...... 50

3. WHEN IMAGINATION SETS THE PRECEDENT FOR REALITY ...... 51

Introduction ...... 51 German Control ...... 53 Racial Division ...... 58 Physical Force ...... 61 Christianity ...... 64 Belgian Occupation...... 68 Hutuness ...... 71 The Rise of the PARMEHUTU ...... 73

4. CONCLUSION ...... 74

When Imagination Became History ...... 74 The Discourse ...... 77

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5. EPILOGUE ...... 79

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 83

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank all of the professors at CSUF who have shaped and molded me into the academic I am today, especially those who have foregone the easy path to ensure that their career choice had a meaningful impact. Additionally, I owe a special thank you to my committee, Dr. McLain, Dr. Fitch, and Dr. Jobbitt, your feedback has been invaluable throughout this entire process, and your positivity has been the most encouraging part of this thesis. Lastly, I owe this to my wife who has encouraged me to continue on my path at every weak point in my journey; I am indebted to you for a lifetime.

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CHAPTER 1

THE WEIGHT OF MISUNDERSTANDING

Introduction

It is not only today that the Rwandan Patriot Front’s (RPF) Inyenzi [RPF supporter] Batutsis [] want to take and monopolize power in order to oppress the and cast out of the window, the Batutsi’s superiority complex has been around for a very long time. Thus, they established schools like the famous Astrida Secondary School in Butare and the Ishuri ry’Indatwa, the elite Nyanza School in Nyabisindu, opened in 1907. The schools were not for everybody, much less for the Hutus, who had been enslaved for centuries and had no access to these schools. According to the feudal colonial legend, the schools were meant for only those born to govern, in other words, Tutsi children considered as the most intelligent. It is this superiority complex which set the apart because, even today, many of them are still convinced of their intellectual superiority to the rest of the Rwandans.1

Under the guise of altruism and benevolence, powerful nation-states in Western

Europe used the continent of Africa to coerce labor, extract resources, and to commodify human beings. Scholars appropriately focus on devastating tragedies such as the slave trade, blood diamonds, or post-revolutionary wars due to their shocking nature, yet all these catastrophes were short-lived and highly visible. In the wake of these predominantly capitalistic events, countless Africans suffered irrevocable damage rooted

1 Georges Ruggiu made this inflammatory argument on Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM), a radio station that many came to know as “hate radio.” This station only ran for little over a year, but their broadcasts became popular with many ordinary and militarized . RTLM’s interviews perpetuated racial hatred towards Tutsis, moderate Hutu, and the United Nations. During the genocide, they often gave directions for killing Tutsi. In the 2014 report, “Propaganda and Conflict: Evidence from the ,” David Yanagizaw-Drott concluded that RTLM was responsible for 51,000 deaths and 10 percent of the total violence—naming them the most destructive facets of the Genocide. Georges Ruggiu, “RTLM 4,” Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines trans. U.S. State Department (April 12, 1994).

2 in the colonial imagination and worldwide misunderstandings. With Africans’ independence came the perception of Africa as war-torn and helpless, and as the scars of violence faded away both figuratively and literally in a generation, the introduction of

European ideas of nationalism, racial hierarchy, and capitalism slowly ossified with every passing year. With these ideas adulterating African culture, many Africans became aliens to their own identity. Despite the revolutions of the 1950s, ‘60s, and ‘70s, when Africans almost unanimously rejected foreign control of their governments, European concepts of exclusivity and identity—“othering”—ironically persisted in African society. The epistemological channels of Africa remained distinctly Western and consequently, disasters continued to befall the continent.

Whites by in large adopted two radically different views of the inhabitants of the continent, either continuing the colonial tradition of perceiving them as a savage being subjected to their own shortcomings due to outdated ideas of tribalism, or they began to view them as well-intentioned, but helpless. “Save Africa” became a slogan adopted by countless white “heroes” attempting to purge their guilt from building their societies off

Africa’s natural resources. Those who came to assist Africans came with missionaries, medical assistance, and most devastatingly with loans that stipulated the liberalization of markets; meanwhile, the figurative scales leaned towards Africans being indebted to the

West, despite the West’s fundamental role in the destruction of their culture and economy.

No country exemplifies this dichotomous existence quite like Rwanda. Much of the recent scholarship focuses on the short-lived yet immensely devastating genocide.

Aside from notable exceptions, many explanations for the causation of the event reflect a

3 fragmented understanding of Rwandan history, refrain from engaging the

Europeanization of the Rwandan psyche, and/or overlook the quest for power of those who masterminded the atrocity. Several authors focus on Westerners’ inability to fathom huge death tolls and subsequently blame Western powers for lack of action during the genocide with few remarking about the effects of .2 The fixation over blaming the West for not putting an immediate end to the genocide subtly propagates the idea that the West needed to save Rwanda from itself, almost inferring that Rwanda needed an external moral compass to maintain a vigilant eye over the fledgling government. More importantly, this viewpoint implies the historical psychological manipulation of Rwanda played an ancillary role; it also takes for granted that indigenous Rwandan culture (along with African culture in general) innately possesses the ability to perpetrate genocide.

Others address Rwanda’s colonial past but downplay it by arguing a precipitous drop in the demand for Rwanda’s primary export of coffee along with a rapid increase in population caused economic hardship so severe it shifted the population into a genocidal mindset.3 Again, these arguments utilize a momentary glimpse into the country’s history

2 For examples of the arguments, see Michael Barnett, Eyewitness to a Genocide: The United Nations and Rwanda (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002); Andrew Wallis, Silent Accomplice: The Untold Story of France’s Role in the Rwandan Genocide (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Fred Grünfeld and Anke Huijboom, Failure to Prevent Genocide in Rwanda: The Role of Bystanders (Boston: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 2013); Lieutenant-General Roméo Dallaire, Shake Hands With the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda (Toronto: Random House, 2003); Hazel Cameron, Britain's Hidden Role in the Rwandan Genocide: The Cat's Paw (New York: Routledge Press, 2013).

3 For examples of these arguments, see Lacey Stone, Rwandan Genocide: Economic Decline and Increased Willingness to Murder (Saarbrü cken, DE: VDM Verlag, 2008); Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Succeed or Fail (New York: Penguin Publishing, 2005); Michel Chossudovsky, “Economic Genocide in Rwanda,” Economic and Political Weekly 31, no. 15 (April 1996): 938-41; Marjike Verpoorten, “Leave None to Claim the Land: A Malthusian Catastrophe in Rwanda?” Journal of Peace Research 49, no. 4 (July 2012): 547-63.

4 while presuming Rwandans possessed the mental capability to murder due to economic duress.

For most of those who perused pre-colonial/colonial history for answers, they only skimmed the surface, using a false narrative of pre-colonial unity and peace in order to juxtapose post-colonial violence.4 Those who stress the irreparable effects of colonialism refuse to recognize the Tutsi population did oppress the Hutu population prior to colonialism, but temporal complications in identity and economics make it anything but a black-and-white scenario. This misunderstanding creates a cavalcade of issues within contemporary Rwandan politics, and on a deeper level, it denies the truth within the past. The misrepresentation causes academics to oversimplify their arguments, and unfortunately allows numerous researchers to use the genocide to progress their political agenda. Regardless of validity, the fabricated narratives led countless writers to force the causes of the genocide to fit into their political perspective, and most notably caused precolonial Rwandan historian David Newbury to claim those who write about the events need to familiarize themselves with the historiography of the region beyond the genocide.5

In heeding Newbury’s advice, rather than focusing on the immediate causes of the genocide, the following study proposes to delve deeper into the colonial past and examine the long-term effects of colonial ideology on Rwandan society. More specifically, by first

4 Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda (New York: Holtzbrinck Publishers, 2004).

5 David Newbury, “Canonical Conventions in Rwanda: Four Myths of Recent Historiography in Central Africa,” History in Africa 3, no. (2012): 41-76.

5 analyzing journals, diaries, and scientific literature from the first colonists within

Rwanda, one can reasonably conclude that prior to stepping foot in Rwanda, the colonial imagination created and propagated the idea that a “white negro,” who came from the

“racially” white north, inhabited Rwanda. Furthermore, this idea became formalized with the creation of the Hamitic Hypothesis—an idea rooted in Christian ideology and pseudo- scientific theories of racial migration patterns and hierarchy. The reclusive nature of

Rwanda and its ability to protect borders from encroaching European powers further validated the speculation within the Hamitic Hypothesis. When Germany and eventually occupied the kingdom, they established conditions of colonial occupation to reflect the imagination of explorers—despite the inaccuracies. The colonists did this in three distinct ways: (1) legitimizing the great status of the Mwamis (kings) through military backing and eliminating all challenges to the throne, (2) utilizing

Christianity/pseudoscience to add a divine and purportedly objective justification for existing economic disparities in society between the majority Hutu (the agrarian and impoverished class constituting 85% of the population) and Tutsi (the cattle-herding and wealthy class constituting the other 15% of the population), and (3) ensuring Hutu and

Tutsi identities solidified. These techniques permitted the colonial powers to enact economic and social control and established the ideological foundation upon which the militant Hutu built their genocide.

Due to the multitude of factors that shaped Rwandan culture, three major periods standout: African/Imagined Rwanda (1600s-1892), Colonial Rwanda (1892-1959), and

Revolutionary Rwanda (1959-present). African Rwanda relies heavily on the works of

Alison Des Forges, René Lemarchand, David Newbury, Cartharine Newbury, Mahmood

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Mamdani, and most importantly Jan Vansina. All of these authors spent time in Rwanda collecting oral histories in order to construct a complex mosaic of the country defying simplistic yet pervasive rhetoric in the genocide debate. This section focuses on monarchical power in order to understand the waning authority marking the country’s past. Additionally, an analysis of the economic conditions of the typical Rwandan demonstrates the disparities within the African kingdom that colonists would later expose. Within the Imagined Rwanda section, the imagined idea of the “superior” and

“white” Tutsi derives from the explorers’ inability to overcome Rwanda’s military forces.

On top of this, the section will analyze the origins of the theories of “white Negros” who came from the north by engaging the Christian and ethnological Hamitic Myth, which the first explorers to Rwanda used to explain perceived racial splits between the Tutsi and

Hutu populations.

The Colonial era of Rwanda adds numerous complicated layers pertaining to the reconciliation between imagination and reality. First, many experts in the field tend to turn the colonial tenure of Germany into a mere footnote, determining its insignificance before providing analysis. However, by understanding how Germany took East Africa and Rwanda, the rationale for low numbers in terms of colonial officials and soldiers emerges, and more importantly, such a perspective displays why the German plan for colonial expansion relied on taking advantage of divisions within society.6 In addition,

Christian missionaries played a crucial role in the spreading of colonial ideas, as they

6 Throughout the time of colonial occupation in Deutsch-Ostafrika, only 2,500 soldiers resided in the region. Moreover, under German control of Rwanda, fewer than 100 administrators, soldiers, and missionaries inhabited the kingdom. Villia Jefremovas, Brickyards to Graveyards: From Production to Genocide in Rwanda (Albany: State University Press of New York: 2002), 66.

7 convinced members of the Hutu population to accept their diminished place in society.

Belgium taking Rwanda in the fallout of WWI only complicated and furthered ethnic discrepancies. The conclusion of this chapter thus follows the rise of the “Hutuness” movement along with the fight for independence as Rwandan ethnic/racial violence plagued the region for over thirty years.

Historiography

Scholars of the Rwandan genocide have proposed several hypotheses as to where the guilt truly rests. Academics, such as Bernard Lugan, in his African Legacy: Solutions for a Community in Crisis (2003), still assert that the guilt of the genocide rests solely on the shoulders of those who actively participated in it; the dissemination of racial hierarchy and ethnic categorization bears little relevance in the genocide and war that trailed. Lugan contends that the true failure of humanity in Rwanda lies in Rwandan’s inability to resolve prior tribal tensions and adopt a western style government of participatory democracy. Regrettably, his arguments—which conveniently provided justification for Western hegemony and liberation from guilt—garnered traction in the public sphere, despite the overwhelming abundance of evidence refuting these claims.

Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2005) suggests that the genocide had nothing to do with the shifting of society or ethnicities, but in fact was the consequence of overpopulation and the economic hardship created by . In

Rwanda before the Genocide: Catholic Politics and Ethnic Discourse in the Late

Colonial Era (2012) Jay Carney, posits that the Catholic Church held little responsibility over the hardening of racial divisions. In fact, Carney indicates that true racial division did not come about until the late 1950s when revolution was at the forefront of the Hutu

8 population’s minds. The arguments of authors such as Lugan, Diamond, and Carney’s receive heavy criticism because they underestimate the crippling totality that contamination of ideas holds on individuals within society.

Several authors differentiate arguments for the cause of the Rwandan Genocide.

Writers, such as Lieutenant General Romeo Dallaire, in Shake Hands with the Devil: The

Failure of Humanity in Rwanda (2005) and Michael Barnett in Eyewitness to Genocide:

The United Nations and Rwanda (2003) argue that Western forces remained stagnant in the face of conflict, and due to the United Nations ineptitude, avoidable atrocities occurred. Meanwhile, Philip Gourevitch, in We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We

Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda (2008), asserts correctly that the chronic issues that continually bog the Great Lakes region7 down result from the fallout of displaced populations and a complete misunderstanding of the region, yet his colonial arguments are cursory and trivializes the complexity of identity. Although these authors argue skillfully, Gerard Prunier’s The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide (1995) keys in on the deep and everlasting effects that colonialism and contamination of ideas held over the Great Lakes population for centuries—providing a good starting point for understanding Rwanda. He also gives insight into the often-overlooked role of the

Catholic Church within the Rwandan government. Prunier meticulously focuses his ideas on the devastating effects that Belgian administration held over Rwanda. Prunier along with Colin Waugh, in Paul Kagame and Rwanda: Power, Genocide and the Rwandan

Patriotic Front (2004), shares the argument that Rwanda’s strong central government

7 Congo, Uganda, Rwanda, , , and Zambia make up this region.

9 allowed and supported the genocide, but it gives too much clout to a single strong administration’s ability to move a population to commit such a personal genocide. Josias

Semujanga’s Origins of Rwandan Genocide (2003) addresses the pre-colonial society and attributes a shifting societal structure from being tri-polar (e.g. chief, herder, farmer or family, friend, foe) to bipolar (Tutsi vs. Hutu)—which, these categorization stretch to fit the past into his argument. He lacks a sharp focus on the Hamitic Hypothesis, shifting identities, and precolonial tensions. Also analyzing pre-colonial Rwanda, Timothy

Longman dissects the influence that the Catholic Church had in disseminating ethnicity throughout Rwanda in Christianity and Genocide in Rwanda (2009). Another tradition of analysis has arisen within the historiographic trajectory of Rwanda—a revisionist movement. With authors such as John Rucyahana stating in The Bishop of Rwanda

(2007), “They [Hutus and Tutsis] were considered equals, they intermarried, they served in the same army, and they were in the service of the same king,” they thoroughly misrepresent Rwandan history as somewhat utopic.8

The vast majority of authors who discuss Rwanda find the need to key in on the pervasive effect that foreign occupation maintained over the history of the Great Lakes region, yet almost all fall short of distinguishing exactly how they did. Most experts succumb to the temptation of fast-forwarding to the climax of confrontation—the

Rwandan Genocide. In this abridged version of history, scholars overlook the colonial construction of history that shaped Rwanda’s genocide. This has led many to argue with an anachronistic understanding of ethnic constructions. This allurement leads to

8 John Rucyahana, The Bishop of Rwanda (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson Inc. 2007), 10.

10 underestimation or oversimplification of the Hamitic Hypothesis and the development of racial hierarchy within Rwanda. Not jumping to genocide and focusing the majority of resources on the development of ethnicity in Rwanda, deconstructs the old picture of

Rwandans and rebuilds them in a post-colonial mindset. The strongest voices from this style of Rwandan history come from David and Catharine Newbury, Alison Des Forges,

Johan Pottier, René Lemarchand, Gérard Prunier, and Jan Vansina. The body of work that these historians have placed together fills serious gaps within Rwandan history.

Catharine Newbury’s Cohesion of Oppression (1988) challenges the idyllic kingdom of

Rwanda before German occupation by questioning the ease in which Hutu and Tutsi shifted social classes and the dominant mode of economic production. David Newbury in

1991 wrote Kings and Clans: Ijwi Island and the Lake Kivu Rift, 1780-1840 about the burgeoning new kingdom next to Rwanda—substantiating the claims that clan identity held more credence than the kingdom in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Within the same vein, Jan Vansina wrote Antecedence to Modern Rwanda (2005) in order to provide a foundation for pre-German Rwanda. Vansina builds on Newbury’s less-utopian narrative, providing the reader with a truer picture of the oscillating borders and waning authority of the Rwandan Kingdom. Alison Des Forges’ Defeat is the Only Bad News

(2011) shifted the historiographical trajectory of Rwanda by shedding light on Mwami

Musinga—the only king to work with the Germans. This book dissects one of Rwanda’s most turbulent times as Musinga fought to reestablish order in a failing kingdom. This critical work brings into question the role of Germany in Rwanda—as most historians write off there their colonial period as largely uneventful. Although many of these

11 individuals have numerous works, all maintain a narrow scope, causing gaps in knowledge about the colonial period and revolutions.

This lack of research focused on the region during the colonial occupation exists because the primary sources that concentrate on the region have complex terms/geography along with a language barrier. Of the primary sources currently collected the works and letters of Henry Stanley, John Hanning Speke, Thomas Wallace

Knox, and J. A. Wood make up the “Orientalized” myth of the “white Negro” living in

Rwanda. These explorers traveled next to Rwanda and wrote of the potential lost Hamitic peoples. E. Heawood and Oskar Baumann write about the first European to step into

Rwanda. While Count Gustav Adolf von Götzen’s Durch Afrika: Von Ost nach West

Resultate und Begebenheiten einer Reise Deutsch-Ostafrkanischen Kuste bis zur

Kongomundung in den Jahren 1893/94 (1895) recounts his exploration of the interior of

Africa and his invitation to be the first person to visit the Rwandan courts. He synthesized his observations by publishing his journal, and provided crucial information about the development of a Rwandan identity and the existing power structures. Furthermore,

Richard Kandt—who brokered numerous deals with the Rwandan government as the longest European resident in the country—stands out as one of the most telling primary sources. The Catholic/Christian perspectives cause more difficulty as the primary sources are difficult to obtain, but strong secondary source work featuring the writings of prominent members of the primary missionary group within central Africa, the White

Fathers, along with newspapers, gives enough to build a strong case in the role of the

Catholic Church in constructing race. Another unique source, authored by the Tourist

Bureau of the Belgian Congo and Ruanda-Urundi, titled Traveller’s Guide to the Belgian

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Congo and Ruanda: Second Edition (1956) alleges to contain factual and necessary ethnological information for those visiting Rwanda. Additionally, numerous documents from the Hutu movement during the Belgian colonial period provide a base to understand the mindset of revolutionary Rwanda.

In order to tie these directly to the genocide, I will take popular Rwandan culture into account, utilizing transcripts from the incredibly popular hate radio station Radio

Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM) and the lyrics of Rwandan pop music icon

Simon Bikindi. The influence that both of the individuals held over the Hutu population caused Hutu to consider them leaders within the genocide. In fact, international courts held RTLM radio personalities and Bikindi guilty of causing genocide without actually killing. RTLM and Bikindi’s focus on Rwandan history assists in correlating the influence history held in the genocide.

Methodological and Theoretical Approaches

Along with the shallow historiography outside of the Genocide, a deeper theoretical analysis of the region is needed. Historiographically speaking, the authors who engaged

Rwandan history stayed away from a theoretical approach; I speculate that this is due to the dearth of a clear contextual understanding of Rwandan history. This, unfortunately, avoids confronting the metrics of power that caused the genocide to occur. When approaching diaries, letters, and official publications, relativism plays a paramount role in the respective parties involved in the expansion of Rwanda, whether it is indigenous or foreign knowledge. It is important for readers to remain cognizant that both the indigenous and colonial populations held their own realities, and despite the innate falsehood within the Europeans constructed reality, they took actions based off their

13 perceived truth. This resulted in the Germans and Belgians possessing the tools to establish the colonized’s societal conditions, thus ensuring that the European imagined reality became a physical one in Rwanda. Reconciliation between these two representational realisms becomes rampant in Rwanda, one of the last areas in Africa to fall to colonialism.

Too often historians of Rwanda quickly disabuse the falsehoods within explorer/colonial text/documents in order to correct the narrative. What remains overlooked is the realism revealed within the fictitious representations of the Tutsi and

Rwanda, in other words, the truth within the lie. What would cause Europeans to imagine

Rwandans how they did? Searching for the answer requires an antipositivistic look at those who imagined and colonized Rwanda/ns. When deconstructing the explorer’s runaway imagination and the colonists’ subtler motives, the notion of the special hermeneutic of empathy is entirely useful. One cannot rely on reading these texts with scientific precision alone in order to grasp the complications hidden within the words, it requires a radical empathy. This empathy does not excuse actions—better yet, it attempts to understand them in order to prevent them within our time.

In a larger sense, the motivation for discursively engaging this material with this approach lays in the Marxist notion that the present coexists with the past, implying that hidden underneath the tensions of the present lays the past actions that shaped modern reality. This is where it is the job of the historian or activist to animate events frozen in time. In other words, events are not immediately historical—they are only rendered historical once brought into the dialectic.

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Recurring throughout this argument, Edward Said’s concept of Orientalization applies itself in the reproduction of history in several capacities. For example, in 1891

Stanley—moved by the stories of the first person to write about Rwanda in 1863, John

Hanning Speke—claimed to view the white Negro. Although it may be merely speculative, it is apparent that Stanley took Speke’s belief that either a Hamitic tribe, a

White Negro, or both peoples inhabited Rwanda and confirmed it because he believed the fables of the region to be fact. Obviously, this is an apocryphal history, yet authors such as Henry Northrop or J.F. Packard synthesized what they read, and argued them as fact without stepping foot in Rwanda. Arguably, the orientalism of the region magnified when teaching of Hamitic Hypothesis and the anthropological superiority of the Tutsi by missionaries who had no prior knowledge of Rwanda. It ultimately shows its effects in the genocide, when the genocidaires placed 40,000 Tutsi bodies in northerly flowing rivers to send the “alien” back home.9

Michel Foucault’s ideas on power-knowledge—knowledge’s relationship with the creation of power—is persistent in the examination of the stratification of Rwandan society while under colonial occupation. This plays an important role in whites controlling epistemological spaces throughout Rwanda (either schools or churches).

Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed holds a heavy influence on my analysis of the continuing conflicts that have defined the region. Most specifically, Freire illuminates

9 Chinua Achebe’s essay, “Africa’s Tarnished Name” parallels this sentiment within an African framework. His argument is rooted in the irony of Africa being the closest geographic continent to Europe, yet it is the antithesis of Europe within the European imagination. Achebe more importantly questions if Europeans view Africans as human, or simply as the other. He concludes that the thought process of othering is not new, as it began during the slave trade and colonialism, continuing to today, but he makes the critical distinction that this is a conscious decision. Chinua Achebe, “Africa’s Tarnished Name,” The Education of a British Protected Child: Essays (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2009) 3-24.

15 systems of imbalanced power throughout history—coming to an overarching conclusion that when members of the oppressed are permitted to take on the role of the oppressor, they in turn act as harshly as their former oppressor. This is because those who were oppressed only know oppression, and when they are given power, all they know is the oppressive systems and how to act within that system. In order to disrupt this binary opposition, both the oppressor and oppressed needs to be conscious of their individual role—if not, chronic issues will plague society. Freedom from this system can be achieved through education, or as Freire concludes, a critical pedagogy. This idea came to a head with the Rwandan Revolution where the Hutu population in turn becomes the oppressors. Interestingly, one of the most heavily criticized authors of Rwandan history,

Mahmood Mamdani, utilizes a Freirean argument in Rwandan history suggesting that the

Tutsi population shifted into the embodiment of the colonial oppressors and de facto took on a white identity. His critical distinction lays the idea that the Tutsi population was not a black ethnicity, but a white invader who continued to prolong the colonial occupation of Rwanda and oppress the Hutu population. His claims lay more so within the framework of the genocide, but overall constructs a strong theoretical approach as they are firmly rooted in how explorers to the region began to view Rwanda.

Overall, the conjoining of such a wide variety of theories will lend itself to the attempt to understand the complex way in which colonists and Rwandans expressed power, and the influence foreign powers held in constructing Rwandans identity. In addition, these theories question knowledge and its sources, race and its validity, and most importantly, power’s relationship to knowledge. Ultimately, these queries expand beyond the region of the Great Lakes and apply themselves to all facets of power.

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CHAPTER 2

REALITY, IMAGINATION, AND UNFORESEEN DEVASTATION

Eeeee! Remember the whip and the chore! Remember the days you [Hutus] spent Serving the master without remuneration And therefore rejoice of Independence!

We said goodbye to the monarchy The feudal and colonial yokes disappeared at the same time And we got the democracy that suits us. Come and let us celebrate the independence. Remember the days of walking, The many nights that you spent in difficult conditions, Carrying tribute to the home of the head or the royal court, At the expense of your family who had needed you And when, exhausted, you arrive at your destination, We were not even appreciated. Come, let us celebrate the independence.10

Introduction

Rwandans lived in closed off fashion, but they were no different from most

African kingdoms. They resided in an extremely complex system, with an array of pressures coming from local economics, larger politics, waning authority, military intervention, and keeping local Arab slave traders at bay. Additionally, Rwanda before colonialism had a frequently shifting political structure where complications surrounded their identities. The kingdom undoubtedly stood out as the fiercest military force in the

10 Written the by Hutu nationalist Simon Bikindi in the months before the genocide, he intended his lyrics to incense rage among the Hutu not only for the Tutsi population during colonialism, but for also the oppression which Hutu endured in ancient Rwanda. Simon Bikindi, “Twasezereye Ingoma ya Cyami (We Said Goodbye to the Monarchy),” Amahoro (1993).

17 area, causing neighboring nations to fear them—and as locals passed information to

Europeans, explorers began to fear them as well.

Europeans, on the other hand, came to Africa for a host of reasons including searching for the head of the Nile, as they believed it housed the Garden of Eden, or more advantageously, opening up trade routes to exploit the continent. Despite their motives, explorers romanticized Rwanda within their imaginations—a crucial point that has yet to have any scholarly engagement. Apparent in the fictions about the mysterious “Ruanda” was the laying of the foundation of what explorers wanted to discover. In essence, explorers such as Henry Morton Stanley and Jonathan Hanning Speke predetermined the individuals who lived in Rwanda from lore told to them by those in outlying countries and Arab traders. It is important to reconcile the explorer’s imagination with the reality of the first accounts of Europeans setting foot into Rwanda. Overall, this chapter addresses the dualistic realities of Rwanda within the minds of two separate populations—

Rwandans and Europeans.

African Rwanda (1600s-1896)

These were Hutu kinglets. Like him, the other kings [Tutsi kings] killed the Bahinzas and conquered the country of the Bahutus [Hutus] ruled by the Bahinzas. All the details can be found in the Inganji Kalinga. Since their kings conquered the country of the Bahutus by killing our kinglets and then enslaving the Bahutus, how could they claim to be our brothers?11

The Rwandan Kingdom—often oversimplified by the majority of Rwandan genocide historians—has numerous layers of complications pertaining to boarders, economics, and political control. Rwanda, before colonial occupation, was by no means

11 Georges Ruggiu, “RTLM 4,” Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines trans. U.S. State Department (April 12, 1994).

18 simplistic or uniform, and temporal issues arise when piecing together a more accurate picture of its history. The constructing of its history prior to European intervention relies heavily on oral histories passed down from generations; adding to this, the tracing of linguistics aids in the reconstruction of migration patterns of populations.

In order to clarify, a contextualization of Rwanda’s ethnic composition provides backdrop for local tensions. Experts conclude that the Twa population, a small minority

(less than 1%) of hunter-gathers originally occupied ancient Rwanda. Shortly after, the majority (80%) Hutu population migrated to the region, bringing agrarian practices to the

Rwandan hillsides. The second minority (20%) population, Tutsi, was a nomadic group of cattle herders who moved in following the Hutu, comprising the current ethnicities within Rwanda during the genocide.12 The Tutsi population held more cattle per capita than the Hutu population—and they leveraged the cattle as wealth within the Rwandan economic system due to the cattle’s ability to sustain a healthy diet and create offspring.

In numerous points in history, the Tutsi tied this wealth to restrictions on chiefdom, military participation, and divinity.

The region of ancient Rwanda up until the 1600s consisted of fragmented localities and independent tribes/clans. These smaller scale organizations—in most cases a family—typically occupied a single hill. Hills in Rwanda retained a special meaning throughout their history as Rwandans closely tied to it to their familial identity along with it serving as the family’s primary economic mode of production. Although heavily

12 Stefan Wolff, Ethnic Conflict: A Global Perspective (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). It is important to note that anthropologists question the validity of ethnic categories—currently in Rwanda, the government no longer a legally defined category of Twa, Tutsi, or Hutu. Also, these numbers shift throughout the kingdom’s history due to conquering of foreign lands.

19 debated, most historians believe that Rwanda formally became a kingdom in the seventeenth century under the auspice of the first Mwami (king) Ruganzu Nodri.13 The

Mwami held an esteemed position in Rwandan religion as an intermediary between the god Imana, and he possessed the ability to reach ancestors. He leveraged this ability to centralize authority, first through the political networks of the royal court where he incorporated rituals of newly annexed clans. Through this annexation, they tied powerful

Hutu lineages into the courts as advisors to the Mwami known as abiiru. This became crucial because they could not exercise true power, but instead only advise the king.14

The administration integrated numerous tribal members into the freshly formed government and expanded military participation, which served as a unifying factor for once unaffiliated parts of the kingdom.15 Additionally, the creation of two notable economic systems created local control, ubahake and ubukonde, which laid the foundations of a class based society.16 The ubahake system consisted of two parties, typically the wealthier Tutsi cattle-owning patron and the impoverished Hutu

13 Jan Vansina, Antecedents to Modern Rwanda: The Nyiginya Kingdom (Wisconsin: University Press, 2004), 44-66; David Newbury, “The Clans of Rwanda: A Historical Hypothesis,” The Land Beyond the Mists: Essays on Identity and Authority in Precolonial Congo and Rwanda (Ohio: University Press, 2009), 215-21; Frank K Rusagara, Resilience of a Nation: A History of the Military in Rwanda (, RW: Fountain Publishers Rwanda, 2009), 14-16; Christopher C. Taylor, “Dual Systems in Rwanda: Have They Ever Really Existed?” Anthropological Theory 4, no. 3 (September 2004): 359.

14 Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton, NJ: University Press, 2001), 63.

15 Newbury, Land Beyond the Mists, 228.

16 Many Rwandan historians and anthropologists furiously debate the extent in which Ubahake client relationships permeated Rwandan society. Modern scholarship—most prominently Cathrine Newbury’s Cohesion of Oppression: Clientship and Ethnicity in Rwanda 1860-1960—refutes the popular notion from revisionist scholars that the Ubahake system provided the Hutu ethnicity the ability to move wealth classes by acquiring cattle.

20 agriculturalist client with land. The patron offered protection and sometimes the promise of a cow in exchange for the client’s servitude. This tied the client’s identity to their patron and caused a rift with their tribal/local distinctiveness.17 The more popular ubukonde system, on the other hand, permitted the agrarian population to hold onto some of their tribal identity. This lineage-based system centered on the distribution of land. The lineage head of a hill allocated property first to those within his ancestry and sometimes to individuals outside of the familial ties. In exchange, allottees expressed gratitude through voluntary gifts—mostly cattle and beer. Ubukonde fell outside the jurisdiction of the Rwandan court thereby ensuring authority remained largely local and in Hutu hands.18 Although these two systems kept power contained in differing ways, the military, along with linguistics, began to amalgamate once hostile neighbors and foster a strong monarchy. Additionally, despite the static nature of economic classes, marriage and tribal identity could shift, albeit rarely, the categories of the Hutu and Tutsi.

Furthermore, neighboring tribes feared Rwanda due to its militaristic might during the short reign of Rujugira (1756-65), who devised a strategy that stayed firmly in place until Germany came to the region. The monarch constructed umuheto, or social armies, to place at the borders of Rwanda. This strategy kept foreign invaders at bay, while also permitting cattle raids into neighboring kingdoms, which brought more wealth

17 Catharine Newbury, “Ubureetwa and Thangata: Catalysts to Peasant Political Consciousness in Rwanda and Malawi,” Canadian Journal of African Studies 14, no.1 (1980): 97-111; Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton: University Press, 2001) 64-68.

18 Jamie Crook, “Promoting Peace and Economic Security in Rwanda through Fair and Equitable Land Rights” California Law Review 94, no. 5 (October, 2006): 1492; Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers, 67; Vansina, Antecedents to Modern Rwanda, 132-34.

21 into Rwanda and gave the kingdom a reputation of fierce militancy. It also played the subtle role in the shifting terrain of Hutu/Tutsi relations as Tutsi primarily occupied the position of warrior while Hutus and Twas held administrative positions. However, as time progressed from the mid-1700s to the late 1800s military necessity opened up positions within the Rwandan army for Hutu participation. Although not fully ingrained into the army at the status of Tutsi, these military roles provides an insight into the complex relationship between the two populations.19

It is important to distinguish that the Tutsi and Hutu identities are without question just as complex as the borders of Rwanda. Addressing this, Mahmood Mamdani lucidly describes these identities prior to centralization:

First, we need to make an analytical distinction between three different kinds of identities: market-based, cultural, and political. For Hutu and Tutsi are best understood, not as market-based or cultural identities, but a political identities reproduced first and foremost through a form of the state.

Second, political identities—and the state institutions that undergird them—need to be historicized so they may also be understood as changing identities. There has not been one single and constant definition of Hutu and Tutsi through Rwandan history. Rather, the definition has shifted as a consequence of every major change in the institutional framework of the Rwandan state.20

These identities shifted radically under every new political structure that took Rwanda, but with the rise of their last precolonial Mwami, a seismic shift in identity took hold.

Authority within the Rwandan Kingdom remained partially diffused until 1853 when the infamous Mwami Kigeri IV Rwabugiri ascended to the throne. Known as the

19 Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers, 67-69.

20 Ibid., 59.

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“quintessential military monarch” he aggressively expanded the Rwandan kingdom and ensured that authority centralized around his Tutsi rule.21 Rwabugiri exerted vigorous control immediately after conquering foreign territories by taking their land and cattle from them and deeming those inhabiting the land Hutu. He also placed Tutsi from his personal court in administrative positions throughout the kingdom in an attempt to ensure everything remained harmonious.22 It is important to note that this added a significant boost to the Hutu population within the borders, bringing the population to the ninety percent Hutu, the number frequently quoted today. As consequence of his hold on foreign lands, he began to tighten his grip on hills already within the Rwandan Kingdom. The previous Mwami Yuhi Gahindiro started the action of taking land from the Hutu lineage heads and redistributing it to members of his administration, an act that began to undercut the authority of Hutu chiefs. Rwabugiri took this action further by introducing the national practice of uburetwa, which forcibly made ubukonde obsolete.23 In uburetwa, the militant King disbanded tribal power structures by decimating local governments and replacing the heads of tribes with three representatives from his royal court (primarily

Tutsi family members). Then they coerced labor out of only the agrarian Hutu population, while the pastoral Tutsi population periodically donated cattle as a form of

21 Newbury, Land Beyond the Mists, 149.

22 Newbury, Cohesion of Oppression, 51-52.

23 The only exemption came from those Hutu who established status elevating ubuhake relationships. Some outlying families continued the practice of ubukonde as a sign of rebellion. Barrie Collins, Rwanda 1994: The Myth of the Akazu Genocide Conspiracy and Its Consequences (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) 41-51.

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payment.24 This seriously challenged local identity and caused populations to identify as

Rwandan. In an essence, he ensured that everyone worked or fought for the kingdom of

Rwanda—and he reaffirmed his authority violently, most notably by publicly removing the testicles of truculent Hutu and challengers to the crown.25 Additionally, his policies accelerated the disintegration of traditional identities and social structures by associating the terms “Tutsi” or “Hutu” into metonyms for those with power verse those who toiled or labored. In a political sense, Rwabugiri undermined the abiiru, publicly demonstrating his lack of interest in their advice. Despite these significant changes to the social and cultural climate of Rwanda, the Hutu did not wholesale reject their Tutsi leaders, as many of them participated in the military and administrative systems despite holding almost no political influence.

Following the king’s death in 1895, monarchical authority weakened under the new Mwami, Mibambwe Rutalindwa. Two reasons caused the governmental fragmentation. First, newly acquired territories refused to comply with the system that the previous king had thrust upon them, subsequently repudiating Rwandan rule. Second, many of the court appointed officials entrusted with collecting tax revenues embezzled

24 This only heightened tensions between the Tutsi and Hutu populations living within Rwanda. Although the endogamous populations sporadically lived together, intermarried, and shared governmental positions, this unfair distribution of labor caused animosity and violent revolt against the Hutu’s oppressor. David Anderson, Carolyn Brown, Johan Pottier, Re-Imagining Rwanda: Conflict, Survival and Disinformation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge: University Press, 2002), 110; Cathrine Newbury, “Ubureetwa and Thangata”; Taylor, “Dual Systems in Rwanda,” 362-68.

25 Newbury, Land Beyond the Mists, 155-56

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the funds and became extremely wealthy.26 These two factors, coupled with a lack of a response from the monarch in rebelling territories, caused wealthy suitors to vie for the crown. Less than a year into his reign, a coup d’état spearheaded by Ranucunshu led to the dethroning of Rutalindwa and brought forth the only king to closely work with the

German empire, Mwami Yuhi V Musinga in 1896.27

Source of the Nile and the Tribes of East Africa (1864-1894)

Ruanda bears the name of Unyavingi to the people of Ukonju, Usongora, and Ankori, and is a large, compact country, lying between the Alexandra Nile and the Congo water-shed to the west, and reaching to within one day's long march of the Albert Edward. It also overlaps a portion of the south-west side of that lake. The people are described as being very warlike, and that no country, not even Uganda, could equal it in numbers or strength. –Henry Morton Stanley 28

At the same time as the Rwandan Kingdom struggled through its identity crisis, the romanticization of the “dark continent” coupled with technological advancements and economic ventures sparked the exploration of Africa by the newly industrialized

European powers. Philosophers, scientists, economists, and social commentators, such as

Thomas Malthus, Adam Smith, Johnathan Stewart Mill, and Joseph Arthur, the Comte de

Gobineau, created a multifaceted mantra for colonial control. The ideas they espoused all fed into each other: scarcity of supplies, genetic predisposition for subservience of blacks, racial hierarchy, competition with your neighbors, and nationalism. At the same time, the

26 Danielle de Lame, A Hill Among a Thousand: Transformations and Ruptures in Rural Rwanda (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005).

27 Alison Des Forges, Roger Des Forges, David Newbury, Defeat Is the Only Bad News: Rwanda under Musinga, 1897-1931 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011), 55-61.

28 Henry Morton Stanley, The Story of Emin’s Rescue as Told in Stanley’s Letters ed. J. Scott Keltie (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1890), 140-41.

25 search for the head of the Nile made for exciting reading for the European population fixated on reading explorers’ journals—where many believed it to be the location of the

Garden of Eden. Hidden within the search for the Nile, private corporations and

European governments recognized the ability to extract resources from Africa. While searching for the head of the Nile and trading opportunities in Tanganyika and Uganda, explorers and ethnologists wrote in their journals and notes about “Ruanda.” Curiously, their only perceptions of Rwanda were from afar and heavily speculative. Those who speculated about Rwanda focused on three primary aspects: their fierce militaristic reputation and closed borders, their geographic location as a predetermined location of greatness, and the “whiteness” of the Tutsi population.

In order to understand why explorers viewed Rwanda as a militaristic force to be taken seriously, John Hanning Speke—the first person to write about Rwanda in 1864— provides a valuable clue. When recounting a conversation with his Arab guide, the guide suggested Rwandans closed themselves off, stating:

Rumanika [a local guide] said the villages in Ruanda were of enormous extent, and the people great sportsmen, for they turned out in multitudes, with small dogs on whose necks were tied bells, and blowing horns themselves, to hunt leopards. They were, however, highly superstitious, and would not allow any strangers to enter their country; for some years ago, when Arabs went there, a great drought and famine set in, which they attributed to evil influences brought by them, and, turning them out of their country, said they would never admit any of their like amongst them again.29

The Mwami’s suspicion closed Rwanda off to European explorers within the area, as the king viewed them as an extension of Arab traders. In reality, Speke encountered the

29 John H. Speke, The Journey of the Discovery of the Nile (Edinburgh, GB: William, Blackwood, and Sons, 1864).

26

Rwandan policy of umuheto, where the king ordered elite Tutsi warriors on the border to prevent anyone from entering the kingdom.30 Interestingly, the guide did not exaggerate about the militancy of those Tutsi protecting their borders, in fact, when it came to whites temporarily resting on the shores of the rivers that lied against the kingdom, Rwandans quickly attacked. Evidence of this comes twenty-three years later, when the travel companion to the famed explorer Henry Stanley, wrote a series of adventures entitled The

Boy Travelers wherein he recalled encountering these quick attacks. Thomas Wallace

Knox, Stanley’s companion, logged his experience with Rwandan warriors: “We began from the extreme south end of the lake the next day to coast along the Muvari or Ruanda coast, and near a small village attempted to land, but the natives snarled like so many spiteful dogs, and drew their bows, which compelled us—being guests of Rumanika—to sheer off, and leave them in their ferocious exclusiveness.”31

Understandably, Knox did not comprehend why the Rwandan kingdom would not open themselves to European explorers. In seeking an answer, he asked his Arab guide to explain further the reason for Rwandan’s “ferocious exclusiveness”:

Their doubts of our character were reported to us by a friendly young Arab as follows: Kassanga, chief of Ruanda, says, ‘How can the white men be good when they come for no trade, whose feet one never sees, who always go covered from head to foot with clothes? Do not tell me they are good and friendly. There is something very mysterious about them; perhaps

30 Umuheto ironically served as more of a way for Rwandans to steal wealth from neighboring countries, and less as a defense. However, Europeans and Arabs did not understand the complexity of Rwanda, and assumed that their only objective was to hold them at bay.

31 Thomas Wallace Knox, The Boy Traveler’s on the Congo, Adventures of Two Youths in a Journey with Henry M. Stanley “Through the Dark Continent” (New York: Harper & Brothers, Franklin Square, 1888) 122.

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wicked. Probably they are magicians; at any rate, it is better to leave them alone, and to keep close until they are gone.32

Rwandans reluctance to allow explorers the chance to enter the hilly and mountainous region built mystery, but it also opened up another aspect to feed the explorer’s imagination. Within East Africa, many consider Ugandans to be one of the—if not the— finest warriors in the area, but even Ugandans did not dare enter Rwanda. In fact, Knox wrote the perception of Rwandans from a Ugandan guide’s viewpoint: “The people of that country are not cowards. They have taken Kishakka, Muvari, and have lately conquered Mpororo. The Waganda [Ugandans] measured their strength with them, and were obliged to retreat. The Wanya-Ruanda are a great people, but they are covetous, malignant, treacherous, and utterly untrustworthy.” 33 It became common knowledge that in East Africa, Rwanda stood out as the most militaristically inclined kingdom. This did not fit into the explorer’s mindset, because within the colonial imagination, Africans existed for Whites to possess them—and in this case, they could not possess Rwandans.

When faced with this reality, wild speculation and pseudo-science explained European’s inability to compete with blacks, and they utilized Christian lore and genetics to buttress their arguments.

Hamitic Hypothesis:

Since then Hutu have put their strength together and understand that Tutsi should abandon forever their thirst for power, I think that this is clear no foreigner will rule Rwanda for us.34

32 Ibid., 188.

33 Ibid., 116.

34 In many respects, the Hamitic Hypothesis constructed a narrative of the Tutsi as a superior race— coming from white antecedence. However, this rhetoric, when taken by the militant Hutu, shifted from

28

It is important to have a true grasp of the Hamitic Hypothesis in order to understand Rwandan history. Fueled by the romantic stories of myth and legend that provided the motivation to brave the unknown terrain in the heart of Africa, explorers in the area leaned on the Christian stories of the lost tribe of the Hamites. The Hamites derived from the story of Noah’s Ark, where Noah tasks his sons Shem, Japheth, and

Ham with repopulating the areas where the flood left barren. Ham, whom Noah sends to

Africa, inadvertently sees his father naked, and Noah retaliates by cursing Ham’s son

Canaan to be “a servant of servants.”35 Because this story purports that Canaan is the genetic root of all Africans and his progeny was predetermined to be slaves, it becomes crucial in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when those searching for justification for found their answer in the word of God. When this hypothesis met enlightenment principles, Europeans began reclassifying Egyptians as white due to advancements in civilization, and this hypothesis took on another idea—that Hamites came from Egypt, or in this case a country of Caucasians.36 As one prominent scholar who supported this idea, C. G. Seligman wrote in his 1930 Races of Africa,

…the civilizations of Africa are the civilization of the Hamites, its history the record of these peoples and of their interactions with the two other African stocks, the Negro and the Bushman, whether this influence was exerted by highly civilized Egyptians or by such wider pastoralists as are represented at the present day…The incoming Hamites were pastoral

Tutsi superiority to Tutsi foreign invaders. Kanto Habimana, “RTLM 18,” Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines, trans. Gaudance Mukakigeli (May 23, 1994).

35 Gn 9:20-27; 10:6.

36 Robin Law, The ‘Hamitic Hypothesis’ in Indigenous West African Historical Though” History in Africa, 36 (2009): 296-97.

29

‘Europeans’—arriving wave after wave—better armed as well as quicker witted than the dark agricultural Negroes.37

He believed, with many others, that all African achievements derived from Hamitic influence within Africa. Many explorers/colonists believed this without question.

Explorers such as Speke stoked the ideas of Hamitic superiority:

It appears impossible to believe, judging from the physical appearance of the Wahuma [Tutsi], that they can be of any other race than the semi- Shem-Hamitic of Ethiopia... Most people appear to regard the Abyssinians as a different race from the Gallas, but, I believe, without foundation. Both alike are Christians of the greatest antiquity... [They] fought in the Somali country, subjugated that land, were defeated to a certain extent by the Arabs from the opposite continent, and tried their hands south as far as the Jub river, where they also left many of their numbers behind. Again they attacked Omwita (the present Mombas), were repulsed, were lost sight of in the interior of the continent, and, crossing the Nile close to its source, discovered the rich pasture-lands of Unyoro, and founded the great kingdom of Kittara, [Uganda, northern Tanzania, eastern Congo, Rwanda and Burundi] where they lost their religion, forgot their language, extracted their lower incisors like the natives, changed their national name to Wahuma, and no longer remembered the names of Hubshi or Galla….38

Most scholars believe that Europeans and Africans constructed the idea of the kingdom of Kittara. Africans did so in order to propagate local religions and to justify expansion, while Europeans utilized it as a powerful tool for reconstructing Hamitic migration patterns.39 Regardless of the validity of the migration patterns, Speke completely bought into the idea of whites living in Africa with his most powerful claim: “[T]hough even the

37 C. G. Seligman, Races of Africa (Oxford, GB: University Press, 1933), 96. In this book, Seligman more broadly focused on the alleged migration patterns throughout Africa. For a more refined look at the Eastern side of Africa see, H. H. Johnston, E. Torday, T. Athol Joyce and C. G. Seligman, “A Survey of Ethnography of Africa: And the Former Racial and Tribal Migration in That Continent,” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 43 (July-December, 1913): 375-421.

38 Speke, The Discovery of the Nile, 247.

39 Ndebesa Mwambutsya, “Pre-Capitalist Social Formation: The Case of The Banyankole of Southwestern Uganda” Eastern Africa Social Science Research Review 6, no. 2 (January, 1991): 78-82.

30 present reigning kings [in the Kittara area] retain a singular traditional account of their having once been half white and half black, with hair on the white side straight, and on the black side frizzly.”40 Speke purportedly heard royalty claim their own whiteness.

Despite the claim being highly suspect, it reveals several conclusions about the mindset of the first explorer to write about Rwanda. First, it shows that Speke believed that several monarchs in eastern Africa understood their ethnic heritage, and second they realized to an extent their royalty arose out of their whiteness. This was not a mere off the cuff remark though, as Speke doubled down these claims in his less popular What Led to the Discovery of the Nile released later the same year as his Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile. In fact, he quotes himself to reiterate his belief in the greatness of the Wahuma.41 He also reveals his fondness of the Christian based portions of the

Hamitic Hypothesis, in stating his “empathy” towards Negroid races, he opines, “I accounted for their cruel destiny in being the slaves of all men…by the common order of nature, they, being the weakest, had to succumb to their superiors, the Japhetic and

Semitic branches of the family.”42Although Speke may have been the loudest proponent of the Hamitic Hypothesis, every explorer who wrote about the area from Stanley to

Knox utilized the idea of Hamitic superiority when imagining Rwandans.

The importance of both Christian and anthropological versions of Hamites cannot be overstated, as both of them lean heavily on the idea that Tutsi’s came from anywhere

40 Speke, The Discovery of the Nile, 247.

41 John Hanning Speke, What Led to the Discovery of the Nile (Edinburgh, GB: William, Blackwood, and Sons, 1864), 367-68

42 Ibid., 340.

31 but African origins. Conveniently, if an explorer such as Speke did not agree with the scientific understanding, they could still adopt the biblical understanding that darker skin represented a punishment from God. Naturally, European explorers deemed Hamites racially superior to the “Bantu” populations due to the closeness to both a Christian god and whiteness. This historical construction allowed imperialists the justification for imagining the Tutsis’ privileged position in society.43 It also rendered the Tutsi not just a rivaling tribe/ethnicity to Negros, but a separate race altogether.44

Understanding this hypothesis makes subtle statements from the first group of explorers standout—as they were hinting at coded Hamitic language. Explorers who pointed out physical characteristics such as being tall or lean helped push the idea of white origin. Speke’s fellow explorer James A. Grant recalled while on the same trip that his Arab guide stated:

He [a guide] also abused the Ruanda people, because they refused to allow any coast-men into their kingdom, which, he said, was even more populous than Uganda. The specimens seen by us were merely men from its borders, who had come with produce by water in three days from the west. They were tall, lean men, with the shortest loin-cover of skin I ever saw...45

43 Christopher Clapham, “Rwanda: The Perils of Peacemaking,” Journal of Peace Research 35, no.2 (1998):197; Liisa Helena Malkki, Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania (Chicago: University Press, 1995), 77-80.

44 This tension will arise during the genocide, as the militant Hutu population no longer view the Tutsi as an aggressive neighbor, but as an extension of German/Belgian imperialism—especially during the 1990 Ugandan refugee problem. Mahmood Mamdani explores this idea at length while incorporating Frantz Fanon’s theory of native violence. Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers.

45 James Augustus Grant, A Walk Across Africa or Domestic Scenes From my Nile Journal (London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1864) 161.

32

Grant does continue his admiration of the Tutsi population, “I went early amongst the

Watusi; handsome people, beautiful rounded small heads, prominent large eyes, thin noses, rather compressed upper jaws; all so clean and trim…”46 All of these traits fit the ideals of western European beauty—tall, thin noses, well groomed—and more importantly, they are in stark contrast with the typical “Negroid” traits. These characteristics of the Tutsi and Rwanda’s reluctance to permit explorers only stoked the flames of the colonial imagination further. This led to others cognizant of both aspects to make essentialist claims based on geography.

Predetermined Greatness: Geographic/Topographic Speculations:

Philippe Broyon-Mirambo fed into the narrative of migration-based whiteness within Africa with a more refined approach. Broyon-Mirambo, a European trader who fancied himself “a relation of the Sultan of Unyamwesi,” came to Africa under the pretense of establishing trading partners.47 Broyon-Mirambo had a meteoric rise in popularity within the geographic societies following the formation of the Association

Internationale Africaine in 1876—an organization that was comprised of the top

European philanthropists seeking to penetrate central Africa. He gave guidance to

Belgium, England, Stanley, and just about any European passing through Africa as he

46 Ibid., 78.

47 The Unyamwesi kingdom, located just southeast of the kingdoms of Burundi and Rwanda, became a powerful trade ally to several countries and assisted in establishing the East Africa German Empire. Broyon-Mirambo was so enamored with the kingdom, that when the king—King Mirambo—offered to share his name, Broyon added the Mirambo portion to his legal name.

33

stood out for successfully integrating into central African kingdoms.48 With that, his conclusions that Africans who came from the North were superior to those in the South carried cultural weight. Despite his sweeping claims being based purely in observational science, Broyon-Mirambo articulately ties together coded Hamitic language into his idea of geographic superiority:

The inhabitants of Eastern Africa may be considered to be divided into two great and distinct races; the one, which seems to belong to the northern hemisphere, is distinguished from the other, which comes from the southern, not less in physical characteristics than in language and customs. The northern people are generally of tall stature, with slender limbs, and long and silky hair, and rarely show the true negro profile; their languages are guttural, almost without vowels; they are warriors, hunters, and shepherds, and seldom touch vegetable food. Such are the Grallas, the Masai, the Watussi, and other tribes with which I am not acquainted. The southern race, on the contrary, have the nose flattened out, thick lips, the hair woolly and curly, the body strong and bulky. Their dialects ring with noisy vowels (the Ki-suaheli is one of these idioms). To this race belong the Wanyamwesi, Wagogo, Wazigua, &, and all other tribes south of the Equator. They live chiefly on grain and vegetable diet: although they breed cattle, they rarely eat the flesh. They are also less brave and warlike than the people of the north, and this is no doubt the reason why the Northerns have poured like a flood over the lands south of the Equator, through a breadth of fully six degrees of latitude, and exercise a sort of tyranny over the inhabitants of these regions. Thus in Usagara and Ugogo, the Wahumba, although few in numbers, are the rulers, and control the chiefs at will: in Uyanzi, the Wataturu dominate; and in Uvinza and Uhha, the Watussi. Further north still, the representatives of the southern race are to be found only in a state of servitude.49

Whether religiously or anthropologically defined, Broyon-Mirambo finds himself using the Hamitic rhetoric by juxtaposing physical traits. However, he also utilizes the biblical

48 Norman Rober Bennett, “Philippe Broyon: Pioneer Trader in East Africa” African Affairs, 62, no.247 (April, 1963): 156-57.

49 Philippe Broyon-Mirambo, “Description of Unyamwesi, the Territory of King Mirambo, and the Best Route Thither from the East Coast,” Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society 22, no.1 (1877-78): 31-32.

34 idea of black’s subservience to whites. In particular, all members of the north naturally took leadership over all Negroes from the south, forcing blacks into natural “servitude.”

This idea is aligned with Noah’s punishment of Ham’s son Canaan to be the servants of all servants—even Broyon-Mirambo’s language reflects the same terminology as the bible. Rwanda being north and northwest of Usagara, Ugogo, Uyanzi, Uyinza and Uhha, and having a large population of Tutsi, made it naturally fit into this model of Hamitic superiority.

Broyon-Mirambo may have been the first to base his hypothesis in a geographic understanding from north to south, but anthropologist Edward Coode Hore championed his own outer to inner geographic claims. Hore, who lived in the Tanganyika just years after Broyon-Mirambo published his description of the Unyamwesi, journeyed through

Africa from west to east and he geographically placed the heart of Africa, specifically

Rwanda, in the perfect location for African superiority. Hore reasserted the previous claims that the Negroes and Wahuma solely inhabited the continent of Africa—but he drew severe and new contrasts between them:

Two Instances will suffice to illustrate this—the Negro, and the M’huma, or Abyssinian type of African. The Negro race extends in unbroken line from the western sea-coast to Tanganyika, where they are represented by the Wamarungu, the Waguha, and Wagoma. The section of Africa thus occupied is one of those parts where inner heights are so broken down over the terrace that it is obliterated, the whole forming one grand continuous slope from the centre to the coast. Its inhabitants, in like manner, exhibit a certain continuity of habits, manners, and industries throughout, only modified by the influence of foreigners and foreign things near the coast. The Wahuma, repressed on the lake shores by the Warundi and Wajiji, show more clearly the changes incident to more varying habitat. Following this Racial line from the barbarous civilisation [sic.] and warlike aspect of its coast portions, we find them on the plains of the terrace become wandering nomads and cattle tenders; further on, but still retaining their cattle, they are found cultivating the ground, or settled as a shepherd class amongst other cultivators; and finally, on the lake

35

shore, having found a permanent home, while still retaining their cattle, have fully developed or revived all the native industries of ironwork, weaving, agriculture ect. by which as well as by their features, we recognise [sic.] their relationship with the natives of the north-east coast.50

Rwanda—being located in the geographic heart of Africa—made sense as a location of Wahuma superiority.51 Hore’s conceptions of Africa add another layer of predetermined greatness for the yet to be explored Rwanda, as he describes a gradient distribution of civilization from west to east. Interestingly, though, in his next passage he proclaims that this positive movement stops in the center of Africa—more specifically, in the region of Southern Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi: “Apart from diversity of race, manners, and language, we find also this remarkable fact, that along almost any section of Africa from coast to centre, the farther that the traveller advances into the interior the better is the condition of the natives found to be: less drunkenness, less immorality— more industry and independence.”52 As one of the foremost explorers of the Tanganyika region (which comprised nearly all of with the exception of Burundi and Rwanda), his mindset, which is very common in explorers guides of Africa, pinpoints

50 Edward Coode Hore, Tanganyika: Eleven Years in Central Africa (London: Edward Stanford, 1892) 164-65.

51 The Wahuma is the overarch ethnologist term of those of white northerners, while the Tutsi are a subsect of that race.

52 Ibid. 165. To further substantiate his claim he utilized a quote from the young missionary Wilmot Brooke located in Niger in his footnote: “The people are like their country, dirty, degraded, and far from prepossessing; ferocious cannibals for the most part, bound by countless cruel superstitions, and last of all dragged lower still by their contact with the white man. If we ascend the river [Niger] we very soon leave the interlacing creeks and poisonous swamps of the delta behind. The squalid villages are seen no more; they are replaced by fine, clean, open towns, with thousands of inhabitants, cannibalism is left behind, and we enter a new world, physical, political, social, and religious.” Obviously, one can ascertain by holding such a low view of his people, Brooke failed almost immediately.

36 the area of the explored Uganda and the unexplored Rwanda and Burundi as a place of special interest.

Topographically, explorers surmised just upon viewing the clouds pushing against the mountains that this area was spiritually special and financially advantageous.

Explorers described their view of the Virunga Mountains53 peeking through the clouds as mysterious, and as a place of notable significance. Speke described from afar what he viewed when passing the Virunga Mountains for the first time: “Returning home to the tents as the evening sky was illumined with the red glare of the sun, my attention was attracted by observing in the distance some bold sky- scraping cones situated in the country Ruanda, which at once brought back to recollection the ill-defined story I had heard from the Arabs of a wonderful hill always covered with clouds, on which snow or hail was constantly falling. This was a valuable discovery, for I found these hills to be the great turn-point of the Central African watershed.”54 Geographically, it made sense as the headwaters of the Nile (which was somewhat of a correct assertion), and Speke hinted that with the nonstop snow. The mountains that Speke wrote about—featuring Mount

Mfumbiro—was invoked in numerous logs, though, where almost all explorers wrote about them with adoration. However, the award winning French geographer Elisée

Reclus added a layer of imagination to Rwanda when writing his ten volume series, The

Earth and Its Inhabitants:

Mount Mfumbiro all the slopes seem to be covered by an immense forest of useful timbers. Northwards M'poro and U-Sagara, also called Ankori or Mkole, are also said to be rich in valuable products… This still unexplored country will

53 They are located on the Rwandan side of the border between Rwanda, Uganda, and Congo.

54 Speke, The Journal of the Discovery, 213.

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doubtless sooner or later occupy a position in the history of the continent analogous to that which it already holds in its geographical aspect. Thanks to its climate and productions, it may become a new Europe in the very heart of Africa, and here will be the principal health-resort of the Nile and Congo lowland regions.55

Reclus makes it abundantly clear that he wants Rwanda to hold vast wealth—yet, again a geographer provided a solid sounding theory to back his speculation. He invokes the larger geographic arguments of predetermined greatness, while implying that those inhabiting the country have enough European attributes to become European.

Due to Rwandans reclusive nature and the beauty of the kingdom viewed from afar, many along with Reclus assumed it held an immense mineral wealth. In fact before exploration of the actual terrain, The Stateman’s Year-Book for the year 1891 claimed

“The land [Rwanda] is stated to abound in minerals, hot springs, and valuable timber covering all the slopes of Mount Mfumbiro (10,000 feet). Ruanda appears to be a very fertile, well-watered, and healthy region, standing at a mean elevation of about 3,500 feet above sea level.”56 Rightfully, one may assume that the geographer’s imagination constructed an image of Rwanda because they wanted an answer to the reclusiveness and militancy towards Europeans. However, other factors may have been at play. For example, a proposal from Stanley at the American Association for the Advancement of

Science for ensuring Rwanda, Uganda, and Unyoro displays the more capitalistically driven motives for entering Rwanda:

There are great empires of natives, and republics, such as Uganda, Ruanda, Unyoro; a country of broad plains for the grazing of cattle, as the Masai Land.

55 Elisée Reclus, The Earth and Its Inhabitants: Africa, vol.1 (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1886) 86.

56 “Ruanda,” The Statesman’s Year-Book: Statistical and Historical Annual of the States of the World for the Year 1891 ed. J. Scott Keltie, vol. 28 (London: Macmillan and Co., 1891), 165.

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There are numerous deposits of gold and silver, and rich mines of copper and of iron. There are beautiful forests which produce woods of an inestimable value, Indian rubber in inexhaustible quantities, gums, and precious spices. There pepper and coffee are grown. There are tribes susceptible of appreciating the advantages of civilization, provided they are protected against the attacks of brigands and the ambuscade of the slave-trader. In my opinion, these facts are sufficient to justify my proposition to define, by means of the easily ascertained limits I have proposed, the frontiers of the free commercial territory of equatorial Africa, and to guarantee the freest possible access as well from the east as from the west.57

In a larger sense of politics, Rwanda was in the midst of determining what colonial power would hold it as their own, and open markets would ensure that more investors would be able to take profit for their own. It is important to note though, that despite the fact some investors may have fabricated what they imagined in order to speed up the exploration of

Rwanda—it did not discount the imagined information that they put out to the public. In fact, that topographic information played into the Hamitic/geographic understanding of who inhabited Rwanda. Considering Rwanda possessed the ability to hold off the powerful African Kingdoms that surrounded their borders, it was in the geographical target for superiority in both the west to east and south to north , and whites had yet to enter the Kingdom, Rwanda, and more specifically its inhabitants, had a reputation that they needed to live up too. Despite the numerous references, describing

Rwanda’s reclusive nature and geographically, more daunting is the imagined individuals that inhabited the land.

Imagined Rwandans

Through the mixed and muddled information coming out of east Africa, one thing became clear, Rwandans should be the greatest race to arise out of Africa. With the

57 “Notes and News” American Association for the Advancement of Science 5, no. 102 (January, 1885): 62.

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Wahuma clearly being of white roots and the Tutsi race deriving from the Wahuma, in conjunction with the geographic theories locating Rwanda as the center point of predetermined greatness, their secluded nature only permitted the colonial imagination to run wild. Immediately following his visual description of the Virunga Mountains, Stanley reaffirmed this notion when sensationalizing information gathered from Arab traders and locals:

On its summits dwell the chief medicine men of Kabba Rega, a people of European complexion. Some half-dozen of these people I have seen, and at sight of them I was reminded of what Mukamba, king of Uzige, told Livingstone and myself respecting white people who live far north of his country. They are a handsome race, and some of the women are singularly beautiful. Their hair is kinky, but inclined to brown in color. Their features are regular, lips thin, but their noses, though well-shaped, are somewhat thick at the point. Several of their descendants are scattered throughout Unyoro, Ankori, and Ruanda, and the royal family of the latter powerful country are distinguished, I am told, by their pale complexions.58

His presumptions tying whiteness equating to leadership is to be expected, but given that he sticks to that idea and claims to have viewed “some half-dozen” of them brings into question the validity of his statement. In an ontological sense, this undoubtedly debunks the credibility of his writing; however, despite his lack of credibility, how he chose to describe those he deemed of a royal family is telling. Even further, Stanley—who to this day many scholars still venerate for his exploration—automatically lends his credibility to the statements he makes. Surely, other explorers must have read his work, and kept out a vigilant eye for the militaristic “people of European complexion” and fed into Stanley’s speculation.

58 Stanley, “Geography and Exploration,” 695.

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Stanley did not simply come to this conclusion without influence though. Earlier in his journey, he viewed a group of Rwandans from the Wanyavingi tribe. His guide

Bevwa led him to believe Rwandans were not only white, but as white as Stanley himself:

When they [Rwandans] had paddled away, Bevwa was questioned as to these Wanyavingi. What were they? Were they a tribe? Then Bevwa looked hard at me and said —“Why do you ask? Do you not know that we believe you to be of the Wanyavingi who but the Wanyavingi and Wachwezi are of your colour?” “What, are they white people like us?” “They have no clothes like you, nor do they wear anything on their feet like you, but they are tall big men, with long noses and a pale colour, who came, as I heard from our old men, from somewhere beyond Ruwenzori, and you came from that direction; therefore you must be of the Wanyavingi.” “But where do they live?” “Ruanda..."59

Throughout his journey, Stanley remained highly impressionable—especially when it came to unveiling new discoveries. He does appear to embellish his stories as well, as he was aware that he wrote his journals for a captive European audience. In this case though, his imagination became reality for other explorers.

Without entering the country, many explorers predetermined the ruling status of

Tutsi, and as James Augustus Grant, a former travel companion of Stanley’s, wrote when synthesizing multiple works/letters from Stanley and F.J. Pocock, he determined that those in Rwanda were “The white people with woolly hair, whom he [Stanley] describes as similar to Prince Nyamionju of Uganda, are difficult to make out without some further information; but from Mr. Stanley’s account and my own opinion, they seem to be a type of fair-skinned Wahuma—an Abyssinian-like race of tall people, who hold large tracts of

59 Henry Morton Stanley, In Darkest Africa: Or, The Quest, Rescue, and Retreat of Emin, Governor of Equatoria, vol.2 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1891) 345.

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grazing country and own hundreds of cattle.”60 This evidences the idea that Europeans believed the ruling class of Rwanda had white lineage, furthers Orientalizes the region, and creates an apocryphal history. What truly stands out is the term “Wahuma,” which becomes almost a scientific synonym for Hamitic by the 1880s. According to the anthropologists who frequented the area, the Wahuma separated into numerous tribes—of the upmost importance for Rwandan history is the Watussi.61 It is not until the actual exploration that anthropologist determine that the aristocratic class of cattle herders are indeed Watussi—as they are sparsely scattered in the south of Uganda and the north of

Tanganyika.62 With that point of clarity, it is evident that when speaking of the Watussi, almost all explorers hold the race in the highest-esteem.

Philippe Broyon-Mirambo stands out as the earliest known proponent for the superiority of the Watussi population. Although little is known about his time in

Tanganyika—where the Kingdom of Unyamwesi was located—what he wrote about in his time is incredibly valuable. Unyamwesi territory is located at the border of the

Burundi Kingdom and thus made it susceptible to Rwandan attack, and as Broyon-

Mirambo points out,

Previous to the reign of Mirambo, the Watussi, a foreign people from the north, tyrannised over all the tribes of Unyamwesi, who, in consequence of the dissensions which prevailed between their various chiefs, were not able to resist the united strength of the Watussi. These last also, although

60 J.A. Grant, “On Mr. H.M. Stanley’s Exploration of the Victoria Nyanza,” Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London 46 (1876): 26. Grant wrote this as a defense of Stanley for his harsh treatment and murder of Africans in areas where he explored—this at times is easily seen when he describes the benevolent nature of Stanley.

61 Most explorers referred to the Tutsi population as either Watussi or Watusi.

62 Tanganyika is modern day Tanzania.

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they became scattered over the whole land, and had no recognised leaders, always kept themselves distinct and separate, never uniting in marriage with a people whom they considered their inferiors, and against whom they were closely combined. 63

Within Broyon-Mirambo’s colonial imagination, it is evident that the Watusi population is astutely aware of a multitude of European philosophies, e.g. genetics mixing through intercourse, the Watusi recognizing their own purity, and separating from those deemed inferior. The idea of the Watusi coming from a different stock does not arise out of a vacuum though; it developed through a highly nuanced Hamitic Hypothesis.

Reclus, on the other hand, took the information he gathered from the guides in the area to add to the mystery of Rwanda. Instead of focusing solely on the Wahuma population, he shifts his attention of a fabled pigmy:

Most extraordinary things are related of this mysterious country, wicked dwarfs, far more formidable than giants, taking a prominent part in all these reports. It is probable that a race of pigmies, like the Akka of the forests of the river Welle, and the Obongo of the Ogoway basin, occupy the upland valleys of Mount M'fumbiro and the ranges running northwards towards Mounts Kibanga and Gambaragara. Stanley states that the king of Uganda sent an expedition against these dwarfs, but the cold seems to have prevented his soldiers from penetrating into the upland valleys. Here also the chief power appears to be in the hands of the Wa-Huma, these conquerors from the east having thus apparently reached the water-parting between the Nile and Congo basins.64

Again an author reiterates the Wahuma role of conqueror and the narrative of outer to inner geographic determinism, yet adds a layer of mystery. The “wicked dwarfs” who were more feared than giants, clearly provides further explanation for Rwanda’s fierce

63 Philippe Broyon-Mirambo, “Description of Unyamwesi, the Territory of King Mirambo, and the Best Route Thither from the East Coast,” Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society 22, no.1 (1877-78): 30-31; Norman Robert Bennett, “Philippe Broyon: Pioneer Trader in East Africa,” African Affairs 62, no.247 (April, 1963): 156-164.

64 Reclus, The Earth and Its Inhabitants, 86

43 military. However, it also transcends the typical narrative of pseudo-science and moves into a realm of complete imagination.

Fables, such as these, existed to garner interest for exploration. It is fair to assume though, that the explorers who constructed these overarching themes about geographic greatness, topographic wealth, Hamitic superiority, and Tutsi domination, believed in their speculations to varying degrees. However, six years after the tales of “wicked dwarfs” the first journey to the continent’s most reclusive country was sanctioned, and the imagined Rwandans met reality.

Reconciling Imagination with Reality

No one who speculated about the mountain kingdom hypothesized that the inhabitants were a mixed economy of Hutus and Tutsis. By and large, Europeans expressed admiration for their militaristic prowess and seemingly only focused on the supposed white Tutsis. The presupposition of a “white negro” being mentioned in written records of Rwanda—even with visual confirmation for Stanley—undoubtedly left explorers shocked when they first entered the kingdom. Who were the Hutu population that inhabited ninety percent of Rwanda—and why had no guides mentioned them? Upon perception they appeared to be agrarian labor, or maybe even slaves; however, those entering the borders for the first time did not understand the complex history of Rwanda, nor did they care much, as most of the first exploration was under the pretext of the

German financial interests.

Despite the speculation of mineral wealth, great races, and a country that could rival Europe, the lack of an Arab guide brave enough to assist explorers through Rwanda halted European exploration. That is until the Austrian cartographer, Oskar Baumann,

44 became the first European to step foot into Rwanda in 1892—while under the reign of the centralized Tutsi government of Rwabugiri. Baumann—who ironically dedicated the journal of his journey through Rwanda to John Hanning Speke, the first person to mention Rwanda in text—attempted to approach his observation in a non-biased manner.

However, he was astutely aware of the myths and speculations when he writes about

Rwanda for the first time in his journal: “Beyond appeared high grassy mountains with the dark points of the settlements; it was Rwanda, the mysterious Kingdom, where a white Negro was supposed, that mythical land, heard of by many travelers but still no one had entered.”65 With his expectations high, his first observation of this imagined

Rwandan remained somewhat prosaic:

The skin color of the Watussi varies. In Usukuma, ever in Unyamwesi, they are mostly dark, but one could ascribe this to blood mixtures, while those are almost impossible in the Rwanda and Urundi-mountains. But there is pleasant light brown alongside dark blackish brown people, as in general with dark colored races the skin color with the residence and the way of life varies, and only the type remains constant. Whether it, as is claimed, even "white," i.e. very light-colored Watussi, is not known to me, but I do not think this is impossible.66

Baumann provided more or less what he viewed, but he subtly continued to hint at the possibility that the legend of a mythical white race in central Africa was a possibility.

65 Oscar Baumann, Massailand zur Nilquelle: Reisen und Forschungen der Massai-Expedition des Duetschen Antisklaverei-Komite in de Jahren 1891-1893 (Berlin: Geographishe Verlagshandlung, 1894) 82. Original translation: Jenseits tauchten hohe grasige Berge mit den dunkeln Punkten der Siedlungen auf; es war Ruanda, das räthselhafte Königreich, in welchem weisse Neger vermuthet wurden, jenes Fabelland, von dem vieleReisende gehört, das aber noch Keiner betreten hatte..

66 Ibid., 205. Original translation: Die Hautfarbe der Watussi variirt sehr. In Usukuma, überhaupt in Unyam wesi, sind sie meist dunkel, doch könnte man dies Blutmischungen zuschreiben, während solche in Ruanda und den Urundi-Gebirgen nahezu ausgeschlossen sind. Aber auch dort findet man neben angenehm lichtbraunen, dunkle und schwarz braune Leute, wie denn überhaupt bei dunkelfarbigen Rassen die Hautfarbe mit dem Wohnsitz und der Lebensweise variirt und nur der Typus konstant bleibt.*) Ob es, wie behauptet wird, auch »weisse«‚ d. h. sehr lichtfarbige Watussi giebt, ist mir nicht bekannt, doch halte ich dies nicht für unmöglich.

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This gave Baumann’s fellow scholar E. Heawood a skewed understanding of the kingdom as he recounted the cartographer’s journey stating,

In connection with this subject, it is certainly remarkable that at the source of the Kagera [Northwest Tanzania] Dr. Baumann should have come across the Missozi ya Mwezi, or ‘mountains of the moon,’ and should have found the country of the Warundi [Burundi], to be known to the neighboring tribes as the ‘land of the moon,’ from a past ruling race [Hamites], derived thence by tradition. While careful not to lay too much stress on this coincidence, Baumann thinks that an earlier greater extent of this kingdom may have led to the appellation being connected with the Nile source….The region is of particular interest as forming the borderland between the Bantu and Hamitic races…The tribes near the Nile sources do not show much variety, being almost exclusively Bantu and agriculturalists, with the exception of the Watussi, a Hamitic race scattered through the counties west of the Victoria Nyanza. While forming the ruling class in Uganda and elsewhere, in other parts they form a caste of cattle-rearers. Their cattle, marked by the great development of horns, is allied, according to Dr. Adametz, to the “Sanga” of Abyssinia, which confirms the belief in the derivation of the tribe from those parts. The Bantu tribes on the east and west of the Victoria Nyanza appear to have come from the north, while the Wayamwesi advanced from the south and separated the two branches of northern immigrants. In speech the Wazinja, etc., west of the lake are related to the Wanyoro, but physically they have felt the influence of the Watussi [Tutsis], who have themselves, however, adopted the speech and mode of life of the peoples among whom they live. 67

This statement not only reveals that Baumann perceived the Rwandan government as having a permanent tradition of Tutsi centralized authority, but, the quote ties Tutsi authority to the theories of North African racial superiority.68 Furthermore, in his observations Baumann reiterates the Tutsi population’s superior status by separating them from the Hutu population stating, “The Bantu population call by the Watussi in Urundi

67 E. Heawood, “Dr. Baumann’s Journey through East Africa,” The Geographical Journal 4, no.3 (September, 1894): 248-49.

68 Speke, The Discovery of the Nile; R. F. Burton and John H. Speke, “Explorations in East Africa,” Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society of London 3, no. 6 (1858): 348-358

46 and Ruanda as ‘Wahutu,’ an expression of the ‘subjugated’ means and is identical to the

Wauddu the Waganda-Watusi, after which the landscape Uddu (Buddu) is named.”69

Obviously, Baumann would have witnessed economic stratification—as they were in the height of Rwabugiri’s reign, but it is clear that he recognized the rift between Hutus and

Tutsis, a point that Germans and Belgians would come to exploit.

Count Gustav Adolf von Götzen, the second explorer in Rwanda in 1894, held a similar reason to entering Rwanda as Baumann did. He entered the kingdom with intentions of taking it for economic exploits—but he also let the mystery of the region affect how he perceived the people. First before entering, he mentioned that, “There are some people in these regions, the Kabba Rega cannot defeat; they live in Rwanda, while the king of Uganda himself does not dare.”70 Again, an explorer focused on Rwandan’s ability to hold them at bay—painting an image of a fierce warrior. Götzen knew that the imagination effected explorer’s perceptions of Rwanda, and he accused Arabs of fanning the flames, as they too could not overcome the fierce warriors to enter the kingdom. He wrote in his journal addressing the mystery of Rwanda, “All other information at last, I had obtained from well-traveled people, especially in Uschirombo, were entirely to refer to the realm of fable and are only insofar remarkable, and they shed light on the fact of

69 Baumann, Massailand zur Nilquelle, 205. Original translation: Die Bantu-Bevölkerung nennen die Watussi in Urundi und Ruanda »Wahutu<, ein Ausdruck der »Unterworfene« bedeutet und mit den Wauddu der Waganda—Watussi identisch ist, nach welchen die Landschaft Uddu (Buddu) benannt ist.

70 Count Gustav Adolf von Götzen, Durch Afrika: Von Ost nach West. Resultate und Begebenheiten einer Reise Deutsch-Ostafrkanischen Kuste bis zur Kongomundung in den Jahren 1893/94 (Berlin: Geographische Verlagshandlung Dietrich Reimer, 1895), 148. Original translation: Es giebt einige Leute in diesen Gegenden, die Kabba-Rega nicht besiegen kann; sie leben in Ruanda, wohin sich selbst der König von Uganda nicht wagt.

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the previous, complete world seclusion of Rwanda.”71 He points to myths of small

Pygmies with long beards hiding in the forests of Rwanda in order to execute military actions and wise men whose heads were too large to stand without help.72 Invoking these ideas demonstrates that he—at minimum—was aware of Reclus’ beliefs of the militant

Pygmies. However, it also shows that he had a preconceived idea of what Rwanda held in store.

Upon entering the kingdom, he became the first visitor to meet with royalty. He echoed the statements of Tutsi superiority mentioned by Baumann when he visited

Rwandan courts.73 He concluded that the kingdom used racial categories as the primary distributer of authority within their economic system of uburetwa. He noted the differences in Tutsis and Hutus immediately as well. He pointed to the structure of society being held together by the tall, high-ranking Tutsis, meanwhile numerous Hutus toiled and labored for the Tutsi in a state of servitude. Von Götzen was very critical of the

Hutu population who tried to swap provisions for gifts when the Tutsi were not in sight, but when caught, the Tutsi caused them to flee.74 The interactions where he perceived the

Hutu as cowards and the Tutsi as exercising dominance over their counterpart heavily

71 Adolf von Götzen, Durch Afrika, 148. Alle übrigen Informationen endlich, die ich von weitgereisten Leuten, namentlich in Uschirombo (s. oben) eingeholt hatte, waren vollends ins Reich der Fabel zu verweisen und sind nur insofern bemerkenswerth, als auch sie die Thatsache der bisherigen, völligen Weltabgeschlossenheit Ruandas beleuchten.

72 Ibid. 148-151.

73 Ironically, these courts actually hoped they Götzen would free them from their new overlord. Alison Des Forges, Defeat Is the Only Bad News, 65-69.

74 Adolf von Götzen, Durch Afrika.

48 affected German colonial policies, especially when Götzen climbed administrative ranks and assumed the role of Rwandan governor.75

Interestingly, French explorer Lionel Decle provides one of the most intriguing perspectives from an early Rwandan explorer as he despised the Germans and de facto their territory. Historians surprisingly have almost completely forgotten his perspectives of the kingdom. Decle sympathized with the British Empire, dedicating his famous book,

Three Years in Savage Africa, to the Cecile Rhodes, and soliciting the foreword from

Stanley.76 However, four years before this publication, he view the Watusi population in

German held Rwanda with a great deal of excitement. In fact, in his journal article he stated, “Of all the various African races, the Watusi are amongst the least known, although they certainly deserve a special study. They have, so far, been described under the name of Wahha, but the latter are really but the greatest tribe of the Watusi race.”77

He goes on to describe what he viewed as he traversed the southern portion of the kingdom:

I am the first traveller who has crossed the whole southern part of the Uhha country, this, on my way from Ujiji to Urambo, and I was very much struck by the extraordinary difference that is to be found between them and their Bantu neighbours. Pure types are not common and are only to be found amongst the aristocracy—if I may use such an expression for Africans. The mass of the people have lost their original type through

75 Thomas Turner, Congo War: Conflict, Myth and Reality (London: Zed Books, 2007), 53-57.

76 Lionel Decle, Three Years in Savage Africa (London: Methuen & Co., 1898). This book is a highly political due to its defense of British exploration, and its continuous criticism of the German and Belgian officials and empires. Aside from lambasting the locals for their perceived ineptitude, Decle finds it necessary to backtrack even on his views of Watussi. I speculate that his newly adopted harsh tone derives from Britain losing possession of the Mfumbiro Mountain—the mountain that marks the entrance into Rwanda in the Southeastern tip of Uganda—despite getting in exchange.

77 Lionel Decle, “The Watusi,” Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 25 (1894): 423.

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intermixture with neighbouring tribes. The pure types have long thin faces with a long line nose and a small mouth, their colour is of a rich brown without the violet black tints usually found in the Bantu races. But what is most striking in them is their hair; it does not grow in woolly patches of a dull colour, but is of a glossy black evenly spread all over the head and with but a slight curl in it. In fact it looks very much like the hair of the Abyssinians. The Watusi range in height from 5 ft. 6 to 5 ft. 8: their hands and feet are small. In fact they appear to me like a kind of connecting link between the Abyssinian and Bantu types.78

To be fair, most anthropologists believed the Watusi race to have spread themselves throughout parts of Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, and in very small numbers, Tanzania.

Additionally, confusion typically surrounded the exactitude of location in which he was mentioning Uhha, due to his use of arcane terminology. However, the most telling part of what Decle consider “Uhha country” comes in his footnote, following the passage, “The

Waruanda call themselves white men, and deny all connection with the Bantu tribes.”79

This footnote reveals more than the previous quotes because it exposes numerous conclusions. First, it helps narrow where he was passing through in 1894—southern

Rwanda—where the Mwami’s control began slipping quickly. Second, it demonstrates— despite the fact that Decle is almost certainly distorting his recollection or outright lying—that in the minds of the explorers, white was the ideal, and even those in Africa believed it. More importantly, he claims the Watusi race recognized their whiteness, or

Hamitic origin upon first contact with whites. Due to that conclusion, it is inferred that they have some recollection of their white origins, thus reaffirming explorer’s imagination.

78 Ibid. 424.

79 Ibid., fn.4.

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Conclusion

Considering the imagined character that inhabited Rwanda, one may ascertain that

Decle wanted the population to be white before he found them, thus leading him to make his comments about Rwandans acknowledging that Whites were superior to the Bantu tribes. Regardless of the validity of the comment, it undoubtedly highlights the fact that by the time explorers were entering Rwanda, they had enough second hand and fabricated information that they fit Rwandans into their imagined roles before entering the tiny landlocked country. Perhaps if Speke had not spoken of “Ruanda” as a country cut off from the rest of Africa, speculation surrounding the country would have dissipated.

Instead, the inconclusive attempts to find the head of the Nile conjoined with one of the last portions of central Africa to welcome explorers caused the colonial imagination to run wild. Additionally, the explorers for an unknown reason, refused to remain critical of the local guides and Arab traders when it came to information surrounding Rwanda. It may have been the hope of naïve explorers that Rwanda truly could have been the answer that they were all searching for, but it may have also been their denial that any African kingdom possessed the mental and militaristic fortitude to hold Europeans at bay.

Unfortunately, the reasons can only be speculated now, but more important to the overall history of Rwanda is how those colonial powers acted with differing sets of knowledge. As Germany and Belgium reconciled between the imagined character of the

Rwandans and the true people who inhabited the region, they began setting the condition for their imagined character to reign supreme. Ultimately, with the colonial powers acceptance of their own constructed knowledge, they established the precedent of tension between the Tutsi and Hutu population during their imperial tenure.

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CHAPTER 3

WHEN IMAGINATION SETS THE PRECEDENT FOR REALITY

Introduction

“The history of the southwestern Wahuma State Ruanda is uncertain. It cannot be determined whether it originally belonged to Kitara or whether it was connected with

Ukanga; the only certain fact is that the supremacy of the Wahuma, who were here known as Wasamboni, was established over the Wavira, and that the power of the kingdom in course of time has rather increased than diminished.”80 This quote found within the H.F Helmot’s The Worlds History: Survey of Man’s Record captures the general understanding of Germany’s new holding. Actual knowledge of the kingdom came through the grand stories told by guides and falsified narratives of previous

Europeans who had claimed to have viewed Rwandans. In a larger scale, Rwanda’s colonial period focuses on those colonists who forced Rwandans to fit into their imagined roles in order to further centralize the kingdoms authority for ease of colonial control.

They did this through a three-pronged approach, starting with military forces allying with the Mwami, followed by constructing a false history of Rwanda, and then further stratifying society socially and economically. However, as much as the imagined

80 H.F. Helmolt, The World’s History: A Survey of Man’s Record, vol. 3 (London: William Heinemann, 1903), 447.

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Rwandan influenced colonial behavior, a complex fight over who held the colony also influenced how Germany and later Belgium ran their colony.

Germany officially became the first country to colonize Rwanda in 1890, where their tenure was marked by an indirect rule that relied on Tutsi assistance. In the wake of

WWII they lost their colonies to Britain and Belgium, with Belgium taking Rwanda.

Comparatively Belgians were more hands-on in their approach, ensuring that the Church, government, and education reflected the divisions in society; meanwhile, they forced the country into the capitalistic ideas of cash crops, private property, and global trade.

Despite their varied approaches to colonialism, the common thread that ties together these colonial periods is their ability to pit Tutsi and Hutu populations against each other.

Within German, and later Belgian politics, they two countries disagreed about how to best govern Rwanda. However, they did find common ground in the idea that

Rwanda—which was situated in the geographic center of Africa—fit all of the speculations of migration patterns of Hamitic tribes traveling south. Despite the Tutsi population being obviously black, these two European powers took Tutsi’s domination over political positions as an obvious sign of their innate superiority—a reaffirmation of the Tutsi’s white ancestry. This chapter, critically analyzes where/why/how colonial powers came to manipulate the image of Rwanda and its population. More specifically, it navigates the relationship between the economic and political reasons for Europeans to take the land as a colony, and the utilizations of presupposed Tutsi greatness.

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German Control

However, the new colonial master kept a remnant of the German colonial reform system—the whip [ibikobo]—which was nothing but a product of the erstwhile Germano-Tutsi alliance.81

During the time of disunity that plagued the Rwandan Kingdom, the Prussian

Empire pursued a comparatively more successful and less violent solidification of authority. In the wake of the Franco-Prussian War, the then leader of the North German

Confederation, Otto Von Bismarck, constructed a deal that unified the German Empire in

1871. Initially opposed to colonial ventures, Bismarck openly admired the ideas outlined in the liberal German economist Friedrich List’s The National System of Political

Economy, in which he argued, “England by her policy [protectionist policies in India] increased her naval power, and by means of her naval power enlarged the range of her manufacturing and commercial powers.”82 In fact, when Bismarck spoke of Deutsch-

Ostafrika, he stated, “I certainly hope that we shall still be able to devise in Africa a system similar to the one which has made England so strong in the East Indies. There, the trader is the sole authority.”83 Although Bismarck passively thought about an East Africa protectorate, he also did not want to put forth the effort to obtain the territory.

81 Although not necessarily leaned on in popular memory in Rwanda during the genocide often, Germany’s role in colonialism, when invoked references their role in allying themselves with the Tutsi. This quote references their alliance through militarism or the whip and their coercing labor from the Hutu population. Georges Ruggiu, “RTLM 4,” Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines trans. US State Department (April 12, 1994).

82 Friedrich List, The National System of Political Economy trans. Sampson S. Lloyd (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1909), 37. For a detailed history of the influence of Friedrich List, please see, Matthew P. Fitzpatrick, Liberal Imperialism in Germany: Expansionism and Nationalism 1848-1884.

83 Hans-Ulrich Wehler, “Bismarck’s Imperialism 1862-1890,” Past & Present no 48 (August 1970): 127.

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In a somewhat fortuitous occurrence for Bismarck, a young explorer named Carl

Peters had taken it on himself to traverse the “Dark Continent” for private investment and fame. He was noted for his Emin Pasha Relief Expedition, where he set out to rescue the trapped German official stuck at the head of the Nile River, while also secretly scouting the continent for German colonization.84 In 1884, Peters, under the backing of his new

German East Africa Company, went to East Africa with two business partners to broker treaties between his company and local kings.85 Interestingly enough, he did this on the eve of the Berlin Conference without Bismarck’s knowledge. To complicate matters, no one officially marked the boundaries of Africa per se, and Peters collected signatures in territories that both Britain and Belgium claimed as their territories. British business interests still wanted to capitalize on the land they claimed as British territories, and

Stanley—who was in competition with over the Emin Pasha rescue—fought

Peters due to his own personal interests. As Stanley revealed in his autobiography, he worked for Sir William Mackinnon on his private business ventures, but with Germany taking the unexplored territory it cause Mackinnon’s company to withstand hardship.

Stanley claimed, “in order to prevent collisions between Mackinnon's Company and the

Germans, to give the East African Company a political status… the Charter was given to it by the British Government, and the Company thereby incurred tremendous

84 Carl Peters, New Light on Dark Africa: The German Emin Pasha Expedition, trans. H. W. Dulcken, (London: Ward, Lock, and Co., 1891), 19; Martin Reuss, “The Disgrace and Fall of Carl Peters: Morality, Politics, and Staatsrason in the Time of Wilhelm II,” Central European History 14, no.2 (June, 1981) 110- 16.

85 This became a point of contention between Peters and his European challengers as he took an “X” as a legal signature. Many at the Berlin Conference seriously questioned if the local kings had any idea of what they signed.

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responsibilities.”86 The primary responsibility was that goods needed to travel by foot and not by waterway—obviously a less than equitable venture. Although not certain, it calls into question Stanley’s claim that vast deposits of gold and silver existed in

Rwanda, and his encouragement to turn the area that encompassed Rwanda into a free trade zone. 87

Despite the false depictions of Rwanda possessing numerous deposits of gold and silver, in 1885, Peters presented the treaties to Bismarck at the Berlin Conference to undercut Stanley, arguing that a power will hold East Africa and “that power must be

Germany.”88 The chancellor immediately recognized the political nightmare that Peters had caused and outright denied German approval. Peters first threatened to sell the treaties to Britain, and after meeting more disapproval, challenged Bismarck by almost giving the treaties to their continental neighbor, Belgium. Bismarck, known for his realpolitik, apprehensively succumbed to Peters, and in accepting an East Africa colony

Germany obstructed the British from obtaining a North-South African rail line, created a naval presence near India, and slowed the Belgian ivory trade.89 The British were

86 Henry Morton Stanley, The Autobiography of Henry Morton Stanley (Boston: Houghton Company, 1909), 447.

87 Henry Morton Stanley, “Untitled Speech Given at the African Conference of Berlin” in “Notes and News,” American Association for the Advancement of Science 5, no. 102 (January, 1885): 62.

88 H.P. Meritt, “Bismarck and the German Interest in East Africa 1884-1885,” The Historical Journal 21, no. 1 (March, 1978): 105.

89 Reginald Coupland, The Exploitation of East Africa 1856-1890: The Slave Trade and the Scramble (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1967), 398-402; Andrew Zimmerman, “Race and World Politics: Germany in the Age of Imperialism 1878-1914,” The Oxford Handbook of Modern German History (Oxford: University Press): 304. This only touched of years of dispute over the official boundaries of the region. Debates over the accuracy of maps and natural geographical borders caused rivaling powers

56 embittered over this less than reputable deal, and pro-British subjects such as Lionel

Decle publicly criticized Germany. Decle, despite his claims of admiration for the

Watussi, reserved a harsh criticism of the mineral wealth of Rwanda and furiousness of the population. In Three Years in Savage Africa, despite his tone of admiration for the northern populations of Wahha and Waruanda, within German East Africa, he pointed out, “From Ujiji to the first degree of latitude the country is occupied by the Wahha and the Waruanda. These tribes are exceedingly hostile to Europeans, and are not likely to submit to them without a long and obstinate struggle. Moreover, the Wahha country is absolutely miserable from the colonial point of view, and, so far as I know, is quite destitute of mineral resources.”90

Despite the British criticism of the German Empire, Bismarck signed the General

Action on February 26, 1885, which took East Africa as a German protectorate. The chancellor released a statement with one caveat, “having placed under our Imperial protection [over] the territories in question, reserving to ourselves a right of deciding hereafter respecting any further acquisitions in the same district.”91 At this point,

Germany legitimized the exploration of the then centralizing Rwandan kingdom. Peters also brokered a deal that setup the East Africa Company as the primary business occupant within the region. As the monopolizing agency, the German public received them in a

to take military action numerous times. For a more comprehensive look at the border dispute see, Roger Louis, Ruanda-Urundi 1884-1919 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963) ch.1-9.

90 Decle, Three Years in Savage Africa, 556.

91 Coupland, The Exploitation of East Africa, 402.

57 negative light, as demonstrated by the Social Democrat August Bebel in the Bavarian

Senate:

What is this East Africa Company? A small group of rich capitalist bankers, merchants and industrialists, i.e. a small group of very wealthy people whose interests have nothing to do with those of the German people, whose colonial policies are determined solely by their own interests…and who are merely concerned to use their greater power to add to their wealth in every possible way at the expense of a weaker people. Never shall we support such a policy. All colonial policies are basically attempts to exploit a foreign people to the greatest possible extent. Wherever we look in colonial history in the last three hundred years, we find atrocities and the oppression of whole people, not infrequently ending with their total destruction. The driving force is wealth, wealth and nothing but wealth. And in order to render possible the fullest and undisturbed exploitation of the African peoples, millions of marks are to be provided from the taxpayer’s pockets, from the national exchequer, for the benefit of the East Africa Company…92

With those anti-imperialists in Germany recognizing this venture as one for profit, the

East German Company began a public campaign against the Arab slave trade. As with most international business, this was a distraction, because when focus shifted toward

Rwanda there was an obvious mindset—exploit the population and extract of wealth.

Although never fully executed, the company planned to take advantage of Rwanda’s dense population by shifting portions of the Hutu population for labor and to control their profitable ivory trade.93

92 StBVR, 7 . Leg. Per. IV. Sess. 1888/89, vol.1, 627-28, found in German Imperialism in Africa: From the Beginnings until the Second World War, ed. Heluth Stoekcer, trans. Bernd Zöllener (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1986), 98. The company began to garner support when they manufactured an Arab attack of their company. They posed as the benevolent force attempting to stamp out the Arab slave trade. This backfired as many entities recognized their disingenuous intentions and used them for their own gains.

93 Ibid., 105.

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With Bismarck’s call for a minimalist style protectorate, the colonial administration turned to the observations made by Baumann and Götzen in laying out their plan for governmental control. Both explorers held a deep reverence for the Hamitic

Hypothesis and their writings implied that the most direct form of control came from co- opting existing ethnic/economic polarizations. The colonial administration concluded that in order to reaffirm the socio-economic power structures that defined Rwabugiri’s

Rwanda, in this case the uburetwa patron-client system, an unchallenged centralization of authority required that the kingdom remained a German protectorate. In order to execute this idea, Germany immediately used three approaches, racial division, physical force, and religion. These three, when applied correctly, permitted the German East Africa

Company to begin it attempts to extract as much wealth from Rwanda as possible.

Racial Division

To remain cost effective, the German Empire in conjunction with the German

East Africa Company typically sent a resident to advise the indigenous king to execute

German orders. This form of indirect rule saved money in the short run, as it took very little capital to start a colony; however, it relied heavily on existing divisions within society. In the case of Rwanda, Hutu and Tutsi stood out as the obvious division, but it required science, history, and a good public relations campaign in order to keep the

German Senate from criticizing them for reinforcing a divided society. Luckily for those pro-empire, Rwanda had a resident who tiptoed the line between science, history, and religion in order to enact their pro-empire agenda.

The longest termed German resident, Dr. Richard Kandt published Caput Nili: eine empfindsame Reise zu den Quellen des Nils, his personal journal where he recounted

59 his interactions with the population, and revealed his perception of Rwandan race. Most tellingly is not how he viewed the Tutsi, but how he debased Hutus into lesser beings. He describes the Hutu as willing to complain about their oppression behind Tutsis’ back, yet when faced with submitting to the will of the Tutsi that they capitulate every time. Kandt even push on further when he argued adamantly that the Tutsi are from a “European stock,” and if indeed, they had Negro blood Germany would not have colonized them.94

Although this may appear as simplistic rhetoric of separating the two populations in order to make the Tutsi the object of affection, what is buried in the anti-Hutu sentiment is a subtle, yet potent, dehumanization. Argumentatively, the Hutu were the true object of

Kandt, and more so the German East Africa Company’s affection. The Hutu represented an easily exploitable population, and the further they were brought away from Europeans and Tutsi (who Europeans quickly considered peers), the more readily accessible dominance over them became.

Even the Catholic Church in Rwanda became keenly aware of this dissension among what they perceived as the two races. Father Leon Classe argued that, “It is a serious error to say that here the people will be Catholic without the chiefs [who are

Tutsi], more serious than anywhere else, since the chiefs and the people are not of the same race [my emphasis]. There is an antagonism of races, of conquerors and the

94 Richard Kandt, Caput Nili: eine empfindsame Reise zu den Quellen des Nils (Berlin: Dietrich Riemer, 1914).

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conquered…”95 These racialized identities are constantly played out on the colonial field, as they are the cornerstone of both militaristic action and missionary work.

Germany colonialists also continued to demonstrate its fondness for the Hamitic

Hypothesis of the Tutsi population during turbulent times. When August Vetter, a

German cartographer, entered the freshly opened up country of Rwanda, he traced his experiences with Watussi, mentioning, “In many cases, they are counted among the

Hamitic or Semitic Galla, who advanced from southern and eastern Ethiopia from southwest, in what is now Unjoro, founded the legendary kingdom of Kitara, and from here the lands of subjugated Lakes region, an assumption which in itself the legends of the Watussi reflects.”96

Racial division came about through various means outside of the government as well, although Kandt held influence over them too. Schools and Churches worked in concert under his watch to teach the same divisions that the first explorers promoted.

Given the religious rooting of Hamitic populations, religion possessed a divine and predetermined answer to validate Tutsi superiority—the surprising challenge was convincing the Tutsi of their biblical greatness. The Catholic Church built schools to

“surely reach the sons of the chiefs Batoutsi, there has been opened a special school for

95 Leon-Paul Classe, La christianisation du Rwanda, found in Timothy Longman, Christianity and Genocide in Rwanda (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 46.

96 August Vetter, Untersuchungen Über Die Geographie Von Ruanda (Darmstadt, DE: G Otto’s HOF- Buchdruckerel, 1906). Original translation: Vielfach werden sie zu den hamitischen oder semitischen Galla gerechnet, die von Süd-und Ost-Abessinien aus nach Süd westen vordrangen, im heutigen Unjoro das sagenhafte Reich Kitara gründeten und von hier die Länder des Zwischen seengebietes unterwarfen, eine Annahme, die sich auch in den Sagen der Watussi wiederspiegelt. The legend that he speaks of is most likely the one retold by Alexis Kagame in Le Code des Institutions Politique De Rwanda, which is a heavily influenced piece of literature from a Rwandan Tutsi who was sympathetic to western ideals except the breaking of land clientage. In it, he lays out the reasons for Tutsi supremacy, and attempts to utilize history to convey his point.

61 them.” Mamdani—one of the first authors to engage this idea critically—uncovered further evidence of this tactic when he discovered the 1910 policy “of ‘favouring the

Mututsi of Rwanda’ [which] was a formulated and addressed by Father Schumacher as a report to the Superior General.”97 All of these actions tacitly reinforced the structure of power within the historical trajectory of Rwandan oppression and slowly won Tutsi favor.

Physical Force

In the fallout of the most highly stratified and territorially expansive time in

Rwandan history, in 1896 Mwami Musinga came to power and held four years of continuously weakening authority over the central African kingdom. He ruled for over a year with no major challenges to the throne, despite numerous local tribes’ rejection of the Rwandan government and the economic system of uburetwa. Vetter, when mapping the terrain of Rwanda, echoed this mentioning, “The powerful position of Rwanda, which is apparent from the descriptions of the natives and the reports of earlier travelers, has gone heavily after the death Luabugiris [Rwabugiri]. The tribes living on the border (in

Bugoie, to the north by volcanoes) are only nominally under the rule of the Mwami. The island Kwijiwi that Luabugiri, as he was denied the tribute that had very subject, now forms an independent kingdom under Mihiggo who, like the also independent sultans of

Bunjabungu, Itambi and Ujungu the west of Kivu, does not belong to the Watussi.”98

97 Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers, 88-89.

98 August Vetter, Untersuchungen Über Die Geographie Von Ruanda (Darmstadt, DE: G Otto’s HOF- Buchdruckerel, 1906), 92. Original translation: Die Machtstellung Ruandas, die aus den Schilderungen der Eingeborenen und den Berichten der älteren Reisenden hervorgeht, ist nach dem Tode Luabugiris stark zurück gegangen. Die an der Grenze wohnenden Stämme ( in Bugoie, im Norden an den Vulkanen) stehen nur noch nominell unter der Herrschaft des Mami. 3 (Siehe auch S. 15 - 16.) Die Insel Kwidjwi, die

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Waning authority throughout the history of Rwanda was typical, and in no way did this present any kind of shock to the Rwandan people; however, a new kind of authority began to take hold in the country.

In 1900, the first rebellion against the new Mwami Munsinga began. In the

Usumbura district, where the rebellion took place, the German Chief von Grawert of that district, stamped out the revolt immediately with the assistance of the German army. The social leader, Rukara attempted to annex a northern territory of Rwanda, but von Grawert caught and imprisoned him.99 The German assistance legitimized Musinga who began to ally with the empire. Given Germany’s willingness to stamp out rebellions within

Rwanda, the Mwami wielded a power no previous leader had held—the German military.

Historically, rebellions did not provide a unique scenario, in fact, throughout Rwandan history, numerous individuals successfully challenged the throne, including Musinga himself, but now the German military provided an almost unchallengeable monarch. In fact, up until 1916 the Rwandan monarchy called for assistance numerous times to eliminate monarchical challengers and to collect tribute.100

Aside from collecting tribute and forcing acceptance of the crown, the military challenged those regions that rejected colonial exploitation. In 1907, Kant wanted to turn the capital of Rwanda into a European style city—with cheap African labor. Receiving

Luabugiri, als ihm der Tribut verweigert wurde, ganz unterworfen hatte, bildet heute ein selbständiges Reich unter Mihiggo, der, wie die ebenfalls unabhängigen Sultane von Bunjabungu, Itambi und Ujungu im Westen des Kiwu, nicht dem Watussistamme angehört.

99 Des Forges, Defeat Is the Only Bad News, 148-56.

100 Jean-Baptiste Mberahahizi, Rwanda: Resolve the Main Contradictions of the Company, (Johannesburg: Aug. 17th, 2008); Des Forges, Defeat is the Only Bad News.

63 hundreds of laborers for thousands of hours, he saw the actualization of what Germans imagined Rwanda could become.101 The population quickly became disillusioned, and despite the multitude of challengers to colonial and monarchical authority, the largest contestation happen in 1912, when Ndungutse, a self-proclaimed son of Rwabugiri, garnered support from the largely Hutu northern Rwanda because he wanted to bring back the old system of labor and rejected Germany’s exploitation of labor.102 Again, the

German military’s superior arms quickly subdued the rebellion, but in this case, the military killed over 50 rebels, standing out as the largest killing of a recalcitrant local population. Furthermore, aside from the public execution of the opposition’s leaders, they punished the local population by destroying their crops and burning down houses. This marked the last major challenge to central authority while under the colonial protection of

Germany. Despite the Hutu’s rejection of the new systems of control, Germany militantly coerced compliance from the local population.103

Out of the subversion of the Hutu population came the realization that the information that came from those who speculated Rwanda as resource wealthy was wrong. Less than a decade into occupation of Rwanda, the German East Africa Company concluded that Rwanda lacked the gold, diamonds, copper, and rubber that would have

101 Germany ultimately only remunerated the Tutsi laborers, as the Hutu we viewed as volunteering for their monarch. James S. Olson, Historical Dictionary of European Imperialism (New York: Greenwood Press, 1991) 530. Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers, 71.

102 Rene Lemarchand, Rwanda and Burundi (London: Pall Mall Press, 1970) 60.

103 Mberahahizi, Rwanda; Des Forges, Defeat is the Only Bad News, 120-26; Des Forges, Alison "The Drum is Greater Than the Shout: The 1912 Rebellion in Northern Rwanda,” Symposium on Rebellion and Social Protest in Africa (1982).

64 made the country primed for economic exploitation. The country did have the correct climate to support cash crops though, and in 1913, Kandt began using the government to force the planting of coffee. When they put the crops on the world market, it began a new exploitation of the region.

Christianity

The Church in the colonies is the white people’s Church, the foreigner’s Church. She does not call the native to God’s ways but to the ways of the white man, of the master, of the oppressor.104

Coinciding with the strong militant arm of Germany, social aspects of control came about with the Catholic Church sending Bishop Jean-Joseph Hirth of the

Missionaries d'Afriqueor (White Fathers) to establish missions in Rwanda. Due to the

East Africa Company’s alleged hardline stance against slavery, they allied with the

Catholic Church and gave them the ability to enter East African territories and establish missions.105 Since the dissemination of the anthropologic Hamitic Hypothesis relied heavily on Christian education, this made the acceptance of Christianity pivotal to the control that the Germans established.106 To be fair, the missionaries who came to

Rwanda had been in Uganda for years prior and firmly ascribed to the Hamitic ideas of race within Rwanda. This caused them to simplify the terms Hutu and Tutsi along the lines of Hutu being “the people” while the Tutsi remained the ruling class. As

104 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (Grove Press: New York, 1961) 42.

105 Stokecker, German Imperialism in Africa, 98.

106 Phillip A. Cantrell, “The Anglican Church of Rwanda: Domestic Agendas and International Linkages,” The Journal of Modern African Studies, 45, no. 3 (September, 2007): 335.

65 missionaries flooded into Rwanda by 1904 there were five times as many White Fathers as German administrators in Rwanda.107

As outlined by the founder of the society, Cardinal Lavigeri, the White Fathers aimed to win influential members of society, because “in winning a single chief you will do more for the advancement of the mission than in winning hundreds of poor blacks.”108

As outlined by the church they argued, “It [Rwanda] has a fine climate, and its leading people are the Batusi [Tutsi], men of fine physique and intellectual power. The Batusi are but 50,000 in the total population of 2,000,000, but are the ruling element, with most of the wealth of the country in their hands. The Church Missionary Society is projecting a mission to these interesting and forceful people, and Drs. Sharp and Stanley Smith will go out this autumn to open a mission hospital among them. The Batusi are born leaders, and it is believed that if they are won they will become themselves a missionary force among the native races all about them.”109 Understandably, the Hutu population rejected the Catholic Church due to their support of the Tutsi. However, as Father Lecoindre recorded his frustration with converting even the Tutsi population in 1905,

We have been established here but four years it was only in 1905 that we recorded our first baptisms. Five stations have been founded with a totality of about 180 Christians. The number is increasing in relatively considerable proportion; there are at present 5000 to 6000 catechumens. But what are they against a total population of two million souls? We cannot assert that we have come in touch

107 Longman, Christianity and Genocide in Rwanda, 44 fn29.

108 De Lacer, Ruanda, found in Des Forges, Defeat Is the Only Bad News, 67.

109 Alexander McConnell, William Revell Moody, Arthur Percy Fitt, Record of Christain Work vol. 39, (East Northfield, MA: Christian Work Co., 1920), 716.

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with the masses; our efforts have been futile with the nobility, the governing class, which manifests a deep hatred against us.110

In fact, the Tutsi court approved of the Catholic Church only because of political pressure from Kandt, but by in large no Rwandans looked favorably upon the church initially.111

They wished for the church to fail as Christian rhetoric directly contradicted native religion—a religion which also added divine backing of the Mwami. More specifically, the king—as with most monarchies—possessed the ability to communicate with gods and past ancestors. In a more practical sense, kings losing that capability would undermine their ability to lead without challenge.112 Much to the annoyance of the royal court, the

White Fathers eventually won acclaim from the impoverished and patronless Hutu as they offered them nourishment, medical assistance, and most importantly, protection. The

Churches offered these benefits with the intentions of converting the population and many Hutu grew warm to the missionaries.113 However, with the conversion the Hutu

110 Father Lecoindre, Annals of the Propagation of the Faith (Baltimore, MD: Society for the Propagation of the Faith, 1905). Interestingly, the Tutsi court and the heavily Protestant German colonizers both approved the Catholic Church because both saw political advantages that could arise from a powerful social institution, but neither intended on converting to the religion. They both wished it to be a pacifying institution to the Hutu population, and in particular, the rebellious hill known as Save.

111 Dr. Richard Kandt, the German government’s official resident in Rwanda, penned a personal letter to Hirth thanking him for making his job easier by pacifying potions of the rebellious north, stating, “The missions that you have founded in the north of Rwanda contribute a good deal to the pacification of that district. They facilitate substantially the task of government. The influence of your missionaries has saved us the necessity of undertaking military expeditions….” Timothy Longman, “Christian Churches and Genocide in Rwanda,” Conference on Genocide, Religion, and Modernity (May, 1997): 3.

112 Longman, Christianity and Genocide in Rwanda, 37.

113 Timothy Longman, “Church Politics and the Genocide in Rwanda,” Journal of Religion in Africa 31, no.2 (May, 2001): 168; Julius Adekunle, Culture and Customs of Rwanda (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2007), 32-34.

67 population, they tacitly accepted the Christianized racial categories as well, thereby accepting Tutsi anthropological authority.

Hirth attempted to lessen the tension between the church and courts by openly remaining committed to Tutsi authority. While writing about Hutu rejecting Tutsi power, he stated that missionaries should “speak highly of their authority and of the power of the king.”114 Leon Classe, the vicar apostolic of Rwanda, followed this sentiment by ensuring that Tutsi power remained under Belgian rule as well.115 Furthermore, Class wrote in his diary, “We want only to raise and affirm the authority of the king…, we want to be always his friends…, we will have people pay tribute.” Hirth also became keenly aware of their place within Rwandan politics as he lambasted his other missionaries for acting unfavorably towards local chieftains stating in a letter to the superior general of the

White Fathers: “The missionaries of Rwanda do not sufficiently look after good relations with the authorities.”116 This mindset surely affected the methods of teaching that the

Catholics utilized during their time within the German colonial period. Since the missionaries played such a pivotal role in the education of the Hutu population, they

114 Jean-Joseph Hirth, quoted by Ian Linden and Jane Linden, Church and Revolution in Rwanda, (Manchester, GB: University Press, 1977) 37.

115 Leon Class—although a deeply complex figure in Rwandan history—is credited with convincing the wavering Belgians to stick to an all Tutsi government by convincing government officials that Hutu rule would most certainly lead to “anti-European communism and anarchy.” He also had a hand in deposing the then Mwami and replaced him with one who identified as Catholic, thus ensuring that the power of the Catholic Church remained unchallenged by the new movement of Evangelical missionaries fighting for power. J.J. Carney, “Beyond Tribalism: The Hutu-Tutsi Question and Catholic Rhetoric in Colonial Rwanda” Journal of Religion in Africa, 42 (2012):179; Longman, “Christian Churches and Genocide.”

116 Leon Class, La christianisation du Rwanda (1900-1945): Methode missionaire et politique selon Mgr Leon Classes, found in Longman, Christianity and Genocide in Rwanda, 19 fn16-17.

68 indisputably used tactics of social control over the population, only widening the divide within the Rwanda Kingdom.

They also played a larger role in the solidification of German colonial authority and Tutsi monarchical authority by standing by both parties during Hutu rebellions.117 In fact, their dogmatic loyalty earned them a kind letter from Kandt where he praised them, stating, “The missions that you have founded in the north of Rwanda contribute a good deal to the pacification of that district. They facilitate substantially the task of government. The influence of your missionaries has saved us the necessity of undertaking military expeditions….”118 However, with the action of acceptance of Tutsi superiority and with a history of exploiting Hutu labor to build missions, the Catholic church—and

Christianity as a whole—fell out of favor with both the Hutu and Tutsi populations.

Luckily for African Missionaries, the Great War was about to capture European focus and allow the church a new avenue to reestablish relations with Rwandans.119

Belgian Occupation

The early educated Bahutus included Grégoire Kayibanda, Joseph Habyarimana Gitera, Balthazar Bicamumpaka and many others; they were more conscious than ever of the Hutu phenomenon—or rather the problems of the Hutus, who hitherto had been enslaved by the feudal Tutsi monarchies. They then started to organize themselves into groups and rise against their feudal masters. This happened under

117 They did this first in 1901 when the Hutu district of Gisaka attempted to reinstate their monarch after the fall of Rwabugiri. Although the region remained a hotbed for rebellious activity, Mwami Musinga extended a thank you the church. Also in 1911, the Church urged rebellious Hutu receiving aid and assistance from the church to capitulate to the Rwandan monarch. Linden, Church and Revolution in Rwanda, 29-45.

118 Richard Kandt, Le christianisation du Rwanda, found in Longman, Christianity and Genocide in Rwanda, 41.

119 Julius Adekunle, Culture and Customs of Rwanda (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2007) 33-35.

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the reign of the last but one Rwandan king, Mutara Radahigwa, considered by the Batutsis as a progressive.120

Although Belgium forcibly seized the German colonies during WWI in 1916, the

Germans did not want to let the colony go, as Emil Zimmerman opined with Germanys last efforts to reconceptualize their empire:

Successful colonial policy among the lower races makes the unquestioned prestige of the colonizing people a fundamental consideration. A people whose representatives have been treated before the eyes of the natives as the Germans have been, is burdened in consequence of these things with a handicap affecting all its future colonial activity, which may be a crushing one if the proper measures are not taken.121

As one could predict, Germany did not take the proper path to control and the Treaty of

Versailles officially relinquished their control over Rwanda and Burundi and transferred power to the Belgian government in 1919. Comparatively, the Belgians ran a more direct colony in which the cornerstone of their policy centered on co-opting the same divisions that the Germans previously had, but in a more intense manner. Difficulty arose out of understanding the Rwandan culture, and the Catholic Missionaries were the Belgians’ only resource for native information. With Belgian reliance on the Church for information, the Europeanization of how Rwanda was conceptualized became solidified, as Belgium believed the church’s history of Rwanda wholesale.122 The church received

120 Georges Ruggiu, “RTLM 4,” Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines trans. US State Department (April 12, 1994).

121 Emil Zimmermann, The German Empire of Central Africa As the Basis of a New German World-Policy (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1918), 6. 122 Linden, Church and Revolution in Rwanda, 125. In fact, as a form of repayment for their knowledge the Belgian government forced the Mwami to sign an official decree ensuring that the White Fathers were guaranteed religious liberty.

70 their first Tutsi converts in 1917 and quickly empowered those Tutsi who welcomed

Catholicism by using their local influence to ensure their success.

With the Church firmly planted within Rwandan culture, administrative moves also reinforced the racial divide. In 1926, Belgians legalized rules that Rwandans followed socially when the new colonial governor Charles Voisin passed les reformes.

This law reestablished Tutsi power in local government, gifted them land to farm, gave them more education in missionary schools, and trained them as Catholic priests.

Missionaries reaffirmed the racial superiority with the teaching of Tutsi divinity and by denying Hutus’ access to higher forms of education. Mgr. Léon Classe oversaw the majority of racially segregated policies. Most notably, he separated the Tutsi from the

Hutu population in schools and created a two-tiered education system. The Hutu tier received a more simplistic education focused on mining and farming, while the church exposed the Tutsi to a more intensive education, geared towards colonial administration.123 In 1933, additional reforms forced the carrying of ethnic identification cards in public—a policy which the country held onto up until their genocide—and they locked all Hutus into blue-collar jobs.124 In fact, these reforms went so far as to reshape the governmental structure over each hill. Under the previous Rwandese system, three types of chiefs governed the land, but these reforms consolidated all three positions into

123John R. Bowen, “Myths of Global Ethnic Conflict,” Journal of Democracy 7, no.4 (1996): 6; J.J. Carney, “Beyond Tribalism: The Hutu-Tutsi Question and Catholic Rhetoric in Colonial Rwanda,” Journal of Religion in Africa 42 (2012): 172-81.

124 Dean J. White, The Ignorant Bystander?: Britain and the Rwandan Genocide of 1994 (Manchester, GB: University Press, 2015); Patricia Bamurangirwa, Rwanda Yesterday (Leicestershire, GB: Matador Publishing, 2013), 25.

71 one, thus making tax collecting easier and lessening corruption. The Belgian administration also passed legislation that determined that the state held all land, regardless if Hutu lived on it—this essentially eliminated those rare hills that still practiced ubukonde.125 These new ideas diverged radically from the communal nature of land—now adopting privatized model of the land, Belgium forcibly started to push

Rwanda into western-style capitalism.

Hutuness

I hate these Hutu, these arrogant Hutu, braggarts, Who scorn other Hutu, dear comrades! I hate these Hutus, these de-Hutuized Hutu, Who have disowned their identity, dear comrades! I hate these Hutu, these Hutu who march blindly, like imbeciles, This species of naïve Hutu who are manipulated, and who tear themselves up, Joining in a war whose cause they ignore. I detest these Hutu who are brought to kill—to kill, I swear to you, And who kill the Hutu, dear comrades. If I hate them, so much the better…126

Education played an ever-growing role in Belgian occupation, for example in

1920 Rwanda had 123 schools and 6,000 students, but by 1948, they had 1,618 schools with 142,652 students—and in 1957, it is estimated that a third of all children attended school.127 This worked against the colonial power though, as more Hutu learned of the

125 This aided the Tutsi led government in their destruction of countless Hutu landholding, and subsequent occupation of their land. The Hutu population, however, did not forget this as 1959 revolutions unfolded many Hutu burned down Tutsi houses. Gerard Prunier, The Rwandan Crisis: History of a Genocide (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995) 27-28.

126 Simon Bikindi, “Nanga Abahutu (I Hate These Hutu) version D,” Amahoro (1993).

127 Mary T. Duarte, “Education in Ruanda-Urundi, 1946-61,” The Historian 57, no. 5 (December, 1995): 275-84.

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Hamitic Hypothesis, the more they concluded that the Tutsi were outside invaders who took the Hutu’s land. Subverting their role of inferiority in society, “Hutuness” as an idea found itself rapidly adopted by the oppressed Hutus.128 Additionally, the Catholic Church began to side more with the Hutu population on issues of social justice; this came as no surprise because in 1951 half of the priests in Rwanda were black, and the majority of the church Hutu.129 Out of this came the 1957 le Manifeste des Buhutu written by nine leaders in the Hutu community where they listed their grievances with colonial control and Tutsi domination. In the manifest they attacked the colonists by harkening back to their agrarian roots, stating, “The current situation stems largely from the State created by the former politico-social structure in Rwanda, in particular the buhake [ubuhake], and the application of thorough and widespread indirect administration, as well as the disappearance of certain old social institutions, which have been erased, which without has allowed modern Western corresponding institutions to settle and compensate.”130

Furthermore, they made calls for the abandoning of Hamitic hierarchical overtones and instead proposed an elimination of the Tutsi “monopoly” of power. Most interesting and perhaps revealing was the Hutu’s attachment to certain European principles, such as call for Hutu to receive privatized land in a “western” sense, their wish to hold elections

128 Aimable Twagilimana, Hutu and Tutsi Conflict (New York: Rosen, 1998), 198.

129 Prunier, The Rwandan Crisis, 42-43.

130 Grégoire Kayibanda, Calliopé Mulindahabi, Silvestre Munyambonera et. Al, Le Manifeste des Buhutu (Kigali, RW: 1957), 1. La situation actuelle vient en grande partie de l’état créé par l’ancienne structure politico-sociale du Ruanda, en particulier le buhake, et de l’application à fond et généralisée de l’administration indirecte, ainsi que par la disparition de certaines institutions sociales anciennes qui ont été effacées sans qu’on ait permis à des institutions modernes, occidentales correspondantes de s’établir et de compenser.

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(ironically so that the Hutu elites could get elected), a rural credit fund, and their attachment maintaining the codified and somewhat immutable Hutu identity.

The Rise of PARMEHUTU

Of those at the forefront of the Hutu movement, Grégoire Kayibanda found himself in charge of the Catholic newspaper Kinyamateka in 1957, where he censured the idea of “Hamitic neo-feudalism.” He then came to head the militarized, Parti du

Mouvement de l'Emancipation Hutu (PARMEHUTU) and sparked the first movements of independence in November of 1959 with the killing of over 200 Tutsis. During the calamity, Belgium—while still holding Rwanda as a colony—permitted the Rwandan

Revolution to occur, which developed into the first of many violent Tutsi-Hutu conflicts.

During the ferocity of revolution, the Belgian authorities shifted their long held support from Tutsi to Hutu. The catastrophic effects of the changing support devastated the Tutsi people; meanwhile, this furthered the sense of Hutu superiority and legitimated the violence taking place in the almost independent Rwanda.131 In May of 1960, the

PARMEHUTU deposed of the last Mwami, Kigeri V, and elected Kayibanda. The Tutsi's fear of death triggered over 130,000 of them to flee the country, contaminating neighboring countries with the hardline racial theories derived from their

Belgian/German education. No longer under the physical control of Europeans, Hutus completely bought into how Europeans imagined their country.

131 Ali Al’Amin Mazrui, Christophe Vondji, Africa Since 1935 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993), 212-13; Turner, The Congo, 221. Unfortunately, since Belgium provided narrowly no support for education beyond the state/church sponsored education, Rwanda lacked an educated group prepared to take leadership in the wake of revolution. This lack of investment in education, although proscribed by UN trusteeship system, setup Rwanda’s infrastructure/ideological foundations for failure, and in this case the fallout of refugees.

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CHAPTER 4

CONCLUSION

When Imagination Became History

A challenge in understanding Rwandan history is getting into the mindset of those who conceptualized the country. At differing times throughout its existence, it had numerous layers of perception. Even in the fallout of revolution, the European knowledge replaced native knowledge as the once fragmented kingdom elected to remain one entity instead of fracturing into previous kingdoms before colonial occupation. Along with this idea of holding on to the European style borders came the grasping of their racialized identities—as Europeans continued to propagate it as the dominate narrative. In a critique of the revolution, the history immediately out of Rwanda read:

The ex-German Protectorate of Ruanda-Urundi which they received as a Mandate from the League of Nations in 1923 was no prize territory. It consisted of two feudal kingdoms, Ruanda and Urundi, perched on the top of mountain ranges separating the Sudan, East Africa, and the Congo Basin; these were known in antiquity as the Mountains of the Moon and they dominate Lakes Kivu and Tanganyika. Because of the inaccessibility of these high plateaux, densely covered with jungle, the societies of Ruanda and Urundi had been completely cut off from any contact with surrounding countries and had preserved, until the coming of the Belgians, a rigid racial feudalism. The tall, aristocratic Tutsis, a pastoral and warrior tribe of Ethiopian origin, invaded the country from the east some four centuries ago and easily mastered the indigenous Hutu societies, patriarchal and agricultural and of Bantu stock; they reduced them to serfdom and established Tutsi monarchies in Ruanda and Urundi under a

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Mwami or king, the essence of whose sovereignty resided in a sacred drum decorated with the shriveled skins of his enemies.132

It is those Tutsi, who have a very complicated past with the Hutu population, that find themselves as refugees fleeing the Hutuness that brought the first Hutu leader into power.

Interestingly, those refugees completely lost their appeal as Central Africans began to view them increasingly as alien to the region. Within the matter of years, the dialog shifted and the Tutsi lost their authority—but not their foreignness:

It is true that Burundi does suffer from a certain amount of Hutu-Tutsi animosity, but not to the same extent as Rwanda. (In Rwanda it was actually the tall Tutsi and not the short ones-not all Tutsis are seven feet high!-who opposed the Republic. The short Tutsi are not considered to be a real problem.)133

As the view shifted, some Tutsis became Africanized, while some were blamed for creating the true problems, and they were viewed as a relic of Europe’s hold on Africa.

Those Tutsis/Hutus who caused the ethnic tensions made Rwanda become a metonym for instability and violence. The journal Africa Today did not hesitate to place articles that outright disassociated entire nations from Rwanda’s ethnic conflicts: “Most outside observers seem to have neglected the basic historical differences, both social and political, that distinguish Burundi from Rwanda. Rwanda had a harsh caste system, which erected rigid lines of demarcation between the ruling Tutsi and their mainly Hutu peasant serfs. In contrast, Burundi's caste system was rather flexible, and Hutus as well as Tutsis

132 A.L Latham-Koenig, “Ruanda-Urundi on the Threshold of Independence,” The World Today 18, no.7 (July, 1962): 288-89.

133 Warren Weinstein, “Mauritania, Madagascar, Burundi: Toward National Unity,” Africa Today 12, no. 3 (March, 1965): 8.

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were able to establish themselves high up on the feudal hierarchy.”134 With the end of colonialism, Tutsi found themselves othered by those African scholars who inhabited their own continent. Worse, the Belgian, German, and Church authorities found little to no blame—after all, the Belgians in conjunction with the Church helped flip the power dynamic in the Hutu population’s favor. Anthropological records validated those powers new view on ethnicity within Rwanda. They claimed that it was the Tutsi hardline racialization that caused them to lose power when compared to Burundi. This is demonstrated by anthropologist Jean Hiernaux:

The matrix of distances between the four groups of Tutsi and Hutu in Rwanda and Burundi can be fitted to only one hypothesis which contains two propositions: the gene flow from Hutu to Tutsi is more intense in Burundi than in Rwanda, and the gene flow from Tutsi to Hutu is more intense in Rwanda than in Burundi. This again confirms sociological data relevant to the fact that Rwanda recently became a republic ruled by the Hutu while Burundi remains a kingdom controlled by Tutsi.135

Hiernaux plays off of the notion that the Tutsi population only continued to get more rather than less exclusive when it came to adding to the population. This shifts the accountability for the rise of Hutuness off Colonial presence, Churches, and most importantly, the Hutu leaders. With the shifting of accountability, Hiernaux then move on to take away from the Tutsi their only vested authority:

These new methods of anthropological analysis were used for testing a frequently expressed view about the Tutsi, namely that they represent hybrids between a White and a Black stock. Tutsi, Hutu, and a series of European children were put on a number of relation graphs. The Tutsi do

134 Warren Weinstein, “Racial Peace and Royalty: Burundi,” Africa Today 12, no. 6 (June-July, 1965): 12.

135 Jean Hiernaux, “Human Biological Diversity in Central Africa,” Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 1, no. 3 (September, 1966): 299.

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not tend to be intermediate between Hutu and Europeans, on the contrary they tend rather to occupy an 'hyper-African' position.136

Hiernaux scientifically robbed the Tutsi of their Whiteness—at least to an extent. Her study still presents the Tutsi as a foreign entity (and in many respects the supreme colonial entity), but it ensures that they are seen as primarily African and not European.

This idea completes the circle of Tutsi perception.

The Discourse

Played out over the next fifty years, the area dubbed the Great Lakes Region— consisting of Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Southern ,

Tanzania, and Uganda—became the stage for , wars, and that ultimately claimed the lives of over 10,000,000, concluding with the Great African Wars.

Sadly, private investors and colonial officials remain almost completely guilt free.137

However, unique in the enormous tragedies is the lack of knowledge due to its extreme complications between imagined history and a true history. Rwanda represents one area of hundreds that possess a complex and deep history that still needs individuals to animate it. As a whole, academics cannot determine the best steps forward for a community or country, let alone an entire continent, but they can historicize the region, tying together cultural and temporal elements to construct a more accurate picture of the past.

136 Ibid., 304.

137 David C. King, Rwanda: Cultures of the World (New York: Marshall Cavendish, 2006), 26; David Backer and Ravi Bhavnai, “Localized Ethnic Conflict and Genocide: Accounting for Differences in Rwanda and Burundi,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 44, no.3 (2000): 286; William S. Parsons and Samuel Totten, A Century of Genocide: Critical Essays and Eyewitness Accounts (New York: Routledge, 2009), 268-69.

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In colonial Rwanda, disseminated history was not lucid, but instead seperated individuals from their true identities. When forced to reconcile precolonial and colonial identities, Tutsis no longer fit their cultural narrative and became the scapegoat central

Africa needed in order to deflect its rejection of colonialism. I am not Rwandan nor do I profess to hold a deeper knowledge of Rwanda as compared to those who have lived through the horrific events that shaped the country today. But to turn a blind eye to this kind of under examined tragedy due to proximity seems almost as immoral as permitting it to happen. It is with that I conclude Rwanda represents a microcosm of a larger issue— how we obtain and disseminate knowledge. Until we can be critical of our precepts, we cannot move forward.

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EPILOGUE

Following the fall of the colonial period of Rwanda, instability became the norm.

In the wake of the Hutu revolution, countless Tutsis fled to the neighboring country’s hills to live in refugee camps for more than thirty years. Europeans provided aid, along with the US in supporting the refugees, but the world media elected to focus on cold war politics instead of attempting to understand the complications within this refugee crisis.

Many of the Tutsis began to radicalize their host populations, notably leading to what some have deemed as a genocide in Burundi in the 1970s. The refugee situation only became more precarious with the Tutsi refugee population propping up a new leader in

Uganda, one who supported the right of the Tutsis to go back to their homeland. Born from Uganda’s successful coup was the (RPF), the military arm that represented the Tutsi refugees during the Rwandan genocide. After a failed coup in

1990, they struck a peace agreement in 1993 allowing for the peaceful reentry of refugees into Rwanda. However, new evidence confirms that splinter factions of the Hutu army— disaffected with the refugees and planning a genocide—shot down the then president of

Rwandan’s plane killing him and starting a 100-day genocide, ultimately put to an end by the RPF.138

138 Igor Marara, “French Judges release report on the plane crash used as a pretext to start genocide in Rwanda,” PR Newswire Europe (January 10, 2012).

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In the wake of this tragedy, disaster capitalism took advantage of the weakened country. With a shaky economy and significant portions of their work force murdered in the genocide or placed in jails so crowded Hutus considered laying down a luxury, international loans from the IMF and the World Bank came into stabilize the region. This twenty-first century solution demanded privatization of public entities in exchange for stability—all the while draining wealth out of the country in a Milton Friedmen-esq style of international finance. Much like Pinochet in Chile, the IMF and World Bank have supported the Rwandan president Paul Kagame, a president that has ruled since the genocide, and has militantly eliminated challengers to his platform. He ordered the arrest of Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza—a Sakharov Prize nominee for her commitment to assisting female refugees; furthermore, two reporters and a banking official have died under suspicious circumstances in the most recent election, prompting several foreign investigations. The Human Rights Watch reports that numerous disappearances have happened in the year of 2014—all alluding to government involvement. Additionally, the

Rwandan government shut down opposition newspapers, citing them as dangerous to stability. Despite the less than reputable actions, the international funding organizations have stood by Kagame because of his views on free-markets. He recently stated, “Every developed economy, without exception, is the fruit of a free market, and a strong developmental state, working in tandem. The orthodoxy of shrinking the state to the bare minimum, and replacing it with externally-funded non-state actors (here you can say

NGOs), left Africa with no viable path out of poverty,” thus inferring forced free-market

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solutions with no safety net is the only viable position to saving Africa’s future.139

Currently, you would be hard-pressed to find a board of directors for any major corporation in Rwanda that does not have a white face on it. Perhaps their presence in

Rwanda is innocuous; however, one must speculate that they are a relic of international finance taking advantage of the weakened state utilizing similar tactics as the German’s during colonialism. Meanwhile, as long as the death toll in Rwanda remains spaced out, international support of the country will come from those parties interested in neoliberalizing all foreign markets.

This contemporary look beyond the genocide begs the question—who holds the guilt in Rwanda? My intention when writing this was not to levy a claim of guilty to any single party. Instead, I disabused the idea that this was a simple and straightforward situation. Layers of complications are continuously piled on first with precolonial economics, religion, and military, secondly with imagination, pseudoscience, western religion, and capitalism, and lastly with refugees, world politics, and environmental circumstances. Yet, it only gets more complicated when you see the post-genocide structure of society favoring neoliberalism and unchallenged acceptance of the new authority, Paul Kagame. Perhaps all of the authors who have written about the Rwandan genocide are right to an extent, yet our biggest misunderstanding arises from competing with our cohorts within the field to have the most correct solution, or even more disconcerting, this is an esoteric academic exercise, where we encompass our biggest fears of our own societies and project them onto another. Regardless of the answer, the

139 Emmanuel K. Dogbevi, “Replacing role of the state with externally funded NGOs left Africa in poverty” Ghana Business News, (August 22, 2015).

82 truth of the matter is every party has varying degrees of responsibility for the genocide, and without acceptance of this all parties cannot move forward. Evident in the Kagame leadership is a continued imbalance of power and a reaction to this power, much in the way Freire predicted that when the oppressed only know oppression, when given power they oppress. If academia can accept the wide array of arguments, then they can assist in giving Rwandans’ the tools to end their cycle of oppression, and preclude the next pending chapter of violence in Rwanda.

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