1 - The burden of the past

Summary

The extreme polarisation of ethnic identities that produced the genocide against the Tutsi did not disappear with the RPF's conquest of Rwanda in July 1994. In spite of the RPF government's efforts to forge an ethnicity-free sense of national belonging, to this day it continues to affect social and political life in the country to various degrees. The contestation of memories that characterises post-genocide Rwanda is the result of a long history of separate experiences and separate perceptions. The original sin, to use a theological metaphor, was the development of a binary pattern of ethnic identities, joined to a protracted process of crystallisation and essentialisation of these identities. It is to the early history of this process that this chapter is dedicated.

We shall see that the Christian churches have a part, for better and for worse, in this history. From the time of their arrival in Rwanda in 1900, they played a major role in the development and consolidation of a binary system of ethnic identities. The first form of identity, that of the Hutu, was attached to people deemed to be physically, socially and culturally inferior and who were seen, at a later stage of their history, as quintessential victims. The second one, that of the Tutsi, was attached to people presented as being born to command and who, as a result, were considered the natural oppressors of the members of the first group. The Hutu were said to form a natural ‘majority’, in contrast to the Tutsi ‘minority’ that was not genuinely Rwandan and had violently ‘conquered’ the native population.

This rigid pseudo-scientific anthropology ignored or misinterpreted phenomena such as the transition from one group to another or mixed marriages. Likewise, it did not account for the fact that the majority of rural Tutsi were just as poor as their Hutu counterparts. It confused the upper-class Tutsi with a biologically distinct group. Lastly, it overlooked the regional factor, which played an essential role during the Second Republic (1973–94), with the Hutu from the south, who had been influential under President Kayibanda, losing power and prestige under President Habyarimana, a man from the north.