Memory, History, and Identity

That national histories are not sets of established facts but rather socially constructed narratives of the past is widely accepted in academic circles today. Popular historical narratives are not unbiased descriptions of events but subjective accounts shaped by the present needs and interests of societies. While history may be “a fable agreed upon,”Footnote ⁵ the manner in which historical narratives are constructed has social and political significance. The process by which societies collectively develop and accept myths about the past that become their national history is not benign. The statement attributed to Winston Churchill that, “History is written by the victors,” emphasizes the ways in which the powerful shape history for their own political purposes. Not only do the victors in great wars interpret history in a way that ennobles their cause and vilifies their defeated enemies, but social victors – the rich and powerful who dominate societies – write history to justify their domination and undercut the pretensions to power of society’s losers.Footnote ⁶ The construction of historical narrative thus has a coercive nature.

Scholars have employed the concept of collective memory to enlighten discussions of historical narratives and their social impact. Maurice Halbwachs first developed the idea of collective memory in the 1920s, arguing that an individual’s memories are developed in a social context that shapes the content of memory.Footnote ⁷ Applying the lens of social psychology, Halbwachs contended that, “the mind reconstructs its memories under pressure of society. … Society from time to time obligates people not just to reproduce in thought previous events of their lives, but also to touch them up, to shorten them, or to complete them so that, however convinced we are that our memories are exact, we give them a prestige that reality did not possess.”Footnote ⁸ Even events that we have personally experienced are shaped by the society within which we live.

The concept of collective memory gained new currency in the 1980s when Pierre Nora applied it to the study of nationalism, looking at the “sites of memory” – the memorials, holidays, anthems, and other symbols – that helped shape French Republican identity.Footnote ⁹ Nora’s analysis contributed to a growing literature that regards nationalities as “imagined communities,” in which people are tied together not by any real fundamental social, cultural, or historical unity but rather by the idea that they share a common connection.Footnote ¹⁰ Eric Hobsbawm argued that nations cannot ultimately be defined by racial differences or such cultural differences as language or religion but rather by a sense of shared history, “the consciousness of having belonged to a lasting political entity … a ‘historical nation.’”Footnote ¹¹

Developing a collective historical memory is key to developing national identities, but the process carries coercive tendencies. To build a shared national identity, a population must be re-educated and may ultimately need to be forced into accepting a particular vision of the past. Karl Deutsch’s classic study of nationalism in the aftermath of the Second World War noted that nationalism involves, “processes of social learning and control which are particularly subject to risks of pathological developments and trends to self-destruction.”Footnote ¹² Those engaged in a nationalist project seek to promote a particular collective memory about the past that serves to support their definition of national identity. Such nationalist projects are notoriously intolerant of open debate and discussion. As Katharine Hodgkin and Susannah Rodstone argue in the epigraph, arguments about the past reflect conflicts over the present.Footnote ¹³ Nationalists who seek to marshal the past to promote a unified national identity do so ultimately to achieve a particular political goal, and as such they generally cannot tolerate individuals and ideas that seek to complicate the past or challenge aspects of the proposed collective memory.

In Rwanda, the post-genocide government has actively sought to shape collective memory, using a focus on the 1994 genocide as a focal point for constructing a new national identity. In subsequent chapters, I explore the various mechanisms being used to build collective memory, such as genocide memorials and genocide trials. In this chapter, I focus on the more obvious aspects of shaping collective memory, the development and promulgation of a new historical narrative. I first review the ways in which historical narratives served to justify the Rwandan genocide. While the historical myths central to the genocidal ideology did not push most people to participate in the violence, historical narratives did serve to delineate the distinctions between Hutu, Tutsi, and Twa without which the genocide could not have occurred, and for a small core group, the ideas that Tutsi did not belong in Rwanda and that Hutu needed to redeem their besmirched honor motivated participation. As I then analyze, since taking power in 1994, the RPF regime and its supporters have undertaken a major project to re-write Rwandan history. They have completely rejected previous historical narratives and sought to develop new ones; but these are no more based on historical fact than those that preceded them. Just as previous history overemphasized the centrality of ethnicity, the more recent history overemphasizes the historical unity of Rwanda’s population, inaccurately denying any historic social significance at all to ethnicity. More problematic is the attempt to re-imagine the RPF in heroic terms, seeking to expunge from popular memory abuses carried out by the RPF and portray RPF violence as motivated exclusively by the attempt to end genocide and bring peace and democracy to Rwanda. As I will develop in later chapters, this portrayal of the RPF – which is directly at odds with the lived experience of many Rwandans – ultimately undermines the public’s willingness to embrace the new official historical narrative.

History, Ideology, and the Rwandan Genocide

History played a key role in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. The ideology used to justify the genocide drew on a historical narrative developed during the colonial period that saw Hutu, Tutsi, and Twa as clear and distinct racial groups and characterized Tutsi as recent arrivals in the region which had conquered and dominated the other groups. Based on this narrative, the instigators of the genocide asserted that Tutsi were foreigners who had no right to be in Rwanda and needed to be feared and opposed because of their history of dominating the majority Hutu.Footnote ¹⁴

While the exact meaning of the categories “Hutu,” “Tutsi,” and “Twa” in pre-colonial Rwanda remains contentious, most scholars today agree that they were not ethnic groups in the modern sense. Current scholarship indicates that the terms reflected a status difference even in pre-colonial times,Footnote ¹⁵ but the groups shared a common culture, spoke the same language, Kinyarwanda, and lived in integrated communities or in close proximity. Furthermore, Hutu and Tutsi were somewhat flexible categories, since intermarriage was possible and a family’s status could change as their fortunes rose or fell.Footnote ¹⁶ The identities emerged as centralizing monarchies sought to extend their control by implanting a Tutsi aristocracy throughout the territory as representatives of the crown.Footnote ¹⁷ Patterns of migration within the region were complex, and each group included both recent migrants and those long in Rwanda.Footnote ¹⁸ Hutu or Tutsi were only one of a number of significant identities for Rwandans along with lineage, region, clan, and sub-clan.

When European missionaries and colonial administrators arrived in Rwanda around the turn of the twentieth century, their perspective on Rwandan society was shaped by then-contemporary European ideas about race and identity. Ignoring the actual complexity of identity within Rwanda, they believed that the Hutu, Tutsi, and Twa identities were paramount, regarding them as three distinct ethnic, or even racial, categories. Influenced by ideas of social Darwinism, that considered identity not merely social but biological, with each ethnic and racial group naturally possessing specific talents and characteristics, they saw in the Tutsi a superior Hamitic group, distant relatives of Caucasians who were more intelligent than their fellow countrymen and therefore natural rulers. They regarded the Hutu as a Bantu group, sturdy and simple, best suited for physical work such as farming, while they considered the Twa a Pygmy group, inferior, lazy, and untrustworthy, never having evolved beyond hunting and gathering.Footnote ¹⁹

The Tutsi elite played on European prejudices to their own advantage, helping develop a historical narrative of Rwanda’s past adapted to European racist assumptions. As Des Forges wrote:

According to this history, the Twa, the region’s original inhabitants, were subdued by Hutu who migrated from the west at the beginning of the first millennium. The Tutsi supposedly arrived from the northeast over a millennium later bringing with them cattle and a complex, centralized political system and, because of their natural intelligence and military superiority, subdued the other groups.Footnote ²¹

Far from being merely of academic interest, this ideologically shaped historical narrative became a basis for public policy. The German and Belgian administrations established a system of indirect rule that left the Rwandan monarchy in place to facilitate their administration of the territory. At the same time, they reshaped the existing system, consolidating Tutsi social position and centralizing the power of the monarchy, eliminating existing vestiges of Hutu power. Much of Rwanda, and particularly the Hutu, experienced what Catharine Newbury has called “dual colonialism” of both the colonial administration and the central court.Footnote ²² Both the government and Christian churches reserved most educational and salaried employment opportunities for Tutsi. In the 1930s, the colonial administration required all residents to carry identity cards that listed their ethnicity, hence administratively fixing group identities and eliminating their flexibility.Footnote ²³ These policies effectively increased the salience of Hutu, Tutsi, and Twa identities over other social identities, since they helped determine life chances, while the ideology provided different historical imaginaries for the groups that ultimately helped to convert them into ethnic identities.

For much of the colonial period, the myth of Tutsi conquest and superiority served successfully to justify the group’s privileged position. But following the Second World War, colonial administrators and missionaries influenced by social democratic political ideas began to change their sympathies to the Hutu, whom they now characterized as an oppressed working class who had suffered under the yoke of Tutsi domination for centuries. The same erroneous historical narrative that had been used to support Tutsi dominance was now used to support the emergence of a Hutu counter-elite and justify a shift in political control to Hutu hands following anti-Tutsi violence in 1959. The democratic principle of “majority rule” got distorted in Rwanda to mean rule by the Hutu ethnic majority, and after independence, the government of Kayibanda continued to draw on the historical narrative of Tutsi conquest and exploitation of the Hutu to justify his own consolidation of power as the defender of Hutu interests.Footnote ²⁴ The false histories of migration as the source of ethnic differentiation in Rwanda and of Tutsi as the long-time oppressors of Hutu continued to be taught in schools after independence.

After Juvénal Habyarimana became president in a 1973 coup, he sought to quell ethnic violence by implementing an ethnic quota system that limited Tutsi access to education and employment, but the basic ideology of Hutu majority rule remained unchanged. When both an internal movement for democratization and the invasion by the Rwandan Patriotic Front challenged the Habyarimana regime in the early 1990s, his supporters returned to the ideology of the Kayibanda years and sought to regain popular support by recasting themselves as the defenders of the Hutu majority against an attempt to re-establish a minority Tutsi dictatorship. They used targeted violence against the Tutsi to heighten ethnic polarizationFootnote ²⁵ and undermined their critics by portraying them as traitors to Hutu interests. This strategy of using ethnic violence to mobilize Hutu support ultimately culminated in the 1994 genocide.Footnote ²⁶

The ideology used to justify the 1994 genocide and inspire popular participation drew heavily on the historical narrative developed during colonial rule. The message was promulgated as propaganda through meetings of Habyarimana’s political party, the National Revolutionary Movement for Development (Mouvement Révolutionaire National pour le Développement, MRND), and even more extreme Coalition for the Defense of the Republic (CDR), extremist publications, and both the official radio station, Radio Rwanda, and the ostensibly independent Radio-Television of the Thousand Hills (Radio-Télévision Libre des Milles Collines, RTLM), founded by MRND and CDR supporters. The ideology claimed that Tutsi were aliens who did not belong in Rwanda. In a notorious November 1992 speech to an MRND meeting in Gisenyi Prefecture recorded on a cassette and much replayed, Léon Mugesera, the prefecture’s party vice-president, said of members of the largely Tutsi Liberal Party, “I am telling you that your home is Ethiopia, that we are going to send you back there quickly, by the Nyabarongo” [a tributary of the Nile].Footnote ²⁷ Another major theme was the history of Tutsi conquest and the need for Hutu to revenge their humiliation and emasculation at Tutsi hands. Mugesera asserted that, “At whatever cost, you will leave here with these words … do not let yourselves be invaded. … I know you are men … who do not let themselves be invaded, who refuse to be scorned.”Footnote ²⁸

For those authors who regard the 1994 Rwandan genocide as a mass uprising in which huge portions – perhaps a majority – of Hutu participated, the genocidal ideology and its historical narrative are key to understanding popular support for the killing campaign. Mahmood Mamdani, for example, portrays the Rwandan genocide as unique because of its mass nature and extensive popular participation.Footnote ²⁹ He seeks in his text to “make popular agency … thinkable,”Footnote ³⁰ and contends that the genocide was deeply rooted in the history developed in the colonial era. What happened in Rwanda, “was a genocide by those who saw themselves as sons – and daughters – of the soil, and their mission as one of clearing the soil of a threatening alien presence.”Footnote ³¹ Jean-Pierre Chrétien emphasized the role of hate radio in disseminating the message that the Hutu needed to defend themselves against Tutsi trying to re-establish feudalism.Footnote ³²

My own experience in Rwanda just prior to the genocide and my subsequent field research on the genocide (particularly the research I conducted in 1995–1996 for the book Leave None to Tell the Story), convince me that the level of popular participation in the genocide is commonly over-estimated and the role of ideology is exaggerated. Relatively small groups of committed (and trained) killers carried out most of the major massacres at churches, schools, and other central locations before mandatory participation in security patrols and roadblocks implicated a larger portion of the population. Many Hutu men participated in the patrols and roadblocks quite reluctantly, and most of those who participated were not involved in killing. Even those who did participate in the killing, however, were not necessarily driven by a deep hatred of Tutsi whipped up by the genocidal ideology. My own research confirms the findings of Scott Straus’s interviews with confessed genocide perpetrators that people participated primarily out of fear created by the RPF invasion of the country and fear of the consequences of resisting orders by authorities to kill.Footnote ³³ Lee Ann Fujii emphasizes the importance of social networks to explaining participation in the genocide, another factor where the ideology mattered little.Footnote ³⁴

Nevertheless, the historical narrative about Rwanda’s past and the ideology that drew upon it were significant to the genocide in several ways. Straus’s conclusion that “an ‘ideology of genocide’ did not drive participation in the genocide”Footnote ³⁵ seems accurate for the vast majority of Rwandans involved in the genocide, but many of the core group of committed killers and those who organized the genocide seem to have been influenced by ideas about a history of oppression and humiliation. For political and social leaders who found their authority slipping away in the early 1990s, the idea of a Tutsi conspiracy made sense. Like other African leaders, Habyarimana developed a neo-patrimonial structure in which he gained support from powerful individuals – principally Hutu from his home region in the north, but also others who were willing to back him – in exchange for opportunities, such as the chance for personal enrichment through embezzling public funds. When the democracy movement challenged this patrimonial elite, their response was not to admit to their own corruption, incompetence, and brutality but to question the motives of those who threatened their power. Because of discrimination, Tutsi were mostly excluded from the elite and widely supported the opposition. Leaders of the regime could thus dismiss the reform movement as a Tutsi conspiracy, particularly when a largely Tutsi army, the RPF, was invading the country. While some Hutu Power leaders may have embraced the ideology of genocide cynically as a tool to motivate popular support, many intensely hated Tutsi. They sincerely believed in the history of Tutsi conquest and domination and deemed themselves the defenders of Hutu interests against a malevolent power-hungry foreign presence on Rwandan soil. The anti-Tutsi ideology’s historical narrative may not explain most popular participation, but it does seem to have motivated many elite participants.

The historical narrative made an even more significant contribution to the genocide, however, in defining the very identity of victims and perpetrators. For scholars, the constructed nature of identities in Rwanda is particularly obvious. Hutu and Tutsi share the same territory and have a common language and culture. Even if claims of physical distinctions between the two groups had historical merit, which they do not, the historic flexibility of group membership and the frequency of intermarriage would have eliminated the reliability of judging individuals by their appearance. What distinguishes the two groups, ultimately, is the idea that they have different historical origins. The fact that historical and anthropological research disproves the assertion that the groups originated through separate migrationsFootnote ³⁶ was politically less significant than the fact that people believed that the two groups were distinct. Jan Vansina’s claim that, “an ethnic group is a group of people who believe erroneously that they share a common history,”Footnote ³⁷ is quite telling in the Rwandan case. The belief that Hutu and Tutsi had different histories ultimately served to distinguish the groups from one another. Long after any occupational differentiation had disappeared, long after Tutsi had lost the reins of power in Rwanda, what separated them from Hutu was a belief in their difference rooted in the historical narrative of separate origins. Colonialists did not invent Hutu, Tutsi, and Twa as categories, but they worked with Tutsi elites to develop a history that endowed the groups with distinct origins and made it possible to think about them as separate races. This distinction, rooted in a historical narrative, ultimately made the genocide possible by delineating the boundaries of group membership.

The Official Historical Narrative

After the RPF swept to power in July 1994, tens of thousands of Tutsi who had been living as refugees, primarily in Uganda, Zaire, and Burundi, began flooding back into Rwanda. These repatriated Tutsi, widely known in Rwanda as the rapatriés, or returnees, had varying experiences abroad. Many had lived in exile for more than three decades, and a large portion was born abroad and had never set foot in Rwanda. Many refugees grew up in the limited confines of camps – particularly in Uganda – but some enjoyed considerable opportunity and prospered in their adopted lands, as in Congo where many Tutsi made successful careers in trade. Despite their diverse backgrounds, most Tutsi refugees shared, to at least some extent, a common vision of Rwanda and its past that was at sharp variance with the historical narrative widely accepted within Rwandan territory at the time. As Liisa Malkki has demonstrated through her perceptive study of Burundian Hutu refugees in Tanzania, the constructed memory of their homeland can be a powerful social force among refugees.Footnote ³⁸ In the perspective of the Tutsi refugees, the Rwandan population had been unified prior to colonialism, and the colonial state and the Catholic Church were largely to blame for the persecution and exclusion of the Tutsi. Corrupt post-independence governments worked in league with foreign powers to manipulate the uneducated and gullible population to prevent the return of Tutsi to their rightful place in Rwandan society. The idea of Rwanda as homeland remained central to the refugee community’s identity, and the desire to return was powerful, particularly during periods when the Tutsi faced discrimination because of their outsider status, as in the second Obote regime in Uganda in the early 1980s.Footnote ³⁹ As Gerard Prunier wrote, “As the years passed and memories of the real Rwanda began to recede, Rwanda slowly became a mythical country in the refugees’ minds.”Footnote ⁴⁰ For the young who had no personal experience of Rwanda, “Contrasting an idealized past life with the difficulties they were experiencing, their image of Rwanda became that of a land of milk and honey. Economic problems linked with their eventual return, such as overpopulation, overgrazing or soil erosion, were dismissed as Kigali regime propaganda.”Footnote ⁴¹ As Malkki suggests, the context in which refugees live affects the degree to which they are driven by collective memory.Footnote ⁴² The RPF had its roots in the refugee camps of southern Uganda, where life was hard and refugees faced repression. The experience of persecution and limited opportunity shaped the refugees’s view of their own past and the conditions that had forced them to flee into exile. Those who emerged to lead the RPF were motivated by a vision of the past in which the Tutsi were unjustly persecuted.

When the RPF took power in Rwanda, the returned refugees viewed Rwanda through the framework of the collective memory they had developed abroad but found a population whose understanding of the past was quite different from their own. The RPF and its supporters correctly perceived that history had been distorted and used to mobilize the population and enable the genocide.Footnote ⁴³ To achieve a durable peace, they recognized a need to re-educate the population about the country’s history and replace the previous historical narrative with a new narrative in which Tutsi were not foreign invaders but sons and daughters of the Rwandan soil. Immediately after taking power, the government placed a moratorium on the teaching of history in Rwandan secondary schools, while a group of repatriated intellectuals – including government officials, professors, and other intellectuals, such as priests – began to work on revising Rwanda’s formal history. Scholars with strong international reputations, such as Paul Rutayisire, Gamaliel Mbonimana, Faustin Rutembesa, Célestin Kalimba, and Déogratias Byanafashe, most of whom had been professors in Burundi or Zaire, sought to introduce their ideas to a new Rwandan audience.Footnote ⁴⁴ As Jean Nizurugero Rugagi asserted, “The current and urgent task for the historian is to place before the eyes of Rwandans and before international opinion the authentic course of Rwandan history to better denounce the manipulation that it experienced.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Dominican Father Bernardin Muzungu founded a quarterly journal, Lumière et Société, focused on correcting understandings of the Rwandan past, the Center for Conflict Management at the NUR in Butare undertook research on issues such as the migration of people into Rwanda and the historic sources of ethnic conflict, and major conferences on the history of Rwanda were organized at the NUR in 1998 and 1999. Government officials in their public addresses, the national radio in both news reports and special programing, and various newspapers and magazines have regularly discussed both Rwanda’s recent and more remote history, using the same historical narrative as the historians.Footnote ⁴⁶ In the remainder of this chapter, I provide a brief overview of the major themes raised in both the academic historical works and official government discourse.

The Essential Unity of the Rwandan People

The fundamental unity of Rwanda’s people in pre-colonial times is a major theme of the new historical narrative. The scholarship generally does not pretend that the region was entirely peaceful, as kingdoms rose and fell and various individuals and groups vied for political power, but conflicts did not occur along lines of identity. In fact, the narrative challenges the idea that ethnic divisions have a historic basis. Scholars draw on linguistic analysis and archeology to demonstrate that patterns of migration into Rwanda were complex and do not explain the emergence of the country’s ethnic groups.Footnote ⁴⁷ The fact that clans cut across ethnic lines is raised as proof of the historic unity of the three groups.Footnote ⁴⁸ The shared use of the Kinyarwanda language is offered as evidence of the cultural unity of the Rwandan people,Footnote ⁴⁹ as is the unifying belief in a high god, Imana.Footnote ⁵⁰ President Kagame has often asserted the unity of pre-colonial Rwandans, as in a 2003 speech in San Francisco, in which he stated, “The Bahutu, Batutsi, and Batwa were Banyarwanda until the colonial adventure.”Footnote ⁵¹ Pre-colonial Rwanda was effectively a nation state, because it had a single national identity and clearly defined territory,Footnote ⁵² which is said to have been considerably larger than the boundaries of Rwanda set in colonial times, encompassing much of eastern Congo and southern Uganda, a fact used to justify modern incursions into Congo.Footnote ⁵³

The narrative contends that while the categories Hutu, Tutsi, and Twa existed before colonialism, they emerged within Rwanda rather than through migration. Oral sources are cited to suggest that Hutu, Tutsi, and Twa come from common descent. According to Rwandan myths, the three social groups are descendants of the children of one father. Imana (God) gave them each milk to guard. Gatwa drank his milk, Gahutu spilled his, and only Gatutsi kept his milk safe, which is why Imana put Gatutsi in charge of his brothers. The story “shows that in the ancestral tradition, what we currently call ethnicities are not a question of race but of ‘wealth and social rank.’ In effect, the story speaks of three brothers, not of three races.”Footnote ⁵⁴ In pre-colonial Rwanda, the three groups lived in harmony, and their relations were not grossly unequal, with each fulfilling a defined social and economic function. In particular, the relationship between Hutu and Tutsi was not feudal, as colonial scholars purported, because relations were reciprocal and mutually beneficial.Footnote ⁵⁵ Many writers argue that Rwanda was like a large extended family with diverse members nevertheless intimately tied together. “It was on this natural line that national unity was grafted as a larger extension of the family. In this way, the king was considered not only as the political chief, but above all as the ‘supreme patriarch of all families.’”Footnote ⁵⁶

The idea that the monarchy served to unify Rwandans of all groups is key to the narrative. The royal Nyiginya clan gradually centralized its rule over the Rwandan population in the centuries before colonialism. “The result of this centralization and this increased uniformity of the management of the country was a consciousness of the unity of the population. One king, one law, one people – such was Rwanda in this pre-colonial ‘Nyiginya’ period. This step of development of the country was the supreme realization of Rwanda as a family whose members were named the Rwandans or Rwandan people.”Footnote ⁵⁷ The king was above ethnicity. As a presidential commission on Rwanda’s national unity concluded, “The King was the crux for all Rwandans. … [A]fter he was enthroned, people said that ‘he was no umututsi anymore,’ but the King for the people. … In the programme of expanding Rwanda, there was no room for disputes between Hutus, Tutsi and Twas. The King brought all of them together.”Footnote ⁵⁸ In sum, “The Rwandans constitute one ethnicity, not three, and have the same origin, a common biological relationship due to the numerous intermarriages over the millenniums.”Footnote ⁵⁹

The Divisive Role of Colonialism

If Rwandans were historically a unified people, the narrative clearly blames colonial rule for dividing the population, particularly along ethnic lines.Footnote ⁶⁰ As Gérard Nyirimanzi writes, “The current crisis has a cause exterior to our past: the racism inculcated in our united people for centuries by the colonizer.”Footnote ⁶¹ The Catholic Church began the practice of ethnic segregation by establishing schools for Tutsi,Footnote ⁶² and the colonial administration then adopted the idea of ethnic differentiation.Footnote ⁶³ Missionaries and others developed a historical narrative that sought to explain the different ethnic groups but that actually created the myths that gave the divisions social meaning. “Colonial historiography not only created cleavages between three social categories but, more seriously, conferred on them an ancient existence. The differences between these entities, rather falsified and unduly important, are explained in reference to the different historical origins.”Footnote ⁶⁴ The colonial idea that Hutu, Tutsi, and Twa were three separate racial groups that migrated into Rwanda at different times became the basis of colonial policy, and priests, teachers, and administrators ultimately duped the Rwandan population into believing the veracity of the racial origins of Rwanda’s differences.Footnote ⁶⁵ As Michaël Kayihura states, “The Western historians, ethnographers, and anthropologists accustomed us to a certain number of physical, moral, social, and cultural stereotypes, about which the least that one can say is that they have had a long life, since they still remain in the work of certain post-colonial authors.”Footnote ⁶⁶

The power and benefits that came to the Tutsi during the colonial period were not due to their own actions but part of the colonial strategy of domination. Once the Tutsi began to seek to wrest control of their country, the colonial rulers switched support to the Hutu in a cynical bid to retain as much power as possible. The Europeans in Rwanda created an “exacerbation through words and acts of the differences between Hutu and Tutsi, by the colony and the mission. The Roman tactic of ‘divide et impera’ (divide to better manipulate) was chosen to prevent the independence of Rwanda. To do this, it was necessary to raise up the Hutu who didn’t ask for it against the Tutsi who demanded it.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Cynical colonial manipulations cast the Tutsi as arrogant, dominating foreigners. “After the alliances were changed, the Tutsi were abandoned by the colonizers for having committed the fault of demanding the independence of their country, what were previously Tutsi qualities became faults or, more exactly, the opposite of an asset.”Footnote ⁶⁸

Even well-meaning colonials, such as progressive priests, acted out of a misunderstanding of the Rwandan situation. Flemish priests saw in the Hutu a working class like the Flemish and equated the Tutsi with arrogant Walloons who had historically dominated Belgium. They saw their fight for the Hutu as a fight for justice. “In this hope for justice, these young Flemish forget the great majority of Tutsi who lived in a low social condition at the same level as the Hutu.”Footnote ⁶⁹

The History of Genocide and Post-Independent Governance

According to the official narrative, the uprising of 1959 was not, as previously contended, a “revolution” but instead the first instance of genocide in Rwanda’s history.Footnote ⁷⁰ This first instance of ethnic violence in Rwanda’s history was due directly to European manipulations, as colonial administrators, missionaries, and others feared losing their control to a radicalized Tutsi political class who would not have allowed neocolonial domination. A key idea in the narrative is that colonial and post-colonial manipulation distorted democracy in Rwanda. Majority rule came to be understood not as government by the political majority but as rule by the ethnic majority, the Hutu. “The identification of the mass as only the Hutu was the fatal error for the country. This logic culminated in negating purely and simply the nationality of all Tutsi and ignored the existence of the Twa. We already have here the premises of the genocide of 1994.”Footnote ⁷¹

The First and Second Republics are understood as pawns of neo-colonial authority. The Hutu who took power were handpicked by the Europeans and betrayed the interests of the Rwandan people for their own personal benefit. “The two first republics were simply extensions of colonization by imposed ‘natives.’”Footnote ⁷² “The Rwandan social order created by colonization endured more than 30 years in the two first republics.”Footnote ⁷³

Violence against Tutsi began in 1959, and the governments of both Kayibanda and Habyarimana must also be understood in light of this violence. Nyirimanzi’s reference to, “the catastrophe that befell our country beginning in 1959 and the culmination of which took place in 1994,”Footnote ⁷⁴ is typical in regarding the period of 1959–1994 as a continuous time of violence against the Tutsi, gradually and inevitably building toward the 1994 genocide.Footnote ⁷⁵ Failure to hold anyone accountable for the earlier violence made possible the genocide in 1994. The anti-Tutsi ideology and policies of the regimes completely overshadow any other policies, such as the focus on economic development.Footnote ⁷⁶ Issues not related to ethnic violence are glossed over or entirely ignored. For example, Jean-Damascène Ndayambaje writes that, “Violence by the Parmehutu Party against the Tutsi marked the entire period 1959–1973,”Footnote ⁷⁷ ignoring the actual periodic nature of the violence and the general absence of ethnic violence between 1965 and 1973. The history of both republics is reduced to the aspects relevant to ethnic discrimination and ethnic violence, as though nothing other than identity issues were politically relevant.Footnote ⁷⁸ As Kagame has said, “The period of 1959 to 1994 is indeed a history of genocide in slow motion.”Footnote ⁷⁹

The Centrality of the Genocide

The genocide is the focal point of Rwanda’s current historical narrative. Much as the previous regimes referred endlessly to the 1959 “revolution” to justify their actions and interpreted contemporary history in light of this uprising against Tutsi and colonial oppressors, the RPF regime has identified the genocide as the key event against which all Rwandan history before and since must be considered. Colonial history is seen as laying the groundwork for genocide,Footnote ⁸⁰ and the First and Second Republics are understood to have built inevitably toward the 1994 genocide. President Kagame and other politicians regularly refer to the genocide as the primary source of Rwanda’s ongoing challenges and as justification for many current government policies. Kagame began his 2003 San Francisco speech with the line, “There is no greater crime than genocide,”Footnote ⁸¹ using the genocide to frame all of his subsequent remarks. The RPF claims considerable moral authority for having stopped the genocide, and the threat of renewed genocide justifies many ongoing government policies.

The historical narrative offers an interpretation of the genocide that emphasizes its mass popular nature and its brutality. The government and its supporters have consistently insisted on the largest possible number of victims – usually over one million – to emphasize the very serious nature of the genocide.Footnote ⁸² The editors of Cahiers Lumière et Société assert (without supporting evidence) that since 1959 two million people have been killed in Hutu–Tutsi violence in Rwanda.Footnote ⁸³ Along with a large number of victims, the narrative portrays the genocide as an event in which nearly every Hutu in the country was caught up and that involved extraordinary depravity. This emphasis implies that anyone in Rwanda at the time of the genocide is tainted by the violence. Only those who lost their lives opposing the genocide can be known to have truly challenged the violence. Survival implies cooption; one has to have done something to survive. Hence, not only all Hutu who survived are suspect, even if they seemed to actively oppose the genocide, but also by implication, so are Tutsi survivors.Footnote ⁸⁴

The narrative attributes the genocide to sources both external and internal to Rwanda. International responsibility for the genocide is assigned not simply to the role that colonialism played in creating ethnic divisions, but also to ongoing failures by the international community.Footnote ⁸⁵ France is singled out in particular for having supported the Habyarimana regime, cooperated with the FAR in combating the RPF, trained and armed the militia groups that carried out the genocide, and helped the Rwandan army and militia members escape into Zaire by establishing the Zone Turquoise.Footnote ⁸⁶ Kagame writes, “I hold the French government, in particular, responsible for helping to arm and train the militias that dispersed throughout the country to wipe out the Tutsi population.”Footnote ⁸⁷ The rest of the international community bears responsibility for failing to stop the genocide. Kagame asserted, “The UN and the international community as a whole abandoned Rwanda in 1994.”Footnote ⁸⁸ Gasana Ndoba, the president of the National Commission for Human Rights, asserted that, “the genocide was prepared and executed in the view of and with the knowledge of the international community.”Footnote ⁸⁹ In his speech on the ninth anniversary of the genocide, President Kagame, asked, “Fifty years ago they said, ‘Never again,’ but what did they do so that this would not be committed in our country?”Footnote ⁹⁰

The narrative attributes blame within the country in two distinct ways. Responsibility lies first with the elite, particularly government officials, who selfishly used their power for personal gain and served foreign interests rather than the national interest. Bad governance is a common theme in discussions of the genocide. The leaders of both the First and Second Republics are regarded as having set the stage for the genocide with their abuse of power and their ethnic discrimination. The discourse pays scant attention to the internal process of democratization from 1990 to 1994 other than to note that many politicians formerly in opposition ultimately re-aligned themselves with President Habyarimana and the Hutu-Power movement. The Democratic Republican Movement (Mouvement Démocratique Républicain, MDR) is particularly singled out for having maintained the anti-Tutsi values of its predecessor party Parmehutu.Footnote ⁹¹ A few Hutu, such as Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana, are recognized as martyrs, but the narrative sees most Hutu as having in fact been complicit in the genocide.

Elites outside the government are also condemned for their complicity. Members of civil society – even human rights organizations – are said to have participated in the genocide, indicating the total bankruptcy of the intellectual class. Paul Rutayisire makes a stinging critique of the Catholic Church and its complicity in the genocide, both for its historic and contemporary role, a perspective embraced by many of the former refugee intellectuals. “In the process that led to genocide, the Catholic hierarchy was complicit, as much in its behavior as in its teachings, in broadcasting the evil that ate away at Rwandan society. Even the most unconditional defenders of the Catholic Church do not contest this fact.”Footnote ⁹² In general, the educated in Rwanda, whether in the government or outside, are considered to have led the country down the road to genocide.

The narrative walks a fine line between blaming the Rwandan population and vindicating them by blaming the international community and the national leadership. The masses are regarded as having participated widely in the genocide, but mostly because of their severe poverty and ignorance that made them vulnerable to manipulation by ill-intentioned elites. The masses were deceived by “an ideology of discrimination,”Footnote ⁹³ that claimed not only that the Tutsi were foreigners and that Rwanda belonged to Hutu,Footnote ⁹⁴ but that all Tutsi in Rwanda were enemies of the Hutu; killing Tutsi was therefore self-defense.Footnote ⁹⁵ The low level of education within the population limited the masses’ capacity to critically assess the false ideas being fed to them.Footnote ⁹⁶ Poverty is also considered a major cause of the genocide, as the wretched lives of the masses made them respond to promises of economic opportunity.

Given its centrality, the genocide must be highlighted and commemorated in order to prevent it from recurring. As the regional representative of the survivors’ group IBUKA reported in a radio interview, “Some people have even said that remembering [the genocide] does not coincide with the process of unity and reconciliation of Rwandans. This is not a good idea. People holding this opinion only take account of their own interests. … He who doesn’t know where he is coming from, doesn’t know where he is going.”Footnote ⁹⁷

The RPF as Agent of Peace and Democracy

The narrative depicts the RPF as Rwanda’s saviors who reluctantly used military force for the benefit of all Rwandan people. Rwanda was suffering under dictatorship and violence, and the Habyarimana regime was unwilling to accept real democracy or allow refugees the right to return to their homeland. “The RPF had to develop an armed wing, because the Rwandan regime did not understand the language of peace.”Footnote ⁹⁸ The goals of the RPF were the repatriation of refugees, the overthrow of the dictatorship, and the “elimination of the virus of divisionism.”Footnote ⁹⁹

The narrative portrays the RPF as serving a noble cause and acting out of self-sacrifice, and their invasion is called the “War of Liberation.” The beginning of the war in 1990 is commemorated as a national holiday annually on October 1, known as the Day of Patriotism. In a speech marking the holiday in 2002, President Kagame claimed, “[T]welve years ago to the day, Rwandans began to struggle against injustice in Rwanda and to proceed with the general reform of the bad politics that scatter the Rwandan people. … This day … reminds us that Rwandans who love their country whether in the interior or the exterior rose up to struggle against the bad leadership that existed in the country.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ While the War of October, as it was known within Rwanda, was extremely unpopular within the country at the time, the RPF has attempted to use the Day of Patriotism to recast the war as a struggle not against the Rwandan people but by the Rwandan people against corrupt authoritarian governance and ethnic violence. Ignoring the pro-democracy movement that had begun months earlier, the narrative treats the RPF invasion as the beginning of efforts for reform.

The idea that the RPF stopped the genocide is a crucial element of the historical narrative. While the international community utterly failed to act on the promise of “never again,” the RPF acted boldly, renewing its attack on Rwanda with the sole purpose of stopping the genocide. According to Bernardin Muzungu, “While the machete and other instruments of death made the law in Rwanda and the international community waited with arms crossed, the RPF-Inkotanyi threw its youth into the fire. The dispersal of the killers was total.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ The attack on Rwanda that the RPF renewed in April 1994 is reinterpreted as an “anti-genocidal campaign.”Footnote ¹⁰²

According to the narrative, the RPF has devoted itself since taking power to correcting the mistakes of the past and reforming Rwanda so that ethnic violence will never recur. As Kagame said, “When the RPF took over, Rwanda was in utter anarchy. … We quickly realized that our task was to restore hope to the Rwandan people and to return power to the population. We have restored trust in the judiciary and have therefore been able to avoid revenge. The long established culture of impunity, which made possible the 1994 genocide, has at last been broken. People now have complete security of life and property.”Footnote ¹⁰³ The RPF fought against ethnic discrimination and “divisionism,” establishing a multi-party, multi-ethnic “government of transition.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ The mention of ethnicity was removed from national identity cards, and positions in schools and government employment are now determined by the principle of merit. Many articles on the history of ethnic violence include a statement on how the current regime has broken with the practice of discrimination. For example, Kayihura writes, “Today, four years after the genocide, the Government of National Unity is striving, against winds and tides, to restore the Rwandan society in a context of beneficial national reconciliation.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵

A corollary of the narrative depicting the RPF as noble and self-sacrificing seeks to obliterate any public memory of RPF abuses during and after the 1990–1994 war. As heroic saviors of the country, the RPF cannot also be villains. The idea that the RPF bears any responsibility for the genocide itself, for having attacked the country without regard for the consequences for Tutsi still within Rwanda, is categorically rejected.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Furthermore, any apparent abuses during the war and its aftermath are either unfortunate casualties of a just war (generally seen as misunderstood or exaggerated) or the actions of rogue individuals who operated outside the approval of the RPF leadership. As Kagame said, “We acted to stop a genocide, but you cannot stop individuals from committing crimes individually.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ His point is that any violence carried out against civilians by the RPF or its soldiers was incidental and not systematic. The idea of a “double genocide” advanced by some regime critics is vociferously rejected as a form of genocide denial; if both sides committed genocide, then blame is shared and the crime is less serious. As Kagame said in response to a question about potential indictments of RPF officials at the ICTR, “What in Rwanda we are opposed to is equating inequitable situations. … Don’t divert from the main purpose of the Tribunal, and that is to try those involved in the genocide.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Rwanda’s two incursions into the DRC in 1996–1997 and 1998–2002 were necessary for Rwanda’s security, particularly to prevent a recurrence of genocide. The troops “showed their courage and their sacrifice based on their patriotic love [of Rwanda]”Footnote ¹⁰⁹

Criticism of the RPF is treated as revisionist support for the “double genocide” theory. An article on the double-genocide theory equates criticism of the RPF with both genocide denial and support for the génocidaires.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Those in the international community who criticize the RPF regime are hypocrites, since they did not oppose the regime that carried out the genocide but now dare to condemn the RPF, which stopped the genocide.Footnote ¹¹¹ Those Rwandans who criticize the RPF demonstrate their continuing adherence to genocidal ideologies. For example, when former President Bizimungu’s political party was banned for promoting “divisionism,” those who supported the new political party that he formed were accused of supporting genocide.Footnote ¹¹² A few months later, the MDR was similarly criticized for having, “always supported the divisions that have beset our country,”Footnote ¹¹³ and its presidential candidate, former Prime Minister Twagiramungu was accused of having denied the genocide.Footnote ¹¹⁴ The parliamentary committee ultimately concluded that the MDR should be suppressed, because the ideology of the party was merely a continuation of Kayibanda’s anti-Tutsi Parmehutu and the leadership was both implicated in the genocide and continued to support a genocidal ideology.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Critics of the regime are also commonly accused of putting their own interests first and indulging in corruption. As one governor declared in a public meeting, “The ethnic divisions that have characterized Rwanda are hidden behind people who would simply fill their stomachs – for selfish interests.”Footnote ¹¹⁶ In short, the RPF has the best interests of the country in mind, and those who would criticize the party and government hold only selfish interests and have yet to give up the divisive racist thinking of the past.

President Kagame’s forward to a book on transitional justice in Rwanda amply demonstrates the various points about the RPF that I have outlined here:

The Official Narrative and Constraints on Historical Debate

I have attempted above to provide as accurate as possible a summation of the official historical narrative advanced by the RPF and its supporters with little commentary.Footnote ¹¹⁸ My goal in this chapter is not to assess the accuracy of the historical discourse but rather to understand its main points in order to appreciate the major themes of the collective memory that the RPF has sought to promote. In fact, many of the points in the current official narrative diverge from or directly contradict the conclusions of most historians and other scholars outside Rwanda. The need to emphasize unity and reject the significance of ethnicity has led to distortions of historical reality. The narrative exaggerates the unifying role of the monarchy by denying the fluid nature of political boundaries in pre-colonial Rwanda, ignoring both the presence of autonomous Hutu kingdoms within the territory and the tenuous ties of peripheral areas to the central court. Placing the genocide at the center of Rwandan history treats the past hundred years as a linear progression toward that signal event, ignoring much of the actual complexity of events in both the colonial and post-colonial eras. The official interpretation of the genocide conceals the facilitating role of the RPF invasion and ignores atrocities committed by the RPF itself.

In promoting a singular narrative, Rwanda’s new elite seeks to develop a unified collective memory for the Rwandan population, one they hope not only creates a propitious environment for their continuing social, economic, and political dominance but will also ultimately reshape what it means to be Rwandan in a way that will prevent future ethnic violence. If, as I have argued, the belief in distinct historical origins made the genocide possible by delineating Hutu from Tutsi and Twa, then developing a belief in a unified history, it is hoped, will eliminate the basis for inter-group violence. Whatever their merits, the distinctly political goals of the effort to rewrite history leave little room for dissention and debate.

In the project that I helped direct to develop modules for a history curriculum for Rwandan secondary schools, we sought to encourage an alternative method of approaching history as a set of questions and problems rather than a list of facts.Footnote ¹¹⁹ In the course of this project, however, my American colleagues and I witnessed exactly how the official narrative serves to constrain discussions of history even among trained historians. Two small incidents serve as examples. The first involves the choice of focus for the working group on pre-colonial Rwanda. David Newbury, a prominent historian of Rwanda, participated in the project as a consultant and advised the pre-colonial group. Newbury has written extensively on clans, and in a definitive work on the topic published in 1980, he argued that clans were not, as earlier histories had maintained, the most important social identifier in pre-colonial Rwanda. While clans were significant for the organization of power in the central court, for most people in what is today Rwanda they were less significant as social identifiers than region and lineage. In fact, the expansion of the clan structure throughout Rwanda was actually part of the process of the extension of central control by the monarchy.Footnote ¹²⁰

The official post-genocide narrative, however, has treated clans as a central aspect of Rwandan history. The fact that clans in Rwanda are multi-ethnic, most including all three groups, is used in the official narrative to support the ideas that the Rwandan people were historically unified and that ethnicity was an artificial creation of the colonial state. Furthermore, clans were important to competitions for power in the Rwandan royal court, even into the colonial period. Tutsi who fled Rwanda beginning in 1959 came disproportionately from the political elite, and in exile, particularly in Uganda, clan identity remained important to them. Inside Rwanda, clans diminished even further in importance, serving little purpose other than limiting marital choices (since Rwandans marry outside their clans). The refugees who returned to Rwanda beginning in 1994 brought with them the perspective that clans were central to Rwandan society. (President Kagame is from the clan of the queen mother, the Abega, and many people have said that his rise to power represents the final victory of the Abega over the Nyiginya clan.) Thus, despite the advice from the pre-eminent expert on clans in Rwanda that the pre-colonial working group focus on a topic less distorted by ideology, the pre-colonial group insisted on choosing clans as their focus and presented clans in a fashion consistent with the official narrative – though they did include a few references to the work of Newbury to indicate that there were divergent perspectives.

Another example from our project of how politicized history has become in Rwanda involved the working group charged with treating the post-independence period. The group included in the initial draft of their materials a section that sought to implicate one of Rwanda’s most respected Hutu human rights activists, Father André Sibomana, in a notorious case of anti-Tutsi discrimination in the late-1980s, the “Muvara Affair.” In 1988, the Vatican appointed as bishop Father Félicièn Muvara, a Tutsi priest, but just days before his installation, he withdrew, claiming “personal reasons.” In fact, rumors quickly spread that he had been pressured to withdraw by leaders in both the government and the church after a “whispering campaign” falsely accused him of fathering a child out of wedlock.Footnote ¹²¹ The materials presented by the post-independence group asserted that Sibomana had instigated the rumors against Muvara.

I strongly believe that the accusations against Sibomana were driven not by the actual events related to Muvara but rather by a contemporary attempt to discredit Sibomana in the post-genocide context. I personally knew both Muvara and Sibomana and researched the Muvara affair during the period just prior to the genocide. Muvara was the curé of one of the Catholic parishes where I conducted research in 1992–1993, and I interviewed him several times, including an extended interview focused specifically on his abandoned appointment as bishop. The evidence that he and others provided me painted a very different picture that directly implicated the archbishop, a close ally of President Haybarimana.

Sibomana, meanwhile, had played an important role in inspiring opposition to the Habyarimana regime and encouraging support for democratic political reform as editor of the Catholic newspaper, Kinyamateka, beginning in 1988. He also became the founding president of the human rights group ADL in 1990, one of the most important human rights organizations in the period leading up to the genocide. During the genocide, death squads targeted Sibomana as an opponent of both the regime and the genocide, but he survived by going into hiding. After 1994, the Vatican named Sibomana acting bishop of Kabgayi, and he was widely expected to be named bishop. He earned the wrath of those in power, however, by continuing his advocacy for human rights, particularly by publicly denouncing the terrible condition of the prison in his diocese, where prisoners were dying in large numbers from dysentery and other diseases related to the unsanitary conditions. As a result, Sibomana ironically became himself an object of a “whispering campaign” by allies of the RPF regime who accused him of being anti-Tutsi and participating in the genocide – despite the reality that he was himself targeted by it. Ultimately, the Vatican passed him over for bishop, naming a mild-mannered Hutu unlikely to challenge the government. Sibomana returned to the editorship of Kinyamateka and his work with ADL, but he faced harassment and intimidation, and his health fell into decline. He died in 1988 after the government denied him the right to leave Rwanda for medical treatment.Footnote ¹²² In response to international criticism surrounding his death, the government stepped up its campaign against him, seeking to discredit him posthumously and thereby justify their own hostility to him.

Having worked with Sibomana as director of the HRW and FIDH office in Rwanda, I was consistently impressed by his courage and principles, and I found the accusations against him poorly supported and inconsistent with widespread testimonies that I heard from Rwandans. Furthermore, the source for the section in our curriculum accusing Sibomana in the Muvara Affair was a notoriously unreliable, pro-RPF and anti-Catholic French press, Golias. Since the accusations against Sibomana were not essential to the text and seemed to serve no useful purpose, I spoke with the professor directing the project and urged that they be edited out. Nonetheless, in the final version, the accusations against Sibomana remained. These accusations served the purpose of discrediting a prominent moderate Hutu who had criticized the RPF government and had suffered as a result. Discrediting Sibomana helped to protect the image of the RPF as a supporter of human rights and democracy and also to promote the impression that Hutu elite were almost universally implicated in the genocide.

These are but two minor examples of the ways in which the official narrative constrains historical discussion, but they occurred in an academic setting that included the top Rwandan historians and education specialists in a project in which participants had committed themselves to developing more democratic approaches to the teaching of history. If even the country’s best historians are unwilling to complicate their discussions of the Rwandan past and allow for alternative perspectives, how much more difficult must it be for common citizens to articulate divergent narratives? As I demonstrate in the next several chapters, the main themes of the historical narrative developed here are reinforced through a variety of means. Genocide memorials, trials, political reform, and other government policies support the official narrative and seek to advance a collective memory that will both promote national unity and justify RPF rule. Given these political goals, alternative perspectives cannot be tolerated. In post-genocide Rwanda, the RPF and its supporters are clearly the ones who claim the right to speak for the past, and their aggressive political agenda does not allow contests over the past to challenge their dominance of the present.