60 years after the UN Convention - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

lineages of racism in genocidal contexts 159
cies of racialisation and ethnicisation, and the genocides in the central
African region, with their fl ashpoints in Rwanda and Burundi.
The ‘boomerang’ in the central African post-colonial context is identifi
ed as the Hamitic Hypothesis on which colonial and post-colonial
racism is said to pivot. The Hamitic Hypothesis serves as a foundational
fantasy that locates ‘Batutsi’ as Hamites having migrated from
the North – from the Mediterranean and Ethiopia.
The Hamitic Hypothesis was adopted and adapted by John Hanning
Speke for his description of the central African region in his Journal
of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile (1863). In line with his reported
discovery of the sources of the Nile, which links the Central African
interior with the Mediterranean, he postulates that the Hamites
of Central Africa had migrated there from Caucasia via Abyssinia.
(Hence his equation, ‘the Wahuma, otherwise Gallas or Abyssinians’.)
He deduces from this the idea that ‘the government is in the hands
of foreigners, who had invaded and taken possession of them, leaving
the agricultural aborigines to till the ground’ (quoted in Eltringham
2006: 427). The Hamite Hypothesis was spun further by early
20th century anthropologists – Charles Seligman being a prominent
member of that fraternity 4 – who postulated an ‘incongruous civilisation’
throughout Central/Eastern Africa. It was lent eff ect by Richard
Kandt, fi rst colonial administrator in Ruanda-Urundi, who applied
it in the classifi cation of the population living on the territory of
Rwanda: the Batutsi were categorised as a ‘race’ of the Hamites, who
were considered a non-indigenist ‘racial’ minority. This attribution
was institutionalised by the Belgian colonial administration between
1927 and 1936 in a move that added ethnic divisions to a racial division.
Banyarwanda were categorised in discrete ethnic groups, and
certifi ed as such through entries in passports and identity documents.
Ethnic categories were further consolidated in the 1933/34 census carried
out by the Belgian colonial administration (85 per cent of those
counted were designated as Bahutu, 14 per cent as Batutsi, and 1 per
cent as Batwa (Stockhammer 2005: 15, 18)). Racial and ethnic categorisations
were not simply bureaucratic measures, but became socially
and politically consequential. 5
4 Charles Seligman’s article entitled ‘Some aspects of the Hamitic problem in the Anglo-
Egyptian Sudan’, originally published in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute
of Great Britain and Ireland , No. 43, July-December 1913: 593-795, was re-published in
revised form as a chapter entitled ‘Eastern Hamites’ in Races of Africa in four editions of
1930, 1939, 1957 and 1966, respectively (Eltringham 2006: 427).
5 For instance: on the assumption of their Hamitic origins, children and young people who
were, in colonial Rwanda, categorised as ‘Batutsi’, were accorded a diff erential school
education that was largely oriented along the lines of French curricula.