[Reader-list] ** Book on Rwandan genocide makes waves **

[Sarang Shidore]

A Deep Crisis, Shallow Roots By JOHN SHATTUCK

THE GREAT LAKES OF AFRICA
Two Thousand Years of History

By Jean-Pierre ChrŽtien

Translated by Scott Straus

Zone Books, 503 pages. $36.Ê

In central Africa, a genocidal war has raged for nearly a decade,
costing more than four million lives in Rwanda, Burundi and Congo and
precipitating the worst humanitarian crisis in more than half a
century. Central Africa shares this gruesome recent past with
southeastern Europe, where in the 1990's the Balkans were swept by a
wave of killing and "ethnic cleansing." In both cases, genocide was
widely misunderstood to be the inevitable product of "ancient
hatreds."

Jean-Pierre ChrŽtien, a French historian with vast experience in the
Great Lakes region of Africa, has undertaken the formidable task of
tracing the roots of the region's violence and exposing the
ideological myths on which the ancient-hatreds theory rests. In a
monumental study that marches through two millenniums before
approaching central Africa's contemporary agony, Mr. ChrŽtien
punctures the sense of inevitability that permeates our thinking
about the Rwandan genocide.

Along the way, he illuminates the responsibility of a wide range of
actors from the colonial period through the present. As warlords
continue today to compete for power in a thoroughly ravaged Congo,
Mr. ChrŽtien helps us understand how this all came about and why it
matters that we know.

The story begins with the geography of the central African highlands.
Despite its equatorial location, Mr. ChrŽtien says, "the region is
blessed with good climate, is rich with diverse soils and plants, and
has prospered thanks to some strong basic techniques: the association
of cattle keeping and agriculture; the diffusion of the banana a
millennium ago; and the mastery of iron metallurgy two millennia
ago." In this healthy environment, complex social structures evolved
in which the idea of kingship and strong central authority took hold
and flourished for more than 300 years before the arrival of colonial
powers in the mid-19th century.

The fertile lands around the Great Lakes were settled by indigenous
Hutu cultivators, while the more mountainous areas were used for the
raising of cattle by Tutsi pastoralists. In the early kingdoms of the
region, agricultural and pastoral systems were integrated because
they controlled complementary ecological zones and served mutually
beneficial economic interests. As Mr. ChrŽtien argues convincingly,
nowhere at this time could the "social dialectic be reduced" to a
Hutu-Tutsi cleavage.

That began to change in the 19th century. As social structures became
more complex, the success of the central African kingdoms depended
increasingly on territorial expansion through raiding, colonizing and
annexing of neighboring lands. At the same time, Tutsi cattle raisers
in search of more land began to emerge as a new elite and a driving
force behind expansion. The kingdoms of Rwanda and Uganda were
particularly expansionist, but were soon thwarted by the arrival of
colonial powers. The immediate effect of colonialism was to reorient
the stratified and dynamic societies of the Great Lakes around
competing poles of collaboration with, and resistance to, the new
foreign occupiers.

Since these remote societies had been untouched by the slave trade
that ravaged Africa's coastal regions, they presented the Europeans
with a range of robust aristocracies and royal courts to win over.

At this crucial point, the issue of race entered the picture.
Obsessed by their theories of racial classification, 19th- and
early-20th-century Europeans rewrote the history of central Africa.
Imposing their own racist projection of superiority on Tutsi
"Hamito-Semites" and a corresponding inferiority on Hutu "Bantu
Negroes," missionary and colonial historians began to attribute the
rise of the Great Lakes kingdoms to the arrival of a superior race of
"black Europeans" from the north.

Mr. ChrŽtien quotes many examples of this toxic "scientific
ethnicism," which the Belgians purveyed to their central African
colonies until just before independence. A typical example from a
colonial school newspaper in Burundi in 1948 states that "the
preponderance of the Caucasian type is deeply marked" among the
Tutsi, making them "worthy of the title that the explorers gave them:
aristocratic Negroes."

Anointed by the Belgians as their administrators and collaborators in
Rwanda and Burundi, the Tutsis, who never constituted more than 18
percent of the population, were presented with a poisoned chalice
combining ethnic elitism with economic favoritism.

In educating their chosen elites, the Belgians were relentlessly
racist. Starting in 1928, all primary schools in Rwanda were
segregated, while at the secondary-school level Rwandan (and later
Burundian) Tutsis were three to four times better represented than
Hutus.

Not surprisingly, the majority Hutu population chafed at this
discrimination, and in the late 1950's a Hutu counter-elite began
calling for the end of "Tutsi feudalism." On the eve of independence,
the growing Hutu rebellion was backed, in a catastrophic reversal, by
the Roman Catholic Church and the colonial administration, which now
claimed that the Hutu majority represented "democratic values." The
outcome, as Mr. ChrŽtien shows, was that "the new Rwanda declared its
national past `Tutsi' and thus despicable."

The post-colonial period was marked by a zero-sum ethnic
fundamentalism that destroyed the social fabric. Mr. ChrŽtien argues
that "the generation catapulted to the top of the former kingdoms
thus squandered the opportunity offered by independence." The deep
ethnic insecurities created by European rewriting of African history
made the competing ethnic groups far more concerned about their own
survival than about the task of nation-building. As a result, he
writes, the elites were "haunted by a passion - which some admitted
and others covered up - about the supremacy of their ethnic group."
In Rwanda, the Hutu revolution led to a series of pogroms against the
Tutsi minority, culminating in the 1994 genocide.

Thus, modern hatreds, not ancient ones, destroyed Rwanda. Far from
being inbred in the country's ancient social structures, these
destructive animosities were created during its recent colonial past.
Even then, it took the manipulation of ethnic identity by the
country's new elites to produce the atmosphere of fear and
recrimination that expanded through the Rwandan countryside and later
into vast reaches of Congo in the genocidal war that has gripped the
region for nearly a decade.

In this respect, the Rwandans were no different from Slobodan
Milosevic, Franjo Tudjman and the other authors of ethnic cleansing
in the Balkans. But the world has so far done far less to confront
them, and Mr. ChrŽtien's extraordinary book prompts one to wonder
whether the reason is rooted in the racism reflected in the violent
rewriting of central African history.