Ancient Rwanda had a rich collection of myths and ideologies long before the coming of Europeans. The traditional myths of origins, which provided a virtual charter of Tutsi supremacy, continue to play a central role to this day, though their meaning has radically changed over time. They are still the main frame of reference for conservative Tutsi elites, but since the early fifties, they have been given a quite different symbolic meaning by Western-educated Hutu elites.
These myths have been studied by Marcel d'Hertefelt,10 who identified five essential themes: the celestial origins of the Tutsi; the fundamental and “natural” differences among Tutsi, Hutu, and Twa; the superior civilization that the Tutsi brought to Rwanda; the threat of divine sanctions against those brazen enough to revolt against the monarchy; and the notion of divine kingship.
The first of these themes finds expression in the story of Kigwe, the founding hero of the royal clan, who descended from heaven, accompanied by his bother Mututsi and his sister Nyamparu. The second is the subject of numerous folktales and dynastic poems. A typical story is that of the stratagem used by God to determine who should rule over whom. So as to test their dependability, God decided to entrust Gahutu, Gatutsi, and Gatwa each with a pot of milk to watch over during the night. When dawn came, gluttonous Gatwa had drunk the milk; Gahutu had gone to sleep and spilt his milk; only the watchful Gatutsi had stayed up through the night to keep guard over his milk. The third is the theme of Tutsi civilization as inherently superior. Nowhere is this theme more tersely summed up than in the opening statement of a folktale of central Rwanda: “Dead are the dogs and the rats, giving way to the cows and the drum.” (The cows here allude to the Tutsi, who, according to legend, introduced pastoralism; the drum was a symbol of power.) Rwanda has no official history before the arrival of the Tutsi. Just as in the dark ages of pre-Islamic civilization ( jahiliya), it is assumed that until the Tutsi arrived, there was little worth remembering, much less recording.11
Why did these early myths take this shape? “The function of myth,” says M. I. Finley, “is to make the past intelligible and meaningful by selection, by focusing on a few bits of the past that thereby acquire permanence, relevance, and universal significance.”12 Rwanda's myths of origins did more than make the past intelligible. Their function was also to make the present legitimate in the eyes of both Hutu and Tutsi.
In time, legends became reality. The myths gained a life of their own and came to be not so much fictitious stories but rather “a statement of a bigger reality.” Its precedents, laws, and morals were, as Bronislaw Malinowski put it, “partially alive,”13 and provided powerful moral justification for the all-encompassing “premise of inequality.”14 Indeed, it was this very ability of these myths to validate oppression that eventually led Hutu politicians to recast them in a radically new light.
Nineteenth-Century European Mythmaking:
The Hamitic Hypothesis
By then, however, another myth had taken hold, one imported from nineteenth-century Europe that placed yet another construction on the history of Tutsi hegemony. Like its precolonial counterparts, the Hamitic myth underwent fundamental changes of substance and meaning; it therefore came to be seen and interpreted in very different ways by Hutu and Tutsi. It is indeed an ironic commentary on the malleability of myths that the same “Hamitic hypothesis”15 should have provided European administrators and missionaries with a powerful argument in support of Tutsi domination, and thus subsequent generations of Hutu politicians with the most devastating ideological ammunition against it.
For the early Christian missionaries, the Tutsi stood as the finest example of the Hamitic race, described by Seligman as “pastoral ‘Europeans,’ arriving wave after wave, better armed as well as quicker witted than the dark agricultural Negroes.”16 In the eyes of these Christians, the Tutsi clearly belonged to a higher order of humanity than the Hutu. For this reason, they were seen as ideally equipped to act as the privileged intermediaries between the European colonizer and the “dark agricultural” masses. Tutsi superiority was manifested in their tall, arresting physique, their extraordinary capacity for self-control, and their ability to exercise authority.
The “scientific” authority of Diedrich Westerman, among others, also was cited in support of the view that the Tutsi were an exceptionally gifted and attractive race: “The Hamites are light skinned, with a straight nose, thin lips, narrow face, soft, often wavy or even straight hair, without prognathism.…Owing to their racial superiority they have gained leading positions and have become the founders of many of the larger states in Africa.”17 What made the Tutsi even more attractive was the fact that they were presumed to be of Ethiopian origin. This ancestry meant that at some point in the distant past, they must have been exposed to biblical influences, which would also explain why they were disposed to embrace Christianity. As Ian Linden puts it, “It seemed to the missionaries that Hamitic history had involved the progressive dilution of some religious essence preordained to flower into the fullness of Christianity.”18 All of this history and speculation was entirely consistent with the prejudices and preconceptions of nineteenth-century European ethnology, but it was also perfectly compatible with the view that some Tutsi had of themselves. Hamitic theories showed an uncanny fit with the mythologies of traditional Rwanda; once incorporated into the work of historiographers, it became increasingly difficult to tell them apart.
Reimagining the Myth in the Early Twentieth Century
Through much of the 1920s and 1930s, Rwandan historiography was cross-fertilized by the confluence of two complementary streams of mythologies: one specific to Rwandan society, the other borrowed from nineteenth-century European race theories. Court traditions gave Christian missionaries a striking illustration of the Hamites as “born rulers, superior in every respect to the ‘dark agricultural’ masses.” The Hamitic frame of reference gave scientific respectability to the work of Tutsi historiographers. In the meantime, the coincidence of views between European and Tutsi historians gave European administrators a rationale for the most extreme and extensive application of indirect rule.
This said, it would be highly misleading to view the “invention” of Rwandan traditions as a straightforward, linear transfer of the Hamitic myth to historiographers and ultimately to African ideologues. If one can speak of “invention by tradition,” then it is important to consider the twists and turns that have accompanied the reinterpretation of traditions. The work of Alexis Kagame is a perfect example. Kagame was a Tutsi historian of considerable reputation, as well as a social actor with strong political commitments. In this latter capacity, his endorsement of the Hamitic frame of reference is not nearly as significant as his attempt to put a modern, Eurocentric construction on Rwandan traditions by casting them in a juridical mold. His Code des institutions politiques du Rwanda pré-colonial, published in 1952, is a case in point.19 Precolonial Rwanda was not just a “royaume Hamite,” to use the title of a celebrated work by Father Pagès.20 It was a traditional state system regulated by codes of laws, juridical norms, and unwritten rules. Just as the rituals of kingship were described as the “code ésotérique de la monarchie,” 21 Rwanda's precolonial institutions were carefully regulated by customary laws, much in the same way that in prerevolutionary France, the “fundamental laws of the realm” imposed specific restrictions on the king's authority. What made traditional Rwanda eminently modern and susceptible to constitutional transformation was not the plasticity of its traditions, but the fact that they were so carefully codified.
Kagame's intellectual processes speak volumes for his political goals. Both are excellently analyzed by Claudine Vidal. “If there is only one word to describe Kagame's philosophy of history,” she writes, “it is ‘le juridisme.’ ” Kagame systematically draws analogs between Rwandan and European institutions. Thus, for example, he assimilates personal power to administrative functions, relations of subordination to contracts, and royal decisions to fundamental laws. In so doing, Kagame identifies precolonial Rwanda with a European nation that has gone beyond the stage of feudalism. He creates an image of it as an absolute monarchy tempered by a military code and offering safeguards against social injustice.22 Kagame had no interest in exalting the merits of an arbitrary, omnipotent kingship. His overriding concern was