The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

This apparent antinomy between the fields of meaning denoted and connoted
in the words isibo and gusiba might appear illogical to someone situated outside the
context of Rwandan social action. Within this context, however, this contradiction
was nothing less than an ineluctable corollary to the workings of social life itself.
It was its internal dialectic. Just as imaana could “flow” or be “blocked,” just
as the sky could yield its fertilizing liquid in the right measure and at the right time,
so could the body flow properly in health or improperly in illness. The words isibo
and gusiba embody part of this recognition, the recognition that one cannot have
“flow” without “blockage,” just as one cannot “milk” (gukama) without incurring
the risk of depleting the environment, and one cannot give to some without withholding
one’s gifts from others. Power in early Rwanda grew as much from the capacity
to obstruct as from the capacity to give.
It was through obstruction, impoverishment, strangulation, murder, and sorcery
that the Rwandan king manifested the coercive aspect of his power over subjects
and adversaries. The precolonial Rwandan polity, through its king, unabashedly
proclaimed its expansionist intent in the five royal rituals directly concerned with
warfare. In one such ritual, Inzira yo Kwambika Ingoma (“The Path of Adorning the
Drum”), the genitals of important slain enemies were ritually prepared in order to
be placed within containers and then hung upon Karinga (the most important royal
drum). Early Rwandan warriors carried a special curved knife that was used to remove
the genitalia of slain enemies. During this ritual the king and his ritualists
would shout:
Ngo twahotor Uburundi kuu ngoma
N’amahang adatuur umwami w’Irwanda
Twayahotora kuu ngoma
(d’hertefelt and coupez 1964:176)
May we strangle Burundi’s drum
And all countries who do not pay tribute to Rwanda’s king
May we strangle their drums.
the rwandan genocide of 1994 157
Women were also victims of mutilation in earlier times. In disputes between rival lineages,
for example, it was common for the victors to cut off the breasts of women belonging
to the vanquished group, although these were not used in the above ritual.
The Rwandan monarchy manifested its control over flowing processes—rainfall,
human fertility, bovine fertility, milk, and honey production—through its ritual
capacity to catalyze or to interdict them. Kings thus encompassed the qualities
of both “flow” and “blockage” and, in that sense, were ambiguous, “liminoid” beings,
the embodiment of evil as well as good. At times of dire calamity to the polity
as a whole, the king became the ultimate repository of ritual negativity, the ultimate
“blocking being,” and in those instances it was his blood that had to be sacrificially
shed to reopen the conduits of imaana. According to Rwandan dynastic