"Imana yirirwa ahandi igataha i Rwanda: God spends the day elsewhere but always comes back to spend the night in Rwanda". (Rwandan proverb) CAN WE even begin to comprehend what has happened in Rwanda?
In a country between the size of Wales and Belgium, one million people were killed after April 6th 1994. One out of every seven inhabitants but the vast majority members of the minority Tutsi community.
What shocked us as much as the attempted genocide of an entire people was our helplessness to do anything about it. "Call in the United Nations" non-governmental organisations demanded, fuming that the several hundred UN troops were to be pulled out.
"An African peace force" pleaded others, critical of the UN record in Somalia let alone its role in the Congo two generations ago. Yet the killings and atrocities only stopped when the rebel Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) had driven out the Kigali government and its murder machines, the Rwandan army and the Hutu supremacist militias to the borders.
Myth of tribalism
Colonised first by the Germans and later the Belgians, Rwanda's present grief has much to do with the transformation of its economy and society in that period. The Banyarwanda or people of Rwanda are drawn from three communities; Hutu, Tutsi and Twa.
Census figures always unreliable suggest their proportions in the population were up till last year 90 per cent, 9 percent and 1 percent respectively. What is not in doubt is that it is unhelpful to view recent events in Rwanda and for that matter in the sub-continent through the prism of "tribalism".
Tribes in the historical and scientific sense have long since ceased to exist in most of Africa along with their mode of production.
This word is not indigenous to African languages and was introduced by the British following their encounter with certain societies in South Asia.
It is a word so loaded with racist and imperialist connotations that it compromises all who use it. Far betZAIRE N. KIVU Goma • • Gisenyi Lake Klyu RWANDA Bukavu • • Cyangugu Butare S. KIVU milo The Great Lakes Region ter is the term "ethnicity" which has the merit of allowing for the dynamism in the formation of identities and its location in certain historical moments.
In any case the Hutu and Tutsi are not "tribes". All three communities speak the same language, Kinyarwanda. They live among each other sharing a common culture and traditions. The facile belief that all Tutsi are "tall and fair-skinned" and all Hate are Short and dark-skinned" was conclusively disproved during the genocide when militias killed Hutus mistakenly believing them to be Tutsis.
In fact the most reliable method these roving gangs used was to demand to see a person's identity card before deciding whether to kill. Identity cards which were introduced by the Belgians state the 'ethnicity' of their bearer.
The Belgians had their own novel UGANDA • Karagwe Byumba KAGERA •Kigall.
• Ngara Kirundo TANZANIA BURUNDI Kibondo Kasulu way of deciding who belonged to which category. They decreed in the 1950's that anyone with ten or more head of cattle was Tutsi and the rest were Hutu. Where they were right was in the identification of cattle with wealth and thus status in society.
Where they were wrong (not that it would have mattered to them was in seeing those identities as fixed, rigid and impermeable.
Pre-colonial Rwanda like its twin Burundi, were societies in which pastoralists known as the Tutsi, rearing cattle, exercised political dominance over agriculturalists and non-cattle owners called the Hutu.
They had acquired this dominance probably from superior military strength which marginalised the indigenous Twa who were hunter-gatherers and subjugated the farmers.
This process took place from the 15th century onwards and was consolidated by the 19th century. In fact it is more correct to intepret this as a combination of caste and class rather than ethnic formation. What the Belgians did was similar to what the British did in India and that was to freeze unfinished social formations and revive pre-capitalist institutions.
It had up till then been possible for social mobility in this hierarchical society. Through a ceremony called "kwihutura", a Hutu who had acquired many cattle and adopted the ways of a Tutsi including a Tutsi wife would cease to be a Hutu and become a Tutsi instead.
Likewise a Tutsi who had fallen on hard times, sold or lost his cattle and turned to subsistence farming would lose his Tutsi identity and become a Hutu. He would then be expected to marry a Huti and his children would be regarded as Hutus too.
So this oppressive system, in which Tutsis were always overlords and Hutus their serfs, owing the former their labour and a proportion of their crop in return for patronage, had an inbuilt safety valve Colonial state As a small contry with vast territories to plunder, Belgium opted for indirect rule through making a minority group their agents. It also served to bind the Tutsi closer to the colonisers upon whom they were now dependent for political survival. Hutu chiefs in the north-west were replaced by Tutsis. Belgian anthropologists and administrators gave succour to myths stressing the divine right of the Tutsi to rule and their unique leadership qualities.
When the authorities wanted free labour for their infrastructure projects they used the Tutsi chiefs to compel Hutus, and the latter hated the Tutsi even more for it. However some Hutu began through missionary education and integration into the colonial economy to enrich themselves, and a middle class was born which challenged their institutionalised oppression.
Meanwhile in the 1950's, radical nationalism was sweeping the continent and in its wake anti-colonial movements. Many Tutsi shared these ideas. Belgium was fearful of losing its influence and it promptly switched support to Hutu leaders. Exclusively Hutu parties were formed and from 1959 onwards attacks between the two main communities became commonplace.
The Tutsi monarch was overthrown in 1961 and Rwanda became legally independent in 1962 under a Hutu government. Hundreds of thousands of Banyarwanda were driven out of the country, they had been singled out as Tutsi and they began to identify themselves as such.
Thirty years later it was these refugees some who had left as babies, who were to form the leadership and core of the Rwandan Patriotic Front.
Noo-Colonial
Economy Political changes were being matched by as dramatic economic ones, principally the transformation in the agrarian system from food crop production to that of cash crops for export. In the 1920's coffee was introduced into Rwanda and by 1987 it constituted 79 per cent of export earnings.
Unlike tea which is the second largest export earner, coffee is grown by small-holders. While coffee prices were good and farmers received a guaranteed price for their crop, the economy did well but the commodity price (which is set in London) began to fall in 1987. When the International Coffee Agreement which is a cartel of producers fell apart in 1989, coffee lost 50 per cent of its value within a few months. Farmers who had taken up coffee cultivation originally under coercion from the Belgians and later to survive under a capitalist rather than exchange based system couldn't afford to buy food and couldn't eat coffee.
There were few alternative means of livelihood for the rural poor. A narrowly based, fragile economy was plunged into crisis and the door opened to intervention by the International Monetary Fund (IF) and the World Bank (WB).
Structural
Adjustment Programme In return for balance of payments support and loans from the IMF/WB, the Rwandan government began a structural adjustment programme in 1989.
Western donor countries had made further disbursements of aid conditional upon neo-liberal economic policies and with reduced revenue from its traditional exports and the regime's desperation to cling onto power it didn't argue.
The familiar medicine was prescribed. State enterprises to be privatised; massive redundancies of public sector workers; marketing boards dismantled; user fees for education and health; agricultural subsidies removed and so on.
When the Rwandan franc was devalued in November 1990, it lost 67 per cent of its value impoverishing people further because imports of food staples and other necessities became much more expensive.
Devaluation coincided with the RPF invasion from Uganda and the spiralling of inflation out of control. The neo-colonial economy was breeding the conditions for an uprising of the poor.
Tragically this groundswell ot rage and trustration was diverted from an uprising against the ruling class into Hutu chauvinism.
Post-Colonial
SOCIALIST OUTLOOK No 85, June 10 1995, Page 9.