60 years after the UN Convention - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

160 development dialogue december 2008 – revisiting the heart of darkness
Reputedly descended from a conquering ‘noble race’, ‘the Batutsi’
were credited with being a historical people capable of forming a
state, and with being carriers of a ‘superior civilisation’. ‘Batutsi’ were
associated with beauty, honour, pride, nobility, skill, intelligence, capacity
to rule over other ‘races’, and racial purity (Stockhammer 2005:
20; Eltringham 2006: 431-432) – not only by German and Belgian
colonisers, but in a symmetry of racialised self- and other-ascription
of ‘Hutu’ and ‘Tutsi’, respectively. ‘Hutu’-identifying persons claimed
injustices perpetrated in the process of ‘Tutsi’ invasions of originally
‘Hutu’-owned lands. The notion of ‘the conquering Hamitic Tutsi’
was articulated by both Hutu and Tutsi nationalists in the latter half
of the 1950s. The Hutu Manifesto (Notes on the Social Aspect of the Racial
Native Problem in Rwanda) of 1957 invokes the Hamitic Hypothesis,
even as it attempts to negate it:
What does the indigenous racial problem consist of?…it is a problem
of the political monopoly of one race, the mututsi… We must
abandon the belief that Rwandan élites can only be found among
the ranks of the hamites…a system systematically favouring the
political and economic progress of the hamite… action [should be
taken] for the economic and political emancipation of the Muhutu
from the traditional tow [of the] hamite. (Nkundabagenzi 1961:
24-29; quoted in Eltringham 2006: 433)
A response to the Manifesto that attempts to legitimate Tutsi domination,
likewise invokes the Hamitic Hypothesis, but this time to
positively assert the validity and longevity of bonds of serfdom and
clientelism:
The ancestor of Banyiginya is Kigwa… The relations between the
subjects of Kabeja [the Bazigaba] and the Kigwa family were so
strong that the latter abandoned their fi rst master [Kabeja] and
became servants of Kigwa. [Therefore] how can the Bahutu now
claim the right to share the common inheritance? (Nkungabagenzi
1961: 35; quoted in Eltringham 2006: 433)
The Hamitic Hypothesis was certainly instrumental in racialising and
ethnicising colonial and postcolonial policies; and it certainly played
a role in the genocidal propaganda mobilising the interahamwe. But in
its form and force, it is neither a peculiarly ‘European fantasy’ (as Eltringham
claims it is – see 2006: 426), nor is it a specifi cally colonial