The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

the rwandan genocide of 1994 175
always what Evans-Pritchard has termed “sorcery,” involving the idea of the ingestion of
harmful substances (even when no substances may have actually been ingested by the victim).
“Les Rwandais sont obsédés par les effets néfastes de l’alimentation qui exige mille précautions,
d’autant plus que la sorcellerie est toujours conçue comme un empoisonnement”
(Smith 1975:133). (Rwandans are obsessed by the possible harmful effects of eating, which
demands the observation of a thousand precautions, even more so because sorcery is always
conceived of as poisoning.)
14. It is interesting to note that among the news and political magazines that came into
existence in the 1990s, there was one called Isibo. Politically speaking, Isibo was an opposition
magazine representing the viewpoint of southern and central Hutu allied to the Twagiramungu
faction of the MDR and opposed to the MRND and the Habyarimana regime
(Chretien 1995:383). Although I have been unable to determine the significance of the magazine’s
title to its promoters and readers, it does seem to indicate that the term isibo retains
cultural and political significance in the modern context and possesses associations that go
beyond that of sacred kingship.
15. During the several days that French troops controlled the center, this man had occasion
to speak with the center’s director twice on the phone. When he explained that he and
other Rwandan employees marooned at the center had nothing to eat, she suggested that they
take the plantains from trees growing on the center’s grounds. (None of the plantain trees
were bearing fruit at the time.) When he expressed his anxiety about the unwillingness of the
French troops to evacuate him and others, she told him that maybe the RPF would rescue
them. (The RPF did not take this section of Kigali until almost two months later.)
16. Melchior Ndadaye was Burundi’s first democratically elected president and first Hutu
president. Elected in June of 1993, Ndadaye was taken prisoner in late October and then murdered
(though not by impalement) by Burundian Tutsi army officers in a coup attempt. Almost
universally condemned by other nations, the coup eventually failed, but not before it
had provoked reprisal killings in which thousands of Tutsi civilians died and counterreprisal
violence in which thousands of Hutu were killed. The coup and Ndadaye’s death served the
cause of Hutu extremism in Rwanda quite well, and extremists lost no time in exploiting it.
Unfortunately the extremists’ point that the Tutsi could never be trusted as partners in a
democracy gained enormous credibility in Rwanda in the wake of Ndadaye’s tragic death.
17. Violence against women also characterized another recent fratricidal conflict where
genocidal acts occurred—Bosnia. While the logic of violence against Tutsi women in
Rwanda appears to have been motivated largely by Hutu extremist fear of interethnic marriages
(cf. Taylor 1999), there was an additional logic in Bosnia, though it too was of a cultural
nature. Among Mediterranean societies characterized by strong notions of “honor”
(cf. Pitt-Rivers 1977), much is invested in the perceived sexual purity of a group’s women.
Rape, as long as it is unavenged, is not just an act that violates an individual; it is an act that
subverts the honor of a family.
REFERENCES CITED
Assad, Talal. 1972. “Market Model, Class Structure and Consent: A Reconsideration of Swat
Political Organisation.” Man 7:74–94.
Barth, Fredrik. 1959. Political Leadership among the Swat Pathans. London: Athlone.
Beattie, John. 1960. Bunyoro, an African Kingdom. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston.