History of a genocide or the nature of group identity in Rwanda
... This must have been the central question during the 1994 massacre in Rwanda. The last genocide of the century took the life of about a million people in a hundred days. While the Hutu opposition had been a target for political matters; the Tutsi had faced genocide, the attempt to eliminate them as a people. ... During the killings, people were asked to produce their identity cards. ... If the no difference view suffers from historical amnesia of how power was organized in the precolonial Rwandan state, that of ethnic difference tends to freeze the history of the Rwandan state at its colonial stage, turning a historical outcome into a primordial difference. A careful review of the history of the Rwandan state reveals that Hutu and Tutsi are bipolar identities reproduced by a form of the state that institutionalized them as such. ... The origin of the Tutsis remain a mystery of precolonial Rwanda. ... The second explanation accepts the migration theory, that the pastoralists came from outside Rwanda, but argues that their relations with the agriculturalists were peaceful and symbiotic: they exchanged dairy products for garden vegetables. ... Neither the dietary hypothesis nor the theory of peaceful coexistence addresses what is truly relevant in the understanding of the precolonial Rwanda, the nature of the political power and organization as the Rwandan state. This history is important, not because of where the Hutu and the Tutsi originally came from, but because by coming together they created certain political institutions that outlived that history and shaped a tragic future. ... While the question of the historical origin of the Tutsi is a mystery, that of the nature of the state they built is not. All spoke Kinyarwanda, the Bantu language originally spoken by the peasant population of Rwanda. ... Rwanda was a highly centralized kingdom, with a standing army and an official bureaucracy. The state in Rwanda defined rulers and subjects as belonging to two distinct social groups, pastoralist and agriculturalist, one noble, the other commoner. ... In the civil bureaucracy, the King of Rwanda appointed and dismissed all chiefs, of which there were three types: the army chief who was in charge of recruiting soldiers, the cattle chief who ruled over grazing lands, and the land chief in charge of agricultural land and production. ... There was one institution in precolonial Rwanda that prevented the Tutsi Hutu distinction from hardening into castelike difference. ... This is why the ruling aristocracy in precolonial Rwanda needs to be understood as both pastoral and Tutsi. The Hutu made up the subject population, while the Tutsi, even when not part of the ruling group, had more of an identification with power and a more privileged relationship to the state. ... It seems that the Tutsi developed a political identity and a self consciousness of being differentiated from the commoners. ... As a result, these physical differences came to bear the weight of an entire history of state formation. While the Rwandan state clearly lost its independence during colonization, the territory it administered reached its widest span under German colonialism, since it was only with German military support that Rwanda was able to enlarge the states boundaries. ... Admission records of the Groupe Scolaire in Astrida (now Butare), a church institution that admitted students from the three Belgian colonies of Rwanda, Burundi, and the Congo, show that Hutu students were virtually excluded until after the Second World War, but the attitude of the European clergy went through a major shift in the mid-1950s. When the Hutu graduates of the Group Scolaire entered the job market in the mid-1950s, they found there were few places for an educated Hutu.