Imperialism's role in the Hutu-Tutsi conflict

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

NY Times, August 30, 2003
BOOKS OF THE TIMES | 'THE GREAT LAKES OF AFRICA'
A Deep Crisis, Shallow Roots
By JOHN SHATTUCK

In central Africa, a genocidal war has raged for nearly a decade, costing 
more than four million lives in Rwanda, Burundi and Congo and precipitating 
the worst humanitarian crisis in more than half a century. Central Africa 
shares this gruesome recent past with southeastern Europe, where in the 
1990's the Balkans were swept by a wave of killing and "ethnic cleansing." 
In both cases, genocide was widely misunderstood to be the inevitable 
product of "ancient hatreds."

Jean-Pierre Chrétien, a French historian with vast experience in the Great 
Lakes region of Africa, has undertaken the formidable task of tracing the 
roots of the region's violence and exposing the ideological myths on which 
the ancient-hatreds theory rests. In a monumental study that marches 
through two millenniums before approaching central Africa's contemporary 
agony, Mr. Chrétien punctures the sense of inevitability that permeates our 
thinking about the Rwandan genocide.

Along the way, he illuminates the responsibility of a wide range of actors 
from the colonial period through the present. As warlords continue today to 
compete for power in a thoroughly ravaged Congo, Mr. Chrétien helps us 
understand how this all came about and why it matters that we know.

The story begins with the geography of the central African highlands. 
Despite its equatorial location, Mr. Chrétien says, "the region is blessed 
with good climate, is rich with diverse soils and plants, and has prospered 
thanks to some strong basic techniques: the association of cattle keeping 
and agriculture; the diffusion of the banana a millennium ago; and the 
mastery of iron metallurgy two millennia ago." In this healthy environment, 
complex social structures evolved in which the idea of kingship and strong 
central authority took hold and flourished for more than 300 years before 
the arrival of colonial powers in the mid-19th century.

The fertile lands around the Great Lakes were settled by indigenous Hutu 
cultivators, while the more mountainous areas were used for the raising of 
cattle by Tutsi pastoralists. In the early kingdoms of the region, 
agricultural and pastoral systems were integrated because they controlled 
complementary ecological zones and served mutually beneficial economic 
interests. As Mr. Chrétien argues convincingly, nowhere at this time could 
the "social dialectic be reduced" to a Hutu-Tutsi cleavage.

That began to change in the 19th century. As social structures became more 
complex, the success of the central African kingdoms depended increasingly 
on territorial expansion through raiding, colonizing and annexing of 
neighboring lands. At the same time, Tutsi cattle raisers in search of more 
land began to emerge as a new elite and a driving force behind expansion. 
The kingdoms of Rwanda and Uganda were particularly expansionist, but were 
soon thwarted by the arrival of colonial powers. The immediate effect of 
colonialism was to reorient the stratified and dynamic societies of the 
Great Lakes around competing poles of collaboration with, and resistance 
to, the new foreign occupiers.

Since these remote societies had been untouched by the slave trade that 
ravaged Africa's coastal regions, they presented the Europeans with a range 
of robust aristocracies and royal courts to win over.

At this crucial point, the issue of race entered the picture. Obsessed by 
their theories of racial classification, 19th- and early-20th-century 
Europeans rewrote the history of central Africa. Imposing their own racist 
projection of superiority on Tutsi "Hamito-Semites" and a corresponding 
inferiority on Hutu "Bantu Negroes," missionary and colonial historians 
began to attribute the rise of the Great Lakes kingdoms to the arrival of a 
superior race of "black Europeans" from the north.

Mr. Chrétien quotes many examples of this toxic "scientific ethnicism," 
which the Belgians purveyed to their central African colonies until just 
before independence. A typical example from a colonial school newspaper in 
Burundi in 1948 states that "the preponderance of the Caucasian type is 
deeply marked" among the Tutsi, making them "worthy of the title that the 
explorers gave them: aristocratic Negroes."

full: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/30/books/30LAKE.html

Louis Proyect, Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org