The conflict between Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda is often characterised as mindless ethnic bloodletting. Mahmood Mamdani provides a far more complex background to the conflict
No two conflicting groups in the Great Lakes region have a longer and more comprehensive history of intermarriage than do the Hutu and the Tutsi. Intermarriage between the Hutu and the Tutsi has been going on for centuries – at least three. The extent of that intermarriage has been so large that it would not be an exaggeration to suppose that a half or more of the population in Rwanda is a product of such intermarriage. And yet, every one of these people is either a Hutu or a Tutsi. None claims to be both; there are no Hutsis!
This uni-dimensional social identity could not be reproduced without patriarchal institutions that passed social identity exclusively through the line of the father. You inherit your father’s identity. Only when the line of the father is highlighted and that of the mother obscured can children be born as purely Hutu or Tutsi, as were their fathers.
And yet, that you were born either Hutu or Tutsi did not mean that you could not change from Hutu to Tutsi, or Tutsi to Hutu – under definitely prescribed circumstances – during your lifetime. In pre-German and pre-Belgian controlled Rwanda, Tutsi was an identity of wealth and power. Hutu signified a lack of both. A Hutu with means could go through a social ritual called kwihutura. It was a ritual by which a Hutu shed his Hutuness. Your children could now marry Tutsi and their children would be considered Tutsi.
Likewise, a Tutsi family without means may find it difficult to find a Tutsi spouse for their offspring. These children would then have no choice but to marry Hutu. While the social space between Hutu and Tutsi was vast, with Tutsi as power and Hutu as subject, it was a space that some could and did negotiate, either through opportunity that came with enrichment or through compulsion that was a consequence of impoverishment.
With the colonial reforms of the 1920s, these identities were written and frozen into law. Every individual was issued an identity pass that classified him or her as Hutu or Tutsi. These identities were no longer just socially acknowledged, reproduced or negotiated, as the case may be; they were politically enforced.
Tutsi was no longer an identity that signified access and proximity to power and wealth, and Hutu a lack of it. Tutsi now became an identity linked much more with power than wealth; in other words, to be a Tutsi was not always to be rich.
At the same time, Hutu came to be a subject identity: whether you were with or without wealth, so long as you were Hutu, you were a subject. With the end of kwihutura, the ritual shedding of Hutu status by the few Hutu who managed to acquire wealth, there could develop a Hutu counter-elite for the first time since the creation of the Rwanda kingdom. Not surprisingly, this counter-elite became a vehicle for a radical Hutu consciousness, turning Hutuness from a mark of servitude to a badge of pride, demanding Hutu Power. That demand fuelled the set of events that have come to be known as the “social” revolution of 1959.
Rwanda was like a halfway house between direct and indirect rule: while its subject population was packaged into separate native authorities, and these enforced a customary law, neither the authority nor the law they enforced could be seen as an instance of rule by one’s own, a claim that was made as a matter of course by indirect rule authorities elsewhere.
The result was that while native authorities everywhere else could be turned into so many separate ethnic enclosures, this could not be in Rwanda, where every native area appeared as more or less equally Hutu, and every native authority equally Tutsi – like a creamy layer spread thin on the Hutu majority. The relationship between the Tutsi chiefs in the native authority and the predominantly Hutu peasantry was much more characteristic of direct than indirect rule.
And yet, let us not forget that both Hutu and Tutsi were colonised subjects. Both had a victim consciousness. The Tutsi were defined as a race, but they were without civic rights. They were victims in the civic sphere. The anti-colonial radical nationalists of Rwanda were invariably Tutsi who had developed a radical insurgent race consciousness.
The Hutu, in contrast, were defined as an ethnic group under Tutsi chiefs in native authorities. They were victims in the ethnic sphere. Their struggle against Tutsi chiefs was branded tribalism, not nationalism. Both struggles, the nationalist and the tribalist, had a democratic component. And yet, neither could be embraced uncritically. Both needed to be problematised.
The 1959 “social revolution” was a peasant uprising that would have remained a rebellion, unable to attain power, had it not been for the Belgian power shifting allies on the eve of colonial rule. The revolution was preoccupied with one question: justice. It was determined that every institution should reflect the identity of the Hutu majority in society.
The first demand of Hutu Power was that the occupants of educational institutions and the holders of state employment should be predominantly Hutu, as predominantly as was the population of Rwanda. They demanded what is now called “affirmative action” to stamp every institution with a majority character. And they demanded eternal vigilance to keep it so.
Thus, the 1972 coup d’etat by which the military regime of Juvnal Habyarimana replaced the civilian presidency of Gregoire Kayibanda was baptised a “cultural” revolution, which was triggered by Hutu vigilante mobs in the university and secondary schools, intent on uncovering “cheaters”, that is Tutsi children of “mixed” marriages who were posing as Hutu.
The Tutsi who have come to power after the 1994 genocide share one thing with the Hutu revolutionaries of 1959. Both see themselves as revolutionaries. Both have vowed never to forget the past. And both are determined that the struggle must never end: a luta continua!
The irony is that, determined to make history, both have turned into prisoners of that same history. For every turn in the cycle that appears as sweet justice to one, appears to the other as the cruel face of revenge. One is compelled to ask: are not the worst perpetrators often those with the mindset of victims?
After 1994, the Tutsi wants justice above all else and the Hutu democracy above all else. The minority fears democracy. The majority fears justice. The minority fears that democracy is a mask for finishing an unfinished genocide. The majority fears the demand for justice is a minority ploy to usurp power forever.
When does the pursuit of justice turn into revenge? The simple answer is: when justice is denied. The more complex answer, the one that our journey through Rwandese history suggests, is: when the quest for justice turns into a permanent preoccupation, into a vendetta, into a self-righteous settling of scores that knows no bounds.
What can be acceptable boundaries for the pursuit of justice? Life itself and the agreement to live as part of a political community within the same state, the community of those willing to live together under a single political roof, and thereby to affirm that it is better to live with one’s political enemies than to die with them.
This article is extracted from Professor Mahmood Mamdani’s inaugural lecture as AC Jordan professor of African studies at the University of Cape Town. The lecture is entitled: When Does a Settler Become a Native? For a complete copy, e-mail [email protected] or fax (021) 689-7560