Genocide: Rwandans could never have dreamt of it

I normally try my best never to eavesdrop, because I was taught since my tender age, that the habit was abhorrent. However, on this occasion, I just could not help it. No. I could not avoid it in this circumstance, as you soon shall see. We were sitting together in the living room. I, however, was somehow far removed in one corner, and was deeply engrossed in a newspaper I was reading. On their side, my maternal aunt, a dignified lady, nearly a century old, was busy talking with our house help, a young lady 30 or so year-old, and a survivor of the genocide against the Tutsi. Looking at my aunt, you would never believe that she had weathered nearly 30 years of life hardships in a refugee camp. To the two women, in their conversational exchange during which my aunt was doing the talking and the girl doing the listening, I was non-existent, not in the room at all. The young lady only interrupted occasionally to ask a question. On my side, I was totally absorbed by my reading, when abruptly my ears pricked up when I heard the old lady utter the word genocide, especially in this period of its remembrance. “On their own, the Hutu could never have dreamt of carrying out the Genocide,” she was saying to the young lady who was all ears. And from this moment, I also shamelessly joined in the listening, hidden behind my newspaper. “I remember vividly when we were still young girls; people were talking of one set of people exterminating the other, far away in those countries of the white. And that the set of people being exterminated were the people of God.” Jesus Christ of Nazareth, I thought. Where did the old lady get all this? But she hadn’t finished yet. “I remember,” she went on, “asking myself at the time, how God could have allowed His people to be exterminated and let the exterminators go unpunished. But I know now, of course, that the Lord works in mysterious ways.” The old lady was no doubt talking of the Holocaust or the Genocide of the Jews, but I was to be further astonished by what followed next. When the younger lady asked how the killers recognised their victims as the people of God, her reply came without hesitation: “They carried identity cards”. There is no way the old lady could have known that the Jews of that time carried identity cards, so she must have conceptualised the whole idea, drawing a parallel from what she had heard identified the Tutsi when they were being hunted down by the Interahamwe in 1994, or even before that. On the other hand, we know that in 1939 Poland, Jews were forced to wear identification armbands showing the Star of David emblem, were walled and locked in ghettos to isolate them from the rest of the population, ready for the slaughter. “The reason I am telling you this, my child, is because God has blessed me with a long life, and intelligence to observe what has been going on in our ountry all these years. “I know of the rule of the Germans and that of the Belgians. The Germans were not bad, but the Belgians were not good at all. They were the source of all evil that befell our country. “And I tell you frankly that never before the coming of the white people in this country, did I ever witness any animosity or malevolence of the Genocide magnitude between the Bahutu and the Batutsi. “Rwandans lived in harmony as Rwandans. The notion of Hutu, Tutsi Twa did not mean ethnic groups but merely social classes and the Umwami (king), with absolute powers, was the unifying factor. The Umwami was for all Rwandans despite their social classes, and in all the country’s administrative matters, he was assisted by chiefs appointed by him from all the three social classes”. But the younger girl was getting impatient. “So what brought about such devastating hatred between the two peoples? What was the root cause of the split between the Hutu and the Tutsis?” “The missionaries”, my aunt went on. “It was the missionaries, especially the Roman Catholics (White Fathers). Through them, the Belgian administration exploited the complicity between colonialism and evangelisation. They first dethroned Umwami Musinga, ostensibly for failing to agree with his chiefs, but in truth, it was because of his blunt refusal to convert to the Roman Catholic faith. They immediately replaced him with his son, Rudahigwa – whom they incidentally also eventually killed in 1959”. The old lady went on to explain that unlike his father, Rudahigwa embraced Christianity, got baptised, married a Christian wife, and thus helped the church in converting even more followers among his subjects. The event of his conversion endeared him to the Church, which in turn highly recommended him to the Belgian administration, as someone intelligent and peaceful who would greatly benefit their cause. “And this is how the Belgians’ systematic support and favour of the Tutsi began,” she explained. My aunt went on to tell the young lady that the Belgians reigned over Rwanda for a long time, without mercy or sympathy for the Bahutu, constantly discouraging them in almost everything, they made the Tutsi chiefs flog them whenever they disobeyed orders and they made out as if all the decisions were taken by the Tutsi. “But all this came to change,” my aunt continued, “when King Mutara finally saw through their hypocrisy. “Because he was a man fully committed to social justice, he first abolished the feudal land system known as ‘ubuhake’, which he found was unfair and saw as being used by the Belgians in disuniting the people. He further insisted that the Belgian colonial administration abolishes the system of unpaid labour on public works projects, which were executed under physical duress ‘uburetwa’. “Of course, this episode was fiercely resisted by the Belgians, but the move went through, and it was massively approved by the people, and this led to an even greater appreciation of his efforts to relieve their burdens. “The final nail in his coffin was that he began agitating for independence. And when the Belgians realised that he would not be easily duped, after all, they killed him. “After his removal, they swiftly shifted their alliance to the Hutu and began a systematic support of them in their relationship with the traditional authority. But this was merely a ruse to gain influence among and support from the majority of the population. They never took into consideration the distinct unity existing between the Bahutu and the Batutsi, their common pride of being Rwandans, nor the fact that ninety per cent of the Tutsi belonged to the masses of poor peasants like the Hutu. I can tell you my girl, that if the Belgians had never set foot in our country, Rwandans would never have dreamt of genocide. But they came, imposed on us the wretched practice of racial identification, which was followed by the issuance of ID cards, artificially designating us Rwandans as Tutsi, Hutu or Twa.” I stood up surreptitiously, as if going to the men’s room for I knew they had finished. But I was busy thinking. Yes. The Belgian colonial administration’s divide and rule system introduced the ID as an instrument to divide Rwandans, created hateful and disastrous consequences that climaxed into the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi. The writer is a veteran Rwandan journalist.