into their political agendas with unusual bluntness and profoundly divisive consequences. For the conservative Tutsi associated with the court, history ruled out reconciliation: “Since our kings have conquered the land of the Hutu by killing their kinglets (bahinza) and turning them into serfs, how can they now pretend to be our brothers?”26 For the Hutu, however, it was precisely this kind of outlook that made revolutionary change imperative.
In the remainder of this chapter, we shall turn our attention to four examples of mythmaking, where memory operates selectively and in so doing, creates not just “imagined” communities but communities of fear and hatred. The first example of divisive mythmaking can be seen in the resurrection of the Hamitic myth in the political discourse of Hutu elites in Rwanda and Burundi. The second is to be found in the denial of genocide by both Hutu and Tutsi (the first in Rwanda, the second in Burundi). A third example of mythmaking is to be found in what might be called the Rwanda irredenta phenomenon. By this, we mean the efforts of postgenocide Rwanda to legitimize its claims to eastern Congo by rewriting the precolonial history of the region. A fourth concerns the emergence of a new “tribe” in eastern Congo, the so-called Banyamulenge.
MYTH #1: THE RESURRECTION OF THE HAMITIC HYPOTHESIS
Of these four myths, the first is evidently the most critical to an understanding of the other three. More than any other, it is the Hamitic myth that has had the most devastating impact on the texture of Hutu-Tutsi relations through much of the Great Lakes region, in effect providing ideological ammunition for the elimination of “Hamites” by “Bantus.” Viewed through the lens of mythical representations, historical memory thus creates its own universe of death and destruction. “Men do not find truth,” wrote Paul Veyne, “they create it, as they create their history.”27
Initially fashioned by colonial historiography, the Hamitic hypothesis provided a simple model for understanding perceived distinctions between lower and higher orders of humanity. Recast in the form of an ideological weapon to discredit allegations of Tutsi supremacy, it reemerged with extraordinary virulence during the 1994 genocide.
Filtered through the prism of antimonarchical ideology, the Hamitic phantasm eventually morphed into a militantly anti-Tutsi vision. Already in 1959, the Hutu elites seized upon the myth and profoundly altered its meaning. They invoked the same mythical themes once taken to prove Tutsi superiority, but now used them to prove Tutsi foreignness and depravity. The Hamitic race, believed by Europeans to embody all that was best in humanity, was now presented by Hutus as the embodiment of the worst. Hamites represented cruelty and cunning, conquest and oppression. Where missionaries had invoked Semitic origins to suggest racial superiority, Hutu ideologues invoked them to argue that “the Tutsi are all originally bad.” Where anthropologists had detected contractual exchange between Hutus and Tutsi, Hutu saw only proof of compulsion. That the native Hutus had adopted customs from the Tutsi was seen as the result of social domination, enforced by ruse and coercion. Even physical attributes once seen as marks of worthiness were denounced: what some perceived as Tutsi feminine grace was now vilified as yet another ploy designed to subjugate the unsuspecting Hutu.
In retrospect, early references to the féodalo-Hamites by Hutu revolutionaries seem relatively mild compared to the murderous frenzy of antiTutsi propaganda and the blatantly racist iconography that was diffused by the Hutu-controlled media on the eve of the genocide.28 The cartoon in Figure 1 is a chilling example of how recent events in Burundi were recast in the frame of historical traditions with a view to casting aspersions on Tutsi cruelty: the death of the Hutu President Melchior Ndadaye (assassinated by elements of the Tutsi army in October 1993), is represented as involving a typically Tutsi-inspired martyrdom (impalement); watching his agony are soldiers of the RPF severing Ndadaye's vital parts, for the purpose of attaching them to the royal drum (Kalinga), as used to be the custom in traditional Rwanda.
Anti-Tutsi propaganda must be seen in the context of the pervasive fear created among Hutu by the RPF invasion of northern Rwanda on October 1, 1990. Another major background factor was the legacy of the Burundi genocide of 1972 that resulted in the extermination of at least 200,000 Hutu civilians.29 The impact of the Burundi bloodbath on subsequent developments in both Burundi and Rwanda cannot be overemphasized. It is not a matter of coincidence that the few Hutu elites who survived the Burundi carnage were the first to articulate a stridently anti-Tutsi ideology, explicitly grounded in a Hamitic frame of reference. Formalized by the founder of the Palipehutu, Rémi Gahutu, this ideology flourished among a small group of Hutu exiles in Rwanda in the years immediately following the Burundi slaughter. The main themes are depressingly familiar. We learn that Tutsi domination over the Hutu can only be explained by taking into account the moral depravity of the Hamites. We hear of their consummate skill in the use of cunning and deceit; using, for example, poisoned gifts (beautiful women and cows) to reduce the Bantu into bondage. The Hutu exiles also stressed the unspeakable cruelties perpetrated during the 1972 genocide. They presented them as irrefutable proof of Hamitic perversity.30
Figure 1. Melchior Ndadaye's assassination reinterpreted through the phantasms of extremist anti-Tutsi propaganda, from Le Médaille-Nyiramacibiri, no. 17 (November 1993): 10. Reproduced from Jean-Pierre Chrétien, ed., Rwanda: Les medias du génocide (Paris: Karthala, 1995), p. 365.
The Kinyarwanda text reads as follows:
Supervisor: Finish up that stupid Hutu and make sure his genitals are attached to our drum.
Ndadaye: You can kill me, but you cannot wipe out the other Ndadayes in Burundi.
Kagame: 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
