A Look at Rwanda
When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda
Mahmood Mamdani, Princeton University Press, 2001.
Goals:
1. I show the ways in which history writing has been complicit with imperialism, particularly in naturalizing political identities, Hutu and Tutsi, and in considering facts about place of origin (migration) as key to history making.
2. I show the ways in which key texts on the 1959 Revolution failed to problematize the object of their analysis.
"Instead of addressing critically the ways in which the postcolonial state reproduced and reinforced colonially produced political identities in the name of justice, they ended up once again treating these identities as if they were natural constructs." (xiii)
“In the process, they also killed not only the Hutu political opposition, but also many nonpolitical Hutu who showed reluctance to perform what was touted as a ‘national’ duty.” (p. 5)
~ This is along the definition of New War by Mary Kaldor-the violence to eliminate opposition en masse as a characteristic different from the nature of Clausewitzean tactics.
“Accounts of the genocide, whether academic or popular, suffer from three silences.” (p. 7)
~ Historical silence (rendering the genocide ahistoric)
~ Silence in acknowledging agency (participation from below)
~ Geographical silence (isolating analysis from regional influences)
“My main objective in writing this book is to make the popular agency in the Rwandan genocide thinkable.” (p. 8)
“I argue that the Rwandan genocide needs to be thought through within the logic of colonialism.” (p. 9)
Settlers’ genocide vs. natives’ genocide, as explored by Hannah Arendt and Franz Fanon (“violence to end violence”).
“Yet, there is a link that connects the genocide of the Herero [by the Germans] and the Nazi Holocaust to the Rwandan genocide. That link is race branding, whereby it became possible not only to set a group apart as an enemy, but also to exterminate it with an easy conscience.” (p. 13)
The Rwandan genocide as a Hutu-native genocide:
“The analytical challenge is to understand the historical dynamic through which Hutu and Tutsi came to be synonyms for native and settler.” (p. 14)
~ How did the Hutus came to see themselves as the natives who needed to (legitimately, à la Fanon’s exhortation) eradicate the Tutsi-settlers? This is a historically situated analysis of the genocide in the context of colonialism and of the phenomenon of making a racial division out of (forced) ethnic differences-the construction of identities that led to embodiment and reaction in a violent manner. Mamdani will analyze both race and ethnicity as political identities (chapter 1).
Chapter 1: Defining the Crisis of Postcolonial Citizenship: Settler, and Native as Political Identities, pp. 19-39
“In the face of political violence that cut across social classes rather than between them, and that was animated by distinctions crafted in colonial law rather han those sprouting from the soil of a commodity economy, explanations rooted in political economy turned arid. Animated by noneconomic distinctions, this violence was neither revolutionary nor counterrevolutionary; it was simply nonrevolutionary.” (p. 19)
“I suggest we recognize that the process of state formation generates political identities that are distinct not only from market-based identities but also from cultural identities.” (p. 20)
~ Is there agency for those even outside of so-called political citizenship? Is it possible to look at Kaldor’s suggestion for horizontal/cosmopolitan approach to resolving New Wars without risking apoliticizing the parties involved as to render them Homo Sacers?
“Direct rule tended to generate race-based political identities: settler and native. Indirect rule, in contrast, tended to mitigate the settler-native dialectic by fracturing the race consciousness of natives into multiple and separate ethnic consciousnesses.” (p. 23)
Colonialism shift from direct to indirect rule.
“Governed under a single law, living under institutions designed for cultural assimilation, and subjugated to a single administrative authority, races were meant to have a common future-but not so ethnicities. In reality, the distinction between race and ethnicity illuminated the political difference between the nonindigenous and the indigenous.” (p. 26)
~ Also, Mamdani calls race vertical and ethnicity horizontal in representation.
“In the African colonies, only ‘natives’ were said to belong to ethnic groups. ‘Nonnatives’ were identified as races. While ethnicities were said to be indigenous, races were presumed to be nonindigenous. Ethnicity was said to mark an internal difference among those constructed by colonial law as indigenous to the land. Race marked an external difference, a differences with others, those legally constructed as nonindigenous.” (p. 27)
~ In this case, a difference is (artificially) carved out among the colonized people. In Mamdani’s words, a “subject race” is created as a sort of middle ground between the colonizer and the colonized.
Civic vs. ethnic citizenships
“The irony was the deracialization without deethnicization continued to reproduce a bifurcated citizenship. So long as Native Authorities continued to function with an ethnically defined membership, the state continued to make a distinction between two kinds of citizens: the ethnically indigenous and ethnic strangers.” (p. 31)
“…the line along which the settler/native dialectic has unfolded in postcolonial Africa, as it has moved from targeting racial strangers in the civic sphere to targeting ethnic strangers in the Native Authorities.” (p. 33)
~ A chain of defining “settlers”: colonizers, subject races, ethnic strangers… etc. This can explain why in some cases the retaliation/revenge becomes so widespread, as the category of “settler” changes and broadens.
“The more the native/settler dynamic proliferated, the more groups of settlers it created.” (p. 33)
Mamdani:
“The origin of the violence is connected to how Hutu and Tutsi were constructed as political identities by the colonial state, Hutu as indigenous and Tutsi as alien.” (p. 34)
Racializing the Hamites:
“Only in Rwanda and Burundi did the Hamitic hypothesis become the basis of a series of institutional changes that fixed the Tutsi as a race in their relationship to the colonial state.” (p. 35)
Put into historical context:
“I will argue that both events are indicative of a deep-seated crisis: 1959 signals a crisis of subaltern nationalism, and 1990 a crisis of postcolonial citizenship.” (p. 36)
Mamdani argues for a regional approach to examining the historical significance of 1959 and 1990. Just as his claim earlier that there isn’t just one explanation to what makes a Hutu and what makes a Tutsi, the regional approach brings out the many different identities of Rwandans-racial, ethnic, indigenous, nonindigenous, Hutu, Tutsi, Banyarwanda, etc. There isn’t one single definition to postcolonial identity that can be isolated without taking the other regional influences into consideration.
Chapter 2: The Origins of Hutu and Tutsi, pp. 40-75
“The ‘no difference’ (or class difference) point of view has come to be identified with a pro-Tutsi orientation, the ‘distinct difference’ point of view with partiality to the Hutu.” (p. 41)
How the two are simultaneously different and the same:
“European explorers and missionaries who entered the region at the turn of the century began with what seemed a commonsense observation: Tutsi aristocrats looked different from Hutu commoners. As we shall see, colonial scholarship built on this observation and constructed Hutu and Tutsi as different. Faced with an accent on difference, the intellectuals of the anti-colonial movement took as their starting point a second common sense observation: no matter how different they looked, Hutu and Tutsi were part of a single economic and cultural community. Ergo, they were the same.” (p. 42)
“…few indeed were the scholars who pointed out that what was at work was really a political project trying to naturalize political difference as a simple and unproblematic reflection of cultural and biological difference.” (p. 43)
~ What Mamdani is ultimately interested in is the political differences between the Tutsi and Hutus, which contributed to the escalating of the conflict that eventually led to the genocide. The political was definitely at work in distinguishing the two groups, distinct from identifying cultural and ethnic differences, which don’t normally lead to genocides.
Three views:
1. Classifying people into three races-Hutu, Tutsi, Twa.
2. Focusing on the migration hypothesis in search of origins.
3. Rendering racial differences and culturally and then politically significant.
Migration hypothesis: “the ancestors of the Hutu and the Tutsi migrated as different peoples into the region of the African Great Lakes.” (p. 45)
~ Based on genotypes, etc., and natural selection.
~ No thoughts to further mobility/migration after the initial move.
Separate origins necessarily conclusive about anything in contemporary realities? (pp. 48-49)
~ Need to consider migration vs. conquest: distinct political outcome.
~ Value of pastoral migration.
~ Does cultural exchange always involve movement of peoples?
~ Hutu and Tutsi offspring: always “pure”?
“Whatever the merits of his specific argument, the important point about Lwanga-Lunyiigo’s contribution was that he questioned the prevalent tendency among historians to assume that every ‘development’ within Africa had to be the result of an external impulse. In the process, even if unwittingly, he exposed the original and persistent sin of Western history writing when it came to Africa: the search for origins.” (p. 50)
On mixed cattle/agriculture and common language:
“Thus, we come to the point that the people called Tutsi, and those who came to be called Hutu, spoke the same language, lived on the same hills, and had more or less the same culture, depending on the cultural zone in which they lived. But they ahd yet to become one people.” (p. 52)
~ Central Rwanda. This was one of the two zones of cultural, but not political, Banyarwanda people. There is not yet a political significance (political life very decentralized) and no single Rwandan polity.
“Two persons may possess the same broad cultural identity-Banyarwanda-and yet be marked by different political identities: Hutu or Tutsi. The cultural identity… exists alongside and in tension with the political identity, Hutu/Tutsi, whether in the singular or the plural.” (p. 53)
~ East Congo. The second of the two zones just outside of the precolonial Rwanda state. Family, lineage, and clan contribute to political power of the Rwandan state as evidenced in the social identity produced through these categories.
“Rather than being biological offspring of Tutsi of centuries ago, today’s Tutsi need to be understood as children of mixed marriages who have been constructed as Tutsi through the lens of a patriarchal ideology and the institutional medium of a patriarchal family.” (p. 54)
“…the Rwandan state was a powerful political engine that restructured social relations wherever its tentacles took hold…. If we are to understand Hutu and Tutsi as changing political identities, we need to move away from notions of an unchanging Rwandan state in the ‘precolonial’ period, and instead draw a historical outline of its institutional development.” (p. 56)
The bottom line:
“The two points of views-one stressing separate origins as the source of the Hutu/Tutsi difference and the other highlighting the cultural integration that created a single Banyarwanda cultural identity from the diverse groups the migrated into the region at different times-need not be seen as incompatible. They can be seen as complementary rather than alternative accounts, each highlighting a different aspect of history.” (p. 57)
~ By historicizing the “origin” question, Mamdani is able to cast away the limit of either/or, a limit that cannot accommodate both views because of an intrinsic ahistorical interpretation of Rwandan history. Migration and social selection can both happen, though not “unequivocal embrace of either.” (p. 57)
Strong vs. weak (p. 58):
~ Strong migration hypothesis-one or several dramatic migration(s).
~ Weak migration hypothesis-migration doesn’t necessarily mean invasion, but can happen over time, gradual and cumulative.
“…even if we accept that Hutu and Tutsi have different and distinct historical origins, we still have to take into account a subsequent history that made of them a cohesive cultural group.” (p. 59)
~ In other words, there was something that made the two into a cohesive political entity (community) in first place.
Needs (pp. 59):
~ See Hutu and Tutsi as political identities reproduced through a form of a state.
~ Political identities must be historicized as changing identities.
~ Examine how political identities are polarized (i.e., no middle ground) into a shape that led to a genocide carried out with a sense of legitimacy.
Mamdani examines the history of Rwanda. There were transient definitions of Tutsi and Hutus (and Twa), even as power seemed to reside mainly with the Tutsi in the higher level and Hutus more often the less powerful.
“And yet this resistance against the combination of Tutsi power and colonial rule… was for the most part led by disaffected elements from the Tutsi monarchy and aristocracy of Rwanda…. The answer lies in the changing nature of Hutu and Tutsi as political identities from the kingdom to the colonial state, even if both went by the name Rwanda.” (p. 73)
“For as a political identity, Hutu was constructed as a consequence of the formation and expansion of the state of Rwanda. If subject populations only came to be defined as Hutu after being incorporated into Rwandan state structures, we cannot speak of these as Hutu before the incorporation.” (p. 73)
Mamdani’s conclusions (pp. 73-74):
1. Search of migration origin for identity ultimately fruitless, since it ignores the political aspect, things like “Hutus did not exist as an identity outside of the state of Rwanda” (p. 74).
2. Today’s Hutu and Tutsi created single cultural community through cohabitation, intermarriage, and cultural exchange.
3. The two emerged as state-enforced political identities. “The context of that development is the emergence of the state of Rwanda.” (p. 74) State responsible for the making of bipolar Hutu-Tutsi political identities.
“If Hutu/Tutsi evoked the subject-power distinction in the precolonial Rwandan state, the colonial state gave it an added dimension: by racializing Hutu and Tutsi as identities, it signified the distinction as one between indigenous and alien.” (p. 75)
Chapter 3: The Racialization of the Hutu/Tutsi Difference under Colonialism, pp. 76-102
Hannah Arendt's biology vs. culture-correct?
"...the confluence of culture and biology and the emergence of a discourse on civilization that was nothing less than a culture-coded racism.... Race became the marker dividing humanity into a few superhuman and the rest less than human, the former civilized, the latter putty for a civilizational project. This bipolar division of humanity provided the rationale for the elimination of entire peoples." (p. 77)
~ Mamdani's criticism of Arendt is that she localized race as an African discovery, when in fact it is a much broader phenomenon if one looks at the Amerindians and trans-Atlantic slave trade, etc. Racialization is not a Boer experience; it is closely tied with imperialism and the "encountering" and (forced?) division of Africa, leading to the notion of a Hamite vs. Bantu Africans. (pp. 78-79)
"The idea that the Tutsi were superior because they came from elsewhere, and that the difference between them and the local population was a racial difference, was an idea of colonial origin." (p. 80)
Hamite Hypothesis:
"Rather than Negroes, Hamites were seen as other than Negroes, those who civilized the Negroes and were in turn corrupted by the Negroes." (p. 82)
~ Hamites were seen as being origin-ly different from other Africans. They became a class unto their own, in the end even surpassing simple racial groupings into a general "superior" race that surpassed colors. Occupationally, they were seen to be pastoralists. It's a construct based on the romaniticization of the "great civilizations in ancient times," to divorce the Orientalist notion of a rosy cradle of civilization from the reality that Africans in reality were nowhere near the constructed representation.
"Only in Rwanda was the notion that the Tutsi were a race apart from the majority turned into a rationale for a set of institutions that reproduced the Tutsi as a racialized minority.... This set the Tutsi apart from other so-called Hamites in Africa, just as it ruptured the link between race and color in Rwanda." (p. 87)
Mamdani: Tutsis became "privileged in relation to the Hutu but oppressed in relation to Europeans." (p. 88)
~ Three ways: education, state administration (putting Tutsi in positions of power), conversion of Tutsi hierarchy to Christianity.
The chain of commands, so to speak, established by the Belgiums through the Tutsi chiefs placed in power gave Tutsi chiefs the power to exact more taxes/food/labor than they were required to pass onto the colonizers, but at the same time, the colonial demands and punishment of unmet demands placed Tutsi chiefs into a clearly subordinate position in this unbalanced partnership. Tutsi remained a subject race.
"The point of the separatist education was not simply to prepare them for manual labor but also to underline the political fact that educated Hutu were not destined for common citizenship." (p. 90)
"The census marked the end of a process through which the colonial power constructed the Tutsi as nonindigenous and the Hutu as indigenous. Through this distinction between alien and indigenous, the Tutsi came to be defined as a race-the Hamitic race-different from the Hutu, who were constructed as indigenous Bantu." (p. 99)
Some notes beyond the first three chapters:
"The year 1959 saw the first major political change in colonial Rwanda. Ushered in by political violence, it led to the routing and dismantling of Tutsi power at the local administration level. It also triggered broader constitutional and political developments that led to a transfer of governmental power from a Tutsi to a Hutu elite." (p. 104)
~ To Mamdani, 1959 was a revolution that is significant yet needs to be problematized. It is a time of polarization between Hutu and Tutsi, not without influence by the colonialists on issues such as the Tutsi privilege, racialization, etc., and the result of such imperialistic construct into the rise of a Hutu counterelite group.
Inside factions:
"While the revolution was an outcome of the growing polarization between Hutu and Tutsi in Rwandan society, the outcome of the revolution was shaped very much by the contest between different points of views within each camp." (p. 119)
1962: general election, PARMEHUTU won 77.7% to 16.8% for the UNAR; monarchy rejected in favor of replican government. (p. 125)
Accommodationists vs. restorationists:
"...the restorationists wished to undo the 1959 Revolution, holding out the prospect of a return to power through armed exile action." (p. 129)
~ On all fronts, raids, armed guerrillas (inyenzi, cockroaches), repression of Tutsi, etc., ensued.
"Many have claimed that the seeds of the genocidal violence that enveloped Rwanda in 1994 lie in the revolution of 1959. But the revolution was not a bloodbath.... The fact is that it was not the revolution, but attempted restoration and the repression that followed, that opened the gateway to a blood-soaked political future for Rwanda." (p. 130)
"...the war [1990 civil war] turned Hutu Power into a central tendency in Hutu politics. With defeat looming on the horizon, the Hutu Power tendency differentiated even further: the genocidal tendency was born of the crisis of Hutu Power." (p. 185)
"And the fact was that many inside the country agreed that RPF rule would mean nothing but the return of Tutsi domination. The irony was that the more successful the PRF was on the battlefield, the more this view came to define the political center stage, bringing Hutu Power back from a fringe preoccupation to the mainstream of respectable politics." (p. 189)
"At the core of the ideology of Hutu Power was the conviction that the Tutsi were a race alien to Rwanda, and not an indigenous ethnic group." (p. 190)
~ This is both colonial and First Republic. It was only in the Second Republic that Tutsi was viewed as an ethnic group and not a race, Rwandan and not alien. The latter view was advocated by Habyarimana, whom the Hutu Power sought to discredit in order to undo attempts at reconciling Tutsi into Rwandan society as an ethnic minority within a majority of Hutu ethnicity (p. 190).
Hutu Power in response to fear of return of Tutsi domination:
"In all, an estimated 3,000 Tutsi were killed in massacres between 1990 and 1993." (p. 192)
"To explain the mass involvement in the genocide, writers have accentuated one of two factors: the economic and the cultural. Without necessarily denying the significance of either, I shall shift accent away from both to the political aspect of the genocide." (p. 196)
Mamdani:
"My critique of those who tend to accent the economic or the cultural in the understanding of the genocide is that their explanation obscures the moment of decision, of choice, as if human action, even-or, shall I say, particularly-at its most dastardly or heroic, can be explained by necessity alone." (pp. 196-197)
"No matter how depressing these facts may seem, we need to keep in mind that there is no necessary connection between a drastic reduction in resources and deadline human conflict." (p. 198)
"To believe that ordinary Rwandans killed, in their hundreds and thousands, and perhaps more, because of a congenital transhistorical condition-"a culture of fear" or of "deep conformity"-would require stretching one's sense of credibility." (p. 200)
"Neither political assassinations nor massacres make for genocide. It will also not help to equate Hutu Power as a whole with a genocidal tendency. The genocidal tendency arose out of a double crisis, of both the democratic opposition and of Hutu Power." (p. 215)
~ With President Habyarimana's death, one of the final notions for reconciliation disappeared and there ceased to be a middle ground of ethnic reconciliation.
"This study has located the genesis of Hutu/Tutsi violence in the colonial period, specifically around the 1959 Revolution and its recurrence at times when Hutu and Tutsi emerged as identities of groups contending for power, as in 1959-63 and 1990-94.... From being a transethnic distinction of local significance, Belgian colonialism inserted Tutsi and Hutu into the world of race and indigeneity. Key to the political impact of Belgian colonialism is the opposite ways in which it constructed Tutsi and Hutu-Hutu as indigenous and Tutsi as alien-thereby racializing the difference between them." (p. 229)
"The irony is that... the perpetrators of the genocide saw themselves as the true victims of an ongoing political drama, victims of yesterday who may yet be victims again. That moral certainty explains the easy transition from yesterday's victims to killers the morning after." (p. 233)
Mahmood Mamdani, Princeton University Press, 2001.
Goals:
1. I show the ways in which history writing has been complicit with imperialism, particularly in naturalizing political identities, Hutu and Tutsi, and in considering facts about place of origin (migration) as key to history making.
2. I show the ways in which key texts on the 1959 Revolution failed to problematize the object of their analysis.
"Instead of addressing critically the ways in which the postcolonial state reproduced and reinforced colonially produced political identities in the name of justice, they ended up once again treating these identities as if they were natural constructs." (xiii)
“In the process, they also killed not only the Hutu political opposition, but also many nonpolitical Hutu who showed reluctance to perform what was touted as a ‘national’ duty.” (p. 5)
~ This is along the definition of New War by Mary Kaldor-the violence to eliminate opposition en masse as a characteristic different from the nature of Clausewitzean tactics.
“Accounts of the genocide, whether academic or popular, suffer from three silences.” (p. 7)
~ Historical silence (rendering the genocide ahistoric)
~ Silence in acknowledging agency (participation from below)
~ Geographical silence (isolating analysis from regional influences)
“My main objective in writing this book is to make the popular agency in the Rwandan genocide thinkable.” (p. 8)
“I argue that the Rwandan genocide needs to be thought through within the logic of colonialism.” (p. 9)
Settlers’ genocide vs. natives’ genocide, as explored by Hannah Arendt and Franz Fanon (“violence to end violence”).
“Yet, there is a link that connects the genocide of the Herero [by the Germans] and the Nazi Holocaust to the Rwandan genocide. That link is race branding, whereby it became possible not only to set a group apart as an enemy, but also to exterminate it with an easy conscience.” (p. 13)
The Rwandan genocide as a Hutu-native genocide:
“The analytical challenge is to understand the historical dynamic through which Hutu and Tutsi came to be synonyms for native and settler.” (p. 14)
~ How did the Hutus came to see themselves as the natives who needed to (legitimately, à la Fanon’s exhortation) eradicate the Tutsi-settlers? This is a historically situated analysis of the genocide in the context of colonialism and of the phenomenon of making a racial division out of (forced) ethnic differences-the construction of identities that led to embodiment and reaction in a violent manner. Mamdani will analyze both race and ethnicity as political identities (chapter 1).
Chapter 1: Defining the Crisis of Postcolonial Citizenship: Settler, and Native as Political Identities, pp. 19-39
“In the face of political violence that cut across social classes rather than between them, and that was animated by distinctions crafted in colonial law rather han those sprouting from the soil of a commodity economy, explanations rooted in political economy turned arid. Animated by noneconomic distinctions, this violence was neither revolutionary nor counterrevolutionary; it was simply nonrevolutionary.” (p. 19)
“I suggest we recognize that the process of state formation generates political identities that are distinct not only from market-based identities but also from cultural identities.” (p. 20)
~ Is there agency for those even outside of so-called political citizenship? Is it possible to look at Kaldor’s suggestion for horizontal/cosmopolitan approach to resolving New Wars without risking apoliticizing the parties involved as to render them Homo Sacers?
“Direct rule tended to generate race-based political identities: settler and native. Indirect rule, in contrast, tended to mitigate the settler-native dialectic by fracturing the race consciousness of natives into multiple and separate ethnic consciousnesses.” (p. 23)
Colonialism shift from direct to indirect rule.
“Governed under a single law, living under institutions designed for cultural assimilation, and subjugated to a single administrative authority, races were meant to have a common future-but not so ethnicities. In reality, the distinction between race and ethnicity illuminated the political difference between the nonindigenous and the indigenous.” (p. 26)
~ Also, Mamdani calls race vertical and ethnicity horizontal in representation.
“In the African colonies, only ‘natives’ were said to belong to ethnic groups. ‘Nonnatives’ were identified as races. While ethnicities were said to be indigenous, races were presumed to be nonindigenous. Ethnicity was said to mark an internal difference among those constructed by colonial law as indigenous to the land. Race marked an external difference, a differences with others, those legally constructed as nonindigenous.” (p. 27)
~ In this case, a difference is (artificially) carved out among the colonized people. In Mamdani’s words, a “subject race” is created as a sort of middle ground between the colonizer and the colonized.
Civic vs. ethnic citizenships
“The irony was the deracialization without deethnicization continued to reproduce a bifurcated citizenship. So long as Native Authorities continued to function with an ethnically defined membership, the state continued to make a distinction between two kinds of citizens: the ethnically indigenous and ethnic strangers.” (p. 31)
“…the line along which the settler/native dialectic has unfolded in postcolonial Africa, as it has moved from targeting racial strangers in the civic sphere to targeting ethnic strangers in the Native Authorities.” (p. 33)
~ A chain of defining “settlers”: colonizers, subject races, ethnic strangers… etc. This can explain why in some cases the retaliation/revenge becomes so widespread, as the category of “settler” changes and broadens.
“The more the native/settler dynamic proliferated, the more groups of settlers it created.” (p. 33)
Mamdani:
“The origin of the violence is connected to how Hutu and Tutsi were constructed as political identities by the colonial state, Hutu as indigenous and Tutsi as alien.” (p. 34)
Racializing the Hamites:
“Only in Rwanda and Burundi did the Hamitic hypothesis become the basis of a series of institutional changes that fixed the Tutsi as a race in their relationship to the colonial state.” (p. 35)
Put into historical context:
“I will argue that both events are indicative of a deep-seated crisis: 1959 signals a crisis of subaltern nationalism, and 1990 a crisis of postcolonial citizenship.” (p. 36)
Mamdani argues for a regional approach to examining the historical significance of 1959 and 1990. Just as his claim earlier that there isn’t just one explanation to what makes a Hutu and what makes a Tutsi, the regional approach brings out the many different identities of Rwandans-racial, ethnic, indigenous, nonindigenous, Hutu, Tutsi, Banyarwanda, etc. There isn’t one single definition to postcolonial identity that can be isolated without taking the other regional influences into consideration.
Chapter 2: The Origins of Hutu and Tutsi, pp. 40-75
“The ‘no difference’ (or class difference) point of view has come to be identified with a pro-Tutsi orientation, the ‘distinct difference’ point of view with partiality to the Hutu.” (p. 41)
How the two are simultaneously different and the same:
“European explorers and missionaries who entered the region at the turn of the century began with what seemed a commonsense observation: Tutsi aristocrats looked different from Hutu commoners. As we shall see, colonial scholarship built on this observation and constructed Hutu and Tutsi as different. Faced with an accent on difference, the intellectuals of the anti-colonial movement took as their starting point a second common sense observation: no matter how different they looked, Hutu and Tutsi were part of a single economic and cultural community. Ergo, they were the same.” (p. 42)
“…few indeed were the scholars who pointed out that what was at work was really a political project trying to naturalize political difference as a simple and unproblematic reflection of cultural and biological difference.” (p. 43)
~ What Mamdani is ultimately interested in is the political differences between the Tutsi and Hutus, which contributed to the escalating of the conflict that eventually led to the genocide. The political was definitely at work in distinguishing the two groups, distinct from identifying cultural and ethnic differences, which don’t normally lead to genocides.
Three views:
1. Classifying people into three races-Hutu, Tutsi, Twa.
2. Focusing on the migration hypothesis in search of origins.
3. Rendering racial differences and culturally and then politically significant.
Migration hypothesis: “the ancestors of the Hutu and the Tutsi migrated as different peoples into the region of the African Great Lakes.” (p. 45)
~ Based on genotypes, etc., and natural selection.
~ No thoughts to further mobility/migration after the initial move.
Separate origins necessarily conclusive about anything in contemporary realities? (pp. 48-49)
~ Need to consider migration vs. conquest: distinct political outcome.
~ Value of pastoral migration.
~ Does cultural exchange always involve movement of peoples?
~ Hutu and Tutsi offspring: always “pure”?
“Whatever the merits of his specific argument, the important point about Lwanga-Lunyiigo’s contribution was that he questioned the prevalent tendency among historians to assume that every ‘development’ within Africa had to be the result of an external impulse. In the process, even if unwittingly, he exposed the original and persistent sin of Western history writing when it came to Africa: the search for origins.” (p. 50)
On mixed cattle/agriculture and common language:
“Thus, we come to the point that the people called Tutsi, and those who came to be called Hutu, spoke the same language, lived on the same hills, and had more or less the same culture, depending on the cultural zone in which they lived. But they ahd yet to become one people.” (p. 52)
~ Central Rwanda. This was one of the two zones of cultural, but not political, Banyarwanda people. There is not yet a political significance (political life very decentralized) and no single Rwandan polity.
“Two persons may possess the same broad cultural identity-Banyarwanda-and yet be marked by different political identities: Hutu or Tutsi. The cultural identity… exists alongside and in tension with the political identity, Hutu/Tutsi, whether in the singular or the plural.” (p. 53)
~ East Congo. The second of the two zones just outside of the precolonial Rwanda state. Family, lineage, and clan contribute to political power of the Rwandan state as evidenced in the social identity produced through these categories.
“Rather than being biological offspring of Tutsi of centuries ago, today’s Tutsi need to be understood as children of mixed marriages who have been constructed as Tutsi through the lens of a patriarchal ideology and the institutional medium of a patriarchal family.” (p. 54)
“…the Rwandan state was a powerful political engine that restructured social relations wherever its tentacles took hold…. If we are to understand Hutu and Tutsi as changing political identities, we need to move away from notions of an unchanging Rwandan state in the ‘precolonial’ period, and instead draw a historical outline of its institutional development.” (p. 56)
The bottom line:
“The two points of views-one stressing separate origins as the source of the Hutu/Tutsi difference and the other highlighting the cultural integration that created a single Banyarwanda cultural identity from the diverse groups the migrated into the region at different times-need not be seen as incompatible. They can be seen as complementary rather than alternative accounts, each highlighting a different aspect of history.” (p. 57)
~ By historicizing the “origin” question, Mamdani is able to cast away the limit of either/or, a limit that cannot accommodate both views because of an intrinsic ahistorical interpretation of Rwandan history. Migration and social selection can both happen, though not “unequivocal embrace of either.” (p. 57)
Strong vs. weak (p. 58):
~ Strong migration hypothesis-one or several dramatic migration(s).
~ Weak migration hypothesis-migration doesn’t necessarily mean invasion, but can happen over time, gradual and cumulative.
“…even if we accept that Hutu and Tutsi have different and distinct historical origins, we still have to take into account a subsequent history that made of them a cohesive cultural group.” (p. 59)
~ In other words, there was something that made the two into a cohesive political entity (community) in first place.
Needs (pp. 59):
~ See Hutu and Tutsi as political identities reproduced through a form of a state.
~ Political identities must be historicized as changing identities.
~ Examine how political identities are polarized (i.e., no middle ground) into a shape that led to a genocide carried out with a sense of legitimacy.
Mamdani examines the history of Rwanda. There were transient definitions of Tutsi and Hutus (and Twa), even as power seemed to reside mainly with the Tutsi in the higher level and Hutus more often the less powerful.
“And yet this resistance against the combination of Tutsi power and colonial rule… was for the most part led by disaffected elements from the Tutsi monarchy and aristocracy of Rwanda…. The answer lies in the changing nature of Hutu and Tutsi as political identities from the kingdom to the colonial state, even if both went by the name Rwanda.” (p. 73)
“For as a political identity, Hutu was constructed as a consequence of the formation and expansion of the state of Rwanda. If subject populations only came to be defined as Hutu after being incorporated into Rwandan state structures, we cannot speak of these as Hutu before the incorporation.” (p. 73)
Mamdani’s conclusions (pp. 73-74):
1. Search of migration origin for identity ultimately fruitless, since it ignores the political aspect, things like “Hutus did not exist as an identity outside of the state of Rwanda” (p. 74).
2. Today’s Hutu and Tutsi created single cultural community through cohabitation, intermarriage, and cultural exchange.
3. The two emerged as state-enforced political identities. “The context of that development is the emergence of the state of Rwanda.” (p. 74) State responsible for the making of bipolar Hutu-Tutsi political identities.
“If Hutu/Tutsi evoked the subject-power distinction in the precolonial Rwandan state, the colonial state gave it an added dimension: by racializing Hutu and Tutsi as identities, it signified the distinction as one between indigenous and alien.” (p. 75)
Chapter 3: The Racialization of the Hutu/Tutsi Difference under Colonialism, pp. 76-102
Hannah Arendt's biology vs. culture-correct?
"...the confluence of culture and biology and the emergence of a discourse on civilization that was nothing less than a culture-coded racism.... Race became the marker dividing humanity into a few superhuman and the rest less than human, the former civilized, the latter putty for a civilizational project. This bipolar division of humanity provided the rationale for the elimination of entire peoples." (p. 77)
~ Mamdani's criticism of Arendt is that she localized race as an African discovery, when in fact it is a much broader phenomenon if one looks at the Amerindians and trans-Atlantic slave trade, etc. Racialization is not a Boer experience; it is closely tied with imperialism and the "encountering" and (forced?) division of Africa, leading to the notion of a Hamite vs. Bantu Africans. (pp. 78-79)
"The idea that the Tutsi were superior because they came from elsewhere, and that the difference between them and the local population was a racial difference, was an idea of colonial origin." (p. 80)
Hamite Hypothesis:
"Rather than Negroes, Hamites were seen as other than Negroes, those who civilized the Negroes and were in turn corrupted by the Negroes." (p. 82)
~ Hamites were seen as being origin-ly different from other Africans. They became a class unto their own, in the end even surpassing simple racial groupings into a general "superior" race that surpassed colors. Occupationally, they were seen to be pastoralists. It's a construct based on the romaniticization of the "great civilizations in ancient times," to divorce the Orientalist notion of a rosy cradle of civilization from the reality that Africans in reality were nowhere near the constructed representation.
"Only in Rwanda was the notion that the Tutsi were a race apart from the majority turned into a rationale for a set of institutions that reproduced the Tutsi as a racialized minority.... This set the Tutsi apart from other so-called Hamites in Africa, just as it ruptured the link between race and color in Rwanda." (p. 87)
Mamdani: Tutsis became "privileged in relation to the Hutu but oppressed in relation to Europeans." (p. 88)
~ Three ways: education, state administration (putting Tutsi in positions of power), conversion of Tutsi hierarchy to Christianity.
The chain of commands, so to speak, established by the Belgiums through the Tutsi chiefs placed in power gave Tutsi chiefs the power to exact more taxes/food/labor than they were required to pass onto the colonizers, but at the same time, the colonial demands and punishment of unmet demands placed Tutsi chiefs into a clearly subordinate position in this unbalanced partnership. Tutsi remained a subject race.
"The point of the separatist education was not simply to prepare them for manual labor but also to underline the political fact that educated Hutu were not destined for common citizenship." (p. 90)
"The census marked the end of a process through which the colonial power constructed the Tutsi as nonindigenous and the Hutu as indigenous. Through this distinction between alien and indigenous, the Tutsi came to be defined as a race-the Hamitic race-different from the Hutu, who were constructed as indigenous Bantu." (p. 99)
Some notes beyond the first three chapters:
"The year 1959 saw the first major political change in colonial Rwanda. Ushered in by political violence, it led to the routing and dismantling of Tutsi power at the local administration level. It also triggered broader constitutional and political developments that led to a transfer of governmental power from a Tutsi to a Hutu elite." (p. 104)
~ To Mamdani, 1959 was a revolution that is significant yet needs to be problematized. It is a time of polarization between Hutu and Tutsi, not without influence by the colonialists on issues such as the Tutsi privilege, racialization, etc., and the result of such imperialistic construct into the rise of a Hutu counterelite group.
Inside factions:
"While the revolution was an outcome of the growing polarization between Hutu and Tutsi in Rwandan society, the outcome of the revolution was shaped very much by the contest between different points of views within each camp." (p. 119)
1962: general election, PARMEHUTU won 77.7% to 16.8% for the UNAR; monarchy rejected in favor of replican government. (p. 125)
Accommodationists vs. restorationists:
"...the restorationists wished to undo the 1959 Revolution, holding out the prospect of a return to power through armed exile action." (p. 129)
~ On all fronts, raids, armed guerrillas (inyenzi, cockroaches), repression of Tutsi, etc., ensued.
"Many have claimed that the seeds of the genocidal violence that enveloped Rwanda in 1994 lie in the revolution of 1959. But the revolution was not a bloodbath.... The fact is that it was not the revolution, but attempted restoration and the repression that followed, that opened the gateway to a blood-soaked political future for Rwanda." (p. 130)
"...the war [1990 civil war] turned Hutu Power into a central tendency in Hutu politics. With defeat looming on the horizon, the Hutu Power tendency differentiated even further: the genocidal tendency was born of the crisis of Hutu Power." (p. 185)
"And the fact was that many inside the country agreed that RPF rule would mean nothing but the return of Tutsi domination. The irony was that the more successful the PRF was on the battlefield, the more this view came to define the political center stage, bringing Hutu Power back from a fringe preoccupation to the mainstream of respectable politics." (p. 189)
"At the core of the ideology of Hutu Power was the conviction that the Tutsi were a race alien to Rwanda, and not an indigenous ethnic group." (p. 190)
~ This is both colonial and First Republic. It was only in the Second Republic that Tutsi was viewed as an ethnic group and not a race, Rwandan and not alien. The latter view was advocated by Habyarimana, whom the Hutu Power sought to discredit in order to undo attempts at reconciling Tutsi into Rwandan society as an ethnic minority within a majority of Hutu ethnicity (p. 190).
Hutu Power in response to fear of return of Tutsi domination:
"In all, an estimated 3,000 Tutsi were killed in massacres between 1990 and 1993." (p. 192)
"To explain the mass involvement in the genocide, writers have accentuated one of two factors: the economic and the cultural. Without necessarily denying the significance of either, I shall shift accent away from both to the political aspect of the genocide." (p. 196)
Mamdani:
"My critique of those who tend to accent the economic or the cultural in the understanding of the genocide is that their explanation obscures the moment of decision, of choice, as if human action, even-or, shall I say, particularly-at its most dastardly or heroic, can be explained by necessity alone." (pp. 196-197)
"No matter how depressing these facts may seem, we need to keep in mind that there is no necessary connection between a drastic reduction in resources and deadline human conflict." (p. 198)
"To believe that ordinary Rwandans killed, in their hundreds and thousands, and perhaps more, because of a congenital transhistorical condition-"a culture of fear" or of "deep conformity"-would require stretching one's sense of credibility." (p. 200)
"Neither political assassinations nor massacres make for genocide. It will also not help to equate Hutu Power as a whole with a genocidal tendency. The genocidal tendency arose out of a double crisis, of both the democratic opposition and of Hutu Power." (p. 215)
~ With President Habyarimana's death, one of the final notions for reconciliation disappeared and there ceased to be a middle ground of ethnic reconciliation.
"This study has located the genesis of Hutu/Tutsi violence in the colonial period, specifically around the 1959 Revolution and its recurrence at times when Hutu and Tutsi emerged as identities of groups contending for power, as in 1959-63 and 1990-94.... From being a transethnic distinction of local significance, Belgian colonialism inserted Tutsi and Hutu into the world of race and indigeneity. Key to the political impact of Belgian colonialism is the opposite ways in which it constructed Tutsi and Hutu-Hutu as indigenous and Tutsi as alien-thereby racializing the difference between them." (p. 229)
"The irony is that... the perpetrators of the genocide saw themselves as the true victims of an ongoing political drama, victims of yesterday who may yet be victims again. That moral certainty explains the easy transition from yesterday's victims to killers the morning after." (p. 233)