Finish him off quickly. Remember what a good job we did in Ruhengeri and Byumba. We have torn the children from their mothers and torn eyes from the men.
From the narratives collected by Liisa Malkki in refugee camps in Tanzania, one gets an idea of the extent to which these ideas took hold among the Hutu survivors:
In the past our proper name was Bantu. We are Bantu. “Hutu” is no tribe, no nothing! The Kihamite is the national language of the Tutsi. Muhutu is a Kihamite word which means “servant.” Having been given cows as gifts by the Tutsi, the Hutu were used as a slave. It is indeed here that the Hutu were born.…We are not Hutu we are Bantu.31
From 1990 to 1994, much the same themes would emerge in the pages of Kangura, one of the most stridently anti-Tutsi of the forty-odd newspapers published at this time in Rwanda. The following are a few random examples:
• “The Tutsi have created out of whole cloth a tribe which does not exist: the Banyarwanda. The Banyarwanda exists nowhere in Africa; it is only mentioned to create confusion.”
• “Public opinion must know that the only language of the Hutu is Kihutu, just as the Nande speak Kinande, the Hunde Kihunde.”
• “Try to rediscover your ethnie, for the Tutsi have taught you to ignore it.”32
What made the ideological climate of pregenocide Rwanda pregnant with intimations of disaster was the sheer force and frequency of appeals to racism diffused through the media, the extensive use of a racist iconography, and the systematic elaboration of Hamitic mythologies into a coherent body of categorical imperatives. This is nowhere more chillingly evident than in the “Ten Commandments of the Hutu,” first published by Kangura33 in December 1990. This doctrine is a veritable catechism of racist principles. At the heart of this ideology are a series of axiomatic truths:
• The Tutsi are the embodiment of malice and wickedness. “You know the trick they employed when they came to Rwanda: they pretended to have descended from heaven; in fact they came from the north of Africa. In Rwanda they found the pastures they needed for their cows. They approached the Hutu kinglets (bahinza), and with their customary malice they offered them women and cattle, until they overthrew the Hutu, seized power and kept it until the 1959 revolution.”34
• The Tutsi never change—a point put across in a Kangura article titled “A Cockroach (inyenzi) Cannot Give Birth to a Butterfly.” Thus, “history shows that the Tutsi have remained identical to themselves, they haven't changed; their malice and wickedness is what we have experienced throughout history.” Typical of their deviousness is the fact that some “changed their identity in order to gain access to positions reserved to the Hutu,” which is why they have gained a dominant position in “the administration, commerce and the health sectors.”35
• Their long-term strategy is the creation of a Hima empire in the heart of the continent. The Tutsi master plan, we are told, is a diabolical scheme “to restore the dictatorship of the more extremists of the Tutsi minority through genocide and the extermination of the Hutu; to institute in the bantu region of the Great Lakes (Rwanda, Burundi, Zaire, Tanzania and Uganda) a vast Hima-Tutsi empire, under the guidance of an ethnie that considers itself superior, like the Aryan race, and whose symbol is Hitler's swastika.”36 The killing of President Melchior Ndadaye in Burundi at the hands of an all-Tutsi army is thus seen as unmistakable evidence of Hamitic imperial ambitions, along with the fact that the RPF fought its way into Rwanda with the help of “the Tutsi Museveni.”
• Given the mortal threat facing the Hutu majority, it is imperative to delineate tribe from nation and for the Hutu to rediscover their true identity as Bantu.Again to quote from Kangura: “The nation is artificial, only ethnicity (ethnie) is natural.”37 “You (the Hutu) are an important ethnie within the Bantu group,” yet numbers alone may not suffice; what you must realize is that “a conceited (orgueilleuse) and bloodthirsty minority is working to create divisions among you, the better to dominate you and kill you.”38
• In these conditions, vigilance is the key. Watch out for spies and be particularly wary of Tutsikazi (Tutsi females). In the words of the first of the “Ten Commandments,” “Every Hutu must know that any Tutsikazi, regardless of where she works, is in the pay of her Tutsi ethnie. Consequently, will be treated as a traitor any Hutu who marries a Tutsikazi, or makes her his concubine or his protégée.” The second commandment stipulates that “every Hutu must know that our women (Hutukazi) are more dignified and more conscious of their roles as mothers and wives,” and the third enjoins Hutu females “to remain vigilant and bring back (their) husbands, brothers and sons to reason.”39
Tutsi women, indeed, play a disproportionate part in Hutu discourse (and iconography). As the foregoing shows, the first three of the Ten Commandments are concerned exclusively with the threats arising from the presence of Tutsikazi among the Hutu communities. Tutsi women, furthermore, were a favorite target of Hutu cartoonists in search of pornographic effect. Warning against the dangers of potential Mataharis among Tutsi females was evidently a major objective of the Hutu-controlled press. The more outrageous caricatures gleaned from the pages of Power and Kangura-Magazine40 suggest, however, a deeper motivation. They reflect the seething anger and frustrations of many Hutu who saw in the greater attractiveness to Europeans of the typical Tutsikazi body a slur against their own “race.” How the media exploited the legendary attractiveness of Tutsikazi to discredit both Tutsi women and the United Nations Mission in Rwanda is nowhere more shockingly illustrated than in the cartoon in Figure 2, published in Power, no. 2 (December 1993): 12.
Figure 2. Extremist anti-Tutsi propaganda directed at Tutsi women and Belgian paratroopers in the MINUAR (the French acronym for the UN Mission in Rwanda). “The Force of Sex and the Belgian Paratroopers,” from Power, no. 2 (December 1993): 12. Reproduced from Jean-Pierre Chrétien, ed., Rwanda: Les medias du génocide (Paris: Karthala, 1995), p. 366.
What all this adds up to is a sustained and deliberate effort to recast the Hamitic frame of reference in such a way as to throw moral discredit on an entire ethnic community. By 1994, it was almost as if every Tutsi in sight was by definition an ally of the RPF and hence an enemy of the Hutu nation.
MYTH #2: THE DENIAL OF GENOCIDE
As an ideological construction designed to justify the annihilation of the Tutsi minority, the Hamitic myth must be seen as the central element behind the 1994 genocide. In the denial of genocide by some of its perpetrators lies another extraordinary form of mythmaking.
The term genocide has now become the most overused and arbitrary word in the political discourse of Hutu and Tutsi in Rwanda and Burundi. In both states, it is among the perpetrators that one encounters the most vigorous denial of involvement in ethnic massacres. Although many of the killers who are now in custody in Kigali or Arusha have admitted involvement in the Rwandan massacres, many more refuse to acknowledge their deeds. In flagrant contradiction of the facts, the argument one hears most often is that the killings were the result of a spontaneous outburst of collective anger, not the outcome of a planned annihilation.
Much the same sort of role reversal can be seen in Burundi, where the perpetrators are cast as victims. To this day, the 1972 genocide of Hutu by Tutsi has been virtually obliterated from the consciousness of most Tutsi. Radical Tutsi ideologues officially recognize only one genocide, the killing of thousands of innocent Tutsi civilians in October 1993, in the wake of President Melchior Ndadaye's assassination. They see this carnage as planned annihilation, even though it might better be described as an explosion of collective fear and anger, set off by a murder that conjured up haunting memories of the 1972 killings. They do not mention the subsequent repression of the Hutu by the Tutsi-controlled army that led to the death of thousands of Hutu and the exodus of some 300,000 of their kinsmen to Rwanda. Although, historically, the group that has suffered most from genocidal killings in Burundi are the Hutu, today it is the 1994