The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

the rwandan genocide of 1994 155
tle epizootics (assuring the production of milk), and one celebrates the sorghum
harvest (most sorghum was brewed into beer). One of the most important rituals,
“The Watering of the Royal Herds,” which was accomplished only once every four
reigns and which was intended to renew the dynastic cycle, deploys virtually the
entire gamut of fluid symbols, including those concerning the two most important
rivers of the kingdom, the Nyabugogo and the Nyabarongo, rivers that delineated
sacred time and sacred space. 12
The person of the mwami embodied flow/blockage imagery with regard to his
physiological processes as well, for every morning the king imbibed a milky liquid
called isubyo, which was a powerful laxative (Bourgeois 1956). Although the ostensible
purpose of this matinal libation was to purge the mwami’s body of any poison
he might have absorbed, the reasoning behind the custom goes deeper than
that, for the mwami’s enemies were depicted as the antithesis of “flowing beings”;
they were beings who interrupted production, exchange, and fertility. They were
“obstructing beings.” When seen from this perspective, the practice of kurya ubunyano
(discussed above with regard to newborn children) makes eminent sense.
The Rwandan mythical archetype of the “blocking being” was a small old
woman (agakeecuru). A legend recounts how Death, while being pursued by the
mwami, Thunder, and God, sought refuge with this agakeecuru, while she was gathering
gourds in a field. The tiny old woman sheltered Death in her uterus (Smith
1975:132), where he remained to subsist on her blood. Later in eating with her descendants,
the agakeecuru communicated Death to them and they, in their turn, to
the rest of the world. In this tale we see that Death is associated with beings whose
fluids do not or no longer flow, for old women do not menstruate. The origin of
Death is also the origin of sorcery, for the old woman passes the contagion of Death
on to others by eating with them. 13
One of the mwami’s responsibilities was to eliminate beings who lacked the capacity
“to flow.” Two such beings included girls who had reached child-bearing age
and who lacked breasts, called impenebere, and girls who had reached child-bearing
age and who had not yet menstruated, called impa (d’Hertefelt and Coupez
1964:286). In both cases, the girls were put to death for want of the apparent capacity
to produce an important fertility fluid, in one case, blood, in the other, milk.
Obstructed in their perceived capacity to reproduce, the girls were thought to be
potential sources of misfortune and aridity to the entire kingdom.
Although it might appear that the person of the mwami catalyzed flows and
eliminated symbolic obstruction, in fact he embodied this metaphor in its entirety.
While he was extolled as the being who “milked” for others, the being who acted
as the conduit of imaana, the being who embodied the powers of both genders as
a “lactating” male, the king was as much a “blocking being” as a “flowing” one. He
was not simply a passive conduit through which beneficence passed; he was an active
agent who possessed the power of life and death over his subjects. He could
enrich his followers with gifts of cattle and land or he could impoverish them. Like
a sorcerer who impedes fertility or inflicts death upon victims by invisibly sucking