Stories from Rwanda
I am reading We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with out families.
I know some about Rwanda already. About the genocide, at least. I've read other books and I remember when it was happening. Back in '94. I even knew some of it's post-colonial history; how it was given to Belgium after WWI as a "spoil of war." And how the popular racial theories making the circuit in Europe in the early 20th century shaped administrative policy of both the Belgian and German overlords.
But I didn't know about the Rwanda of the Mwamis. And why hadn't I ever heard about John Hanning Speke?
So I'm trying to learn more about this Hamitic myth.
It turns out that my knowledge of the Bible is slap-dash at best. I think that I'm pretty well-versed in the "big" stories and I know the Apocrypha. I know some of the history of the Church and theological thought. But then someone comes out with something like "The Prayer of Jahbez" or "Genesis 9" and I have to go back re-arrange everything I thought I knew.
So I'll quote Philip Gourevitch, for the sake of brevity:
"Speke's basic anthropological theory, which he made up whole cloth, was that all culture and civilization in central Africa had been introduced by the taller, sharper-featured people, whom he considered to be a Caucasoid tribe of Ethiopian (Abyssinia) origin, descended from the biblical King David, and therefore a superior race to the native Negroids."
So, in Speke's Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile, he exhaustively "describes" the African "negroid." Over all finding them physically and morally lacking and "a strikingly existing proof of the Holy Scriptures." And by "Holy Scriptures" he means this one story of how Noah cursed his youngest son, Ham, for peeping on him when he was drunk with his bits and pieces hanging out. Noah said to Ham that "a slave of slaves shall he be to his brother's."
This story , "subject of many bewildering interpretations," was used as the Biblical justification of slavery in antebellum America and gave evidence to the "race scientists" of Europe that Ham was the first Negroid.
Speke felt that a colonial government "like ours in India" was needed to help the Negroid "step out from his darkness" or he would "be superseded by a being superior to himself." ("As his father did, so does he. He works his wife, sells his children, enslaves all he can lay hands upon, and unless when fighting for the property of others, contents himself with drinking, singing, and dancing like a baboon, to drive dull care away.")
Yet living along-side the Negroid, was another better subspecies of "men who were as unlike as they could be from the common order of natives." With "fine oval faces, large eyes, and high noses, denoting the best blood of Abyssian" these Watusi (Tutsis) could become, with the aid of British education, nearly as "superior in all things as an Englishmen himself."
And so the Journal of a man who had been no closer to Rwanda than Lake Victoria became the blueprint of a colonial policy.
I know some about Rwanda already. About the genocide, at least. I've read other books and I remember when it was happening. Back in '94. I even knew some of it's post-colonial history; how it was given to Belgium after WWI as a "spoil of war." And how the popular racial theories making the circuit in Europe in the early 20th century shaped administrative policy of both the Belgian and German overlords.
But I didn't know about the Rwanda of the Mwamis. And why hadn't I ever heard about John Hanning Speke?
So I'm trying to learn more about this Hamitic myth.
It turns out that my knowledge of the Bible is slap-dash at best. I think that I'm pretty well-versed in the "big" stories and I know the Apocrypha. I know some of the history of the Church and theological thought. But then someone comes out with something like "The Prayer of Jahbez" or "Genesis 9" and I have to go back re-arrange everything I thought I knew.
So I'll quote Philip Gourevitch, for the sake of brevity:
"Speke's basic anthropological theory, which he made up whole cloth, was that all culture and civilization in central Africa had been introduced by the taller, sharper-featured people, whom he considered to be a Caucasoid tribe of Ethiopian (Abyssinia) origin, descended from the biblical King David, and therefore a superior race to the native Negroids."
So, in Speke's Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile, he exhaustively "describes" the African "negroid." Over all finding them physically and morally lacking and "a strikingly existing proof of the Holy Scriptures." And by "Holy Scriptures" he means this one story of how Noah cursed his youngest son, Ham, for peeping on him when he was drunk with his bits and pieces hanging out. Noah said to Ham that "a slave of slaves shall he be to his brother's."
This story , "subject of many bewildering interpretations," was used as the Biblical justification of slavery in antebellum America and gave evidence to the "race scientists" of Europe that Ham was the first Negroid.
Speke felt that a colonial government "like ours in India" was needed to help the Negroid "step out from his darkness" or he would "be superseded by a being superior to himself." ("As his father did, so does he. He works his wife, sells his children, enslaves all he can lay hands upon, and unless when fighting for the property of others, contents himself with drinking, singing, and dancing like a baboon, to drive dull care away.")
Yet living along-side the Negroid, was another better subspecies of "men who were as unlike as they could be from the common order of natives." With "fine oval faces, large eyes, and high noses, denoting the best blood of Abyssian" these Watusi (Tutsis) could become, with the aid of British education, nearly as "superior in all things as an Englishmen himself."
And so the Journal of a man who had been no closer to Rwanda than Lake Victoria became the blueprint of a colonial policy.