WHEN I WAS FIVE YEARS OLD, there was an afternoon when people came to our house carrying spare clothes in their bags. My father seemed to know some of them, but not all. There must have been a dozen strangers in our courtyard. They were frightened and apologetic.“Don’t worry, you’re safe here, ” I heard my father say. “Relax and have a drink.” There was one strange boy about my age. His shorts were filthy. There were cuts on his feet, as if he had been walking a long way. We looked at each other from across the courtyard.
I asked my mother what was happening, and she told me that there was trouble in the capital city. The white men who had been in control were having problems. Some bad things had happened, and these people who had come to visit us were trying to get away from bad men. They would be staying awhile.
We all slept outside that first night, and it was a bit of an adventure to be under the open sky. The adults smoked tobacco and talked in low voices.
On the second night I asked my father why we were sleeping outside and he told me the truth: “Because if somebody comes to burn the house down we will not cook to death inside it.” The people who had come to stay with us were known as “Tutsis, ” he said, and there were people roaming about who hated them. It was hard for me to understand because they looked just like us.
I understood years later that our guests that November week had been fleeing widespread massacres in the wake of what was called the “Hutu Revolution of 1959.” It was also when the tactic of burning down the enemy’s houses was pioneered. Those who tried to protect the Tutsi were considered targets as well. To shelter the enemy was to become the enemy.
History is serious business in my country. You might say that it is a matter of life and death.
It is a rare person here, even the poorest grower of bananas, who cannot rattle off a string of significant dates in Rwanda ’s past and tell you exactly what they mean to him and his family. They are like beads on our national necklace: 1885, 1959, 1973, 1990, 1994. Even though this nation is dirt poor and our school system does not match the standards of the West, we might be the most knowledgeable people on the globe when it comes to analyzing our own history. We are obsessed with the past. And everyone here tries to make it fit his own ends. But this is not something of which we should always be proud.
George Orwell once said, “He who controls the past, controls the future, ” and nowhere is that more true than in Rwanda. I am fully convinced that when so many ordinary people were swinging machetes at their neighbors in that awful springtime of 1994 they were not striking out at those individual victims per se but at an historical phantom. They were trying not so much to take life as to actually take control of the past.
Rwanda is sometimes called the “Switzerland of Africa, ” and with good reason. Not only do people here tend to be quiet and reserved, like the Swiss, but our country is also a mountainous jewel tucked into some of the loveliest real estate on its continent. It is an aerie of high hills and grassy meadows and river valleys tucked between Lake Kivu to the west and the plains of Tanzania to the east. The entire region occupies an area no bigger than the American state of Vermont. It is so small there is usually never room for the name “ Rwanda ” on most maps of Africa and the word must be printed off to one side, sometimes with an arrow pointing to the pebble that is my country. But there is abundant rainfall and mild weather and black loamy soil that made it one of the richest spots in Central Africa for the growing of food and the herding of livestock. The good returns on small-scale agriculture therefore made it an attractive place to settle. And near the year 1500, at the same time that the arts and sciences were beginning to flower in Renaissance Europe, a distinct nation of people began to emerge in Rwanda under the banner of a dynastic king that everybody called the mwami.
According to tribal lore the bloodline of the mwami had a heavenly origin. If there was a dispute over succession the true king was supposed to be known by being born with the seeds of a squash plant clutched in his tiny fist. A court of royal advisers known as the abiru would reveal the successor when the current king died. They were also the guardians of the obscure poems, songs, and stories that comprised a kind of underground national history. It was a long account of violence and royal assassinations and illicit sex; in short, the failings of past kings and queens, the kind of history that doesn’t flatter. It was known by a Kinyarwanda word, which is roughly translated as “gossip.” If you were trusted with the gossip it was a signal that you were now a part of the inner circle. In Rwanda, political power has always been linked with control of history.
Kings were the ultimate guardians of the past and of power and they were supposed to watch over everybody with equal favor. They fielded extremely tough armies with excellent archers. As a result, we were one of the only regions in Africa where Arab and European slave traders were never able to conduct raids, and so almost none of our people were sold into bondage. One of our ancient kings-a ruler named Gihanga-was supposed to have discovered fire. A flame burned in his memory at the royal court until the monarchy finally ended in 1959. I’ll say more about that event later, but it is important to know now that the early kings and all the advisers that surrounded them were generally the taller people in the tribe. This established a legend just as colorful as the squash seeds I mentioned, but one that would be infinitely more damaging.
It is well known that the main ethnic groups in modern Rwanda are the Hutu and the Tutsi, but it remains a matter of controversy if these are indeed two separate races or if that is just an artificial political distinction created in a relatively short period of time. Evidence points to the latter. We share a common language-the beautiful tongue of Kinyarwanda-the same religions, the same children’s games, the same storytelling traditions, the same government, even, in most cases, the same outward appearance. We also had a strong idea of our hilly land as a unified nation and a pride in ourselves as tough warriors for the mwami. There was never any “Hutu homeland” or “Tutsi homeland.”
What divided us was an invented history.
The false-but very common-explanation for our origins is that the Hutus are a wandering offshoot of the huge group of Bantu-speaking people who have occupied Central Africa for thousands of years. They were said to have come into the country from the west. The Tutsis, on the other hand, are supposed to be descendants of the taller peoples of the Ethiopian highlands near the headwaters of the Blue Nile. They were supposed to have invaded Rwanda from the north about five hundred years ago and established the mwamis government. Or so the story went. But there is no real evidence for it, and most scholars now think that it is pure invention. We will probably never know for certain. Africa ’s traditional history is one passed down through poems and genealogies and heroic ballads in which people, not places, are the emotional focus. So many specific details about geography and migration patterns are lost in the fog of time.
One influential man who helped create the “Tutsis from the Nile” theory was British explorer John Hanning Speke, who is given credit for being the first white man to lay eyes on Lake Victoria. He made some superficial observations about the people he came across during his expeditions in Central Africa and connected them with stories in the Bible. In his 1863 book, Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile, he showed a strange fixation with an extended clan of leaders in what is now present-day Rwanda. These people-they called themselves Tutsis-measured their wealth in cows, drank milk, ate beef, and seemed to be taller and have slightly more angular noses than their subjects, who fed their families by growing cassavas, sweet potatoes, and other vegetables. Speke theorized that they were actually a lost tribe of Christians who had migrated from the deserts of the Middle East and were therefore the carriers of a noble line of blood. The Hutu-what Speke called the “curly-head, flab-nosed, pouch-mouthed negro”-was a different story. The name itself means “one who works, ” and Speke thought there was a divine purpose behind the differences in lifestyle. Those who grew crops, he said, were probably the distant descendants of Noah’s son Ham, who according to the ninth chapter of Genesis had committed the sin of looking at his father lying naked in a tent when he, Noah, was drunk on homemade wine. For this transgression Noah cursed his son Ham’s descendants for all time.“The lowest of slaves will he be to his brothers, ” said the man who had captained the ark through the floodwaters. And, to Speke’s way of thinking, these poor lowborns had obviously found their way to exile in Central Africa and had reproduced themselves by the millions. The Hutus were part of that accursed lot, and this explained their generally subservient role to the cattle-owning Tutsis, even though the two groups of people looked quite similar on the surface.
All of this is, of course, total European foolishness, but what came to be called the “Hamitic hypothesis” carried a surprising amount of weight in the late nineteenth century, just as the great powers were preparing to carve up Africa into colonies. These ideas about race were to become more than fanciful stories told over port at the Royal Geographic Society but an actual template for governing us. The real origin of Rwanda ’s class system had almost nothing to do with physical characteristics. It was much more banal than anything the European gentlemen explorers had been able to imagine.
What seems to have happened was that the ministers and priests closest to the Rwandan king started to conceive of themselves as being a special class of people, in much the same way that large landowners in what is now Great Britain or France began to call themselves lords and dukes and earls. In precolonial Rwanda, however, it wasn’t land that was used to reckon a person’s wealth. It was cows. Those who didn’t have cattle were forced to turn to growing crops for sustenance and took on the identity of Hutu, or “followers”. Many acquired cows by applying to a local strongman and agreeing to pay an annual tribute of grain and honey beer and pledging to defend him in times of war. These client relationships were known as the code of ubuhake and became the glue of the Rwandan social hierarchy.
Intermarriage between the Tutsi and the Hutu was not unheard of, but it was also not the norm. Those taller frames and aquiline noses that John Hanning Speke had fallen in love with were probably the result of just a few hundred years of sexual selection within that particular caste group. This deluded love affair, as you might guess, was soon to become the cause of great misery. I experienced it for the first time when I was nineteen years old.
My best friend, Gerard, was expelled from school in February 1973. This was one of the saddest days I had ever known, not just because I was losing my friend, but because it was my first real taste of the poison in the soil of my country. I also became aware for the first time of a bloodline inside me that divided me from people that I loved.
I had known Gerard almost as long as I could remember. We had both come from mixed families and we had a lot in common in the way we viewed the world. We had grown up together-played soccer together, talked about girls, made fun of each other, wondered together about our future careers, speculated about who we would marry-all the normal things that make up a friendship between boys. He was as smart a kid as I ever met. Our daily walk to school together had been a constant feature of my mornings ever since we were eight years old. Our footprints grew larger, but our friendship remained.
The year before Gerard was expelled there had been chaos and death in the neighboring country of Burundi, a nation with an ethnic composition very similar to Rwanda. The president, a former Army captain named Michel Micombero, had ordered his armed forces to crack down on a Hutu uprising, and these soldiers took their mission beyond the bounds of rationality. Nearly two hundred thousand people were slaughtered and even more fled their homes for the relative safety of my country. We have a saying: “Whatever happens in Burundi eventually spills over into Rwanda, and whatever happens in Rwanda will also spill into Burundi.”And that was certainly the case in 1973.
The government in Rwanda was sympathetic and began taking reprisals against Tutsis as a kind of revenge. Several dozen were massacred with knives and machetes in villages near the border. Others lost their houses and their businesses. The younger ones were kicked out of the schools. One of them was my friend Gerard.
I will never forget the last time we walked to school together. When we arrived there were lists of names tacked to the bulletin boards outside the classrooms. Gerard’s name was there. He was told to take his things and go-he was not wanted at the school any longer. A group of Hutu students stood in front of the classroom door as a human wall to block the undesirables from going inside. These were the same children who had laughed, played, and gossiped together just twenty-four hours before. Now they were being divided in a way that was not fully comprehensible, but I will never forget the look of determination-even glee-on the part of some of my classmates who were accepting their new superior role all too readily.
I stood alone on the grassy quadrangle and watched Gerard walk back down the lane toward his home. That was the last I saw of him for a very long time.
His name was on the list because his mother was a Hutu and his father was a Tutsi. My name was not on the list because my mother was Tutsi and my father was a Hutu. Since ethnicity passes through the father’s loins in Rwanda, according to this idiotic logic Gerard was considered a despicable Tutsi and I was considered a privileged Hutu. Had the parentage been reversed it would have been me walking down that lane of guava trees with my head down.
I cannot tell you how much I loathed myself that day for having been lucky. It was the first time I became aware of myself not as “Paul” but as a “Hutu.” I suppose this dark epiphany is an essential rite of passage for anyone who grew up in my country, one of the most physically lovely places on the globe, but one with poison sown in its heart.
I have to tell you more.
One of those beads I mentioned on our necklace is 1885. This was the year of the famous Conference of Berlin, which put the seal on what was to become nearly seven decades of colonial government in Africa. This was also where Rwanda ’s fate was to be determined.
Representatives from Austria-Hungary, Denmark, France, Great Britain, Spain, the United States, Portugal, Holland, Sweden, and Norway met to sort out the conflicting claims their agents had made to vast pieces of real estate in Africa-most particularly, the forests of the Congo that had been turned into a private reserve for King Leopold II of Belgium. The Berlin conference was remarkable not just for the lack of African participation, but also for laying out a few key principles. The first was that a European nation couldn’t just draw lines on a map and claim that area as a protectorate. They had to prove they could “effectively occupy” and defend that territory. The second was that if a navy could seize a piece of coastline it would also have the rights to whatever lay inland for a virtually unlimited distance. The African continent was then sliced up with borders that frequently had no logical relation to watersheds, trade patterns, linguistic groups, or geography. Remarked the British prime minister: “We have been giving away mountains and rivers and lakes to each other, only hindered by the small impediment that we never knew exactly where they were.”
Rwanda fared well in some ways-at least, better than most of our neighbors. The borders shaved some corners from the rugged area claimed by the mwami, but we retained a certain amount of territorial integrity. Our colonizing power would be Germany, a nation that generally did not share the worst rapacious tendencies of some of the other conquerors of Africa. They had won our aerie as a compromise and they showed little interest in taking advantage of what little natural resources we could offer them. It took German agents more than nine years to arrive in Rwanda and thirteen before they finally got around to establishing an administrative office. Our nation was assigned to the same colonial department as the neighboring nation of Burundi and renamed Ruanda-Urundi.
The Germans looked on their new possession with indifference. It was a country far from the ocean. The most important provision of the Berlin Conference-the one that required “effective occupation”-was also a problem. The government of Otto von Bismarck simply did not see the value in sending a large portion of its army and civil service to rule a poor chunk of landlocked farmland. What this meant, in effect, was that the kaiser’s flag flew over our country as a matter of appearance, but the real power continued to be the top-down apparatus run by the Tutsi royalty. After the Germans’ catastrophic loss in World War I we were handed over as a spoil of war to the government of Belgium. That was the beginning of real change, for the Belgians showed more of an interest in us.
Belgium wanted to get the most profit out of Rwanda while expending the least amount of men and effort. The new colonizers looked at the social rift between our leaders and farmers and saw an easy way to rule by proxy. It was a version of the old divide-and-conquer tactics used so effectively by colonizers throughout history. The Aztec empire in Mexico was finished the moment that Hernán Cortés realized he could exploit minor resentments between tribes to his own advantage, making friends with one tribe to beat the more powerful rival and thus subdue the entire region for the Spanish Crown. And so the Belgians adopted the bizarre race theories of John Hanning Speke to turn the Tutsi aristocracy into something like junior managers. It was no longer enough to simply co-opt the royal court as the Germans had. There was now an explicitly racial way of separating the haves from the have-nots.
Here’s how crazy it became. Belgian scientists were sent down to Rwanda with little measuring tapes. They determined that a typical Tutsi nose was at least two and a half millimeters longer than a Hutu nose. This brand of “scientific” race theory led directly to a particularly dark bead on our necklace: the year 1933, when all people in Rwanda received identity cards known as books that specified their ethnic class. Years later these cards would become virtual death warrants for thousands of people, as we will see. But the immediate effect of these cards was to crystallize the racism into a Jim Crow system. Almost all the colonial administrative jobs were reserved for Tutsis. When categories were written down, it became harder for Hutu to pass as Tutsi, even after they had accumulated many cows.
The doctrine of Tutsi superiority was taught in schools, preached in churches, and reinforced in thousands of invisible ways in daily Rwandan life. The Tutsi were told over and over that they were aristocratic and physically attractive, while the Hutu were told they were ugly and stupid and worthy only of working in the fields. An early colonial film described the farming class as “souls sad and passive, ignoring all thought for the morrow” who viewed their Tutsi masters as “demigods.” This was the message that our fathers and mothers heard every day. One of the most distingished scholars on our nation, the American professor Alison Des Forges, has described the net effect this way: “People of both groups learned to think of the Tutsi as the winners and the Hutu as the losers in every great contest in Rwandan history.”
It saddens me to tell you that one of the archetypical images of my country became the Tutsi king borne on the shoulders of a platoon of Hutu laborers. It is true that my country, just as every civilization on earth, has economic and social inequalities in our past. What makes Rwanda particularly tragic, however, is that our unhappiness was given its shape by the indelible contours of race, making it all the easier for the great-grandsons of the whipped to find someone’s head to chop off.
Rwanda ’s apartheid system began to fall apart in the 1950s, when it was becoming increasingly clear that the European powers could no longer hold on to their colonies in Africa. Independence movements were sweeping the continent-violently in some places, such as Kenya, Algeria, and the Belgian Congo. Nearly every nation that had participated in the Berlin Conference had been shell-shocked by World War II and no longer had a taste for empire. Under pressure from the United Nations and the world community, Belgium was getting ready to let go of its claim on Rwanda. But one last surprise was in store.
The Tutsi aristocracy had, not surprisingly, been generally supportive of their Belgian patrons through the years. But it was a devil’s bargain. The Tutsis received a limited amount of power and a condescending recognition of the mwami in exchange for their ultimate loyality to Brussels. They also cooperated in the oppression of the Hutu, who were forced to harvest timber and crops in crews of road gangs, with Tutsi bosses. As any social scientist can tell you, any system of organized hatred also damages the oppressor, if in less obvious ways. Tutsi were forced to punish their Hutu neighbors for misdeeds or face punishment themselves. And Belgium left no doubt who was in charge in 1931 when they deposed the mwami Musinga, who had resisted all the arguments of all the Catholic priests sent from Europe to convert the natives. The colonizers ignored the squash seeds and handpicked a successor, King Rudahigwa, a man considered sufficiently pliable. He was also an ardent Roman Catholic. His example led Tutsis and Hutus alike to convert to the new faith. Almost overnight Rwanda became one of the most Christian nations on the globe, albeit with a strong flavor of the old mysticism. The Catholic priests from Europe, however, helped foment a revolutionary twist in the history of Rwanda.
A well of sympathy for the Hutu underclass had been building throughout the late 1950s. The key role was played by the Roman Catholic Church. Perhaps it was the words of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount: “Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven… blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.” Or perhaps it was that Belgium itself is a nation of competing ethnicities and that many of the Catholic priests sent to Rwanda were from the historically abused Flemish communities. Perhaps there was finally a sense that too much was too much. Either way, the authorities took steps to empower the people who had been suffering for so long. The Hutus had always had superior numbers, and official policy began to reflect that mathematical reality-and then some. The Hutu slowly assumed power as the ruling class. One administrator in Kigali issued the following secret order: “I deem it necessary to rapidly put into place a local military force officially composed of 14 percent Tutsi and 86 percent Hutu but in effect and for practical purposes, 100 percent Hutu.” Fearful of losing their longstanding grip on power-and perhaps also fearful of retributive violence-the Tutsi commenced a period of sharp opposition to Belgium ’s continuing hold on Rwanda. This course would prove disastrous for them, as it finalized the shift in Belgium ’s favor over to the Hutu they had mistreated for sixty years.
On July 27, 1959, our king died of a cerebral hemorrhage, and speculation ran wild that he had been secretly assassinated by the Belgians. His successor, the teenage ruler Kigeli V, would last only a few months before the ancient dynastic line would be snuffed out forever. Belgium called for the first free elections in Rwanda ’s history, but soon found itself trying to put down a rebellion of Hutu insurgents, who had set about murdering Tutsis and setting fire to their houses. Despite the centuries of coexistence, this marked the very first outbreak of systematic ethnic murders in Rwanda. The killers were rewarded with some of the first prosperity they had ever tasted. The homes, fields, and stores of the Tutsis often went into the hands of those who had hacked them apart, establishing a link between patriotism and money that has yet to disappear. I’ll never forget sleeping outside at night during that time, wondering if somebody was going to burn our house down for harboring Tutsis.
The national elections were held in a climate of fear and-not surprisingly-the Hutus won 90 percent of the open seats. Suddenly it became desirable, even necessary, to have an identity card that called you a Hutu. Public schools were soon open to the majority, and children who had been denied education for years began learning to read and write and add figures just as adeptly as the Tutsi. This should have given the lie once and for all to Speke’s idiotic racial ideas-as if they had not been discredited already. Belgium and the United Nations handed the nation over to a Hutu government and left the nation after a brief ceremony on July 1, 1962, at 10 o’clock in the morning. A new flag was hastily designed and raised: a tricolor banner with a plain letter R in the middle. These events, taken as a whole, came to be called the “Hutu Revolution.”And there was to be no sharing of power.
Tens of thousands of persecuted Tutsis fled the country to the safety of Uganda and other neighboring nations. One of the refugees was a small child named Paul Kagame, who was said to have been carried on his mother’s back.
Rwanda had not seen the last of him.
The exiled Tutsis would eventually number more than a quarter million. The angriest young men among them began launching guerrilla raids into Rwanda from their hiding places across the border. They were called “cockroaches” because they came out at night and were hard to kill. This military slang would soon be applied to the Tutsi people as a whole, a term as pernicious and dehumanizing as the American word nigger.
The raids were mostly amateur affairs, but they gave a pretext for our new government of President Grégoire Kayibanda to wrap itself in the flag of the Hutu Revolution and begin a purge of the Tutsis who remained inside Rwanda. There is no greater gift to an insecure leader that quite matches a vague “enemy” who can be used to whip up fear and hatred among the population. It is a cheap way to consolidate one’s hold on power. And this is just what the new regime did.
The persecution was made all the eaiser because Rwanda is a meticulously organized country. The nation is arranged into a series of twelve prefectures, which look a bit like American states, except they have no powers. Within every prefecture are several communes, which are the real building blocks of authority in Rwanda. The head of the commune is known as the bourgmeister, or mayor, and he usually gets his job through a personal friendship with the president. This is the real seat of power in tiny Rwanda, which is like one giant village. Four out of five of us live in the rural areas and nine out of every ten people here draws some income from farming the hills. Even the most urbanized among us has a close connection with the backcountry. And so the orders came down to every hill: It was the duty of every good and patriotic Hutu to join “public safety committees” to periodically help “clear the brush.” Everyone understood this to mean slaughtering Tutsi peasants whenever there was a raid from the exiles across the border. In 1963 thousands of Tutsis were chopped apart in the southern prefecture of Gikongoro. These countryside massacres continued off and on throughout the decade and flared up again after the trouble in Burundi in 1972 that caused the education of my best friend, Gerard, to be stolen.
He never quite recovered. Though he had the skills and the ambition to become an engineer, the only job he could get was selling banana beer in a stand by the side of the road. He later moved to Kigali, where he landed a clerical job in a bank. But he was always plagued by the image of what he might have become had he been allowed to continue his education and use all of the formidable talents that had rotted inside of him. When we were both much older I tried to get together with him for beers from time to time, but there was a taint of sadness, and even anger, that always hung over our friendship. I was one thing in the blood and he was another and there was nothing either of us could do to change it. He was a Tutsi by accident and he had to live the rest of his life under that taint, occasionally in fear for his life from the public safety committees and destined to work in dead-end jobs. It was an appalling waste-not just of a man but of a potential asset to Rwanda and the rest of the world. Gerard had something to give. It was not wanted.
As one born into the favored class, my accidental path would be different.