When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism and the Genocide in Rwanda (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism and the Genocide in Rwanda Jennifer Hasty Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001) Ugandan political scientist Mahmood Mamdani is perhaps best known for his theoretical framing of the consequences of colonial administrative techniques in Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (1996). In his new book on the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, Mamdani deploys his theoretical framework in a comparative and historical analysis of the genocide in terms of racialized ethnic violence and the politics of indigeneity. In the long process of precolonial state formation beginning around the fifteenth century, a rather loose Hutu identity and a more coherent Tutsi identity slowly emerged as local, mutually-defined political categories constituting a “mythic interdependence” of ritual (Hutu) and military (Tutsi) power. From the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, new religious cults, military expansion, and the elaboration of patron-client practices all served to undermine Hutu ritual power and strengthen Tutsi military power, further polarizing the two identities. With colonization at the end of the nineteenth century, Rwanda was developed as a kind of “halfway house” of colonial techniques, combining the racial dynamic of direct rule with the ethnic constructivity of indirect rule. As colonizers, both the Germans and later the Belgians designed a racialized sphere of civil society to exclude subject populations of “indigenous” peoples who were dominated in terms of ethnicity and tribe. Assuming a politicized ethnic binary between Tutsi elites and Hutu peasants, both the church and colonial administration constructed the Tutsi as a “subject race” of non-indigenous conquerors, securing their collaboration with colonial forces in the effective domination of the indigenous and ethnicized Hutu majority. This racialization of Tutsi identity was largely accomplished in three ways: through the preferential practices of the church, modern administrative technologies like the census, and the promulgation of racial ideology in the schools (the Hamitic hypothesis). Failing to overturn these racialized categories, the social revolution of 1959, leading to independence, merely reversed the categorical order of power. Tutsi minority domination, which had derived legitimacy from alien racial superiority, was merely exchanged for domination of a Hutu majority whose legitimacy hinged on its claims to victimized indigeneity. These victims become killers in postcolonial Rwanda because the racialized categories of colonial rule remained largely intact while the conditions for rivalry and revenge intensified economically, politically, and regionally. The slide toward genocide began in 1990 when a small force of Tutsi exiles in Uganda, doomed to alien status there, crossed the border to retake Rwanda, now constructed as their native homeland. Settling finally with a “victor’s justice” that virtually retains the categorical dynamic of domination and revenge, Rwanda remains in danger of exploding again in racialized turmoil that could easily spread into a larger regional crisis. The challenge, according to Mamdani, is to reform the institutions and ideologies that have promulgated these historical categories, Hutu and Tutsi, transcending this binary. Mamdani argues that these categories might be replaced with notions of social identity that are at once more immediate and more carefully historicized, abandoning the ideological search for “origins” in favor of more immediate forms of belonging such as local residency and national purpose, perhaps eventually merging into a larger regional entity. Read as an account of the genocide itself, the book is somewhat confusing. The book focuses more on the historical backdrop and regional dynamic surrounding the crisis, complicating the singular narrative of key sequential points with a multiplicity of complex arguments. The actual events of the genocide comprise a mere fifteen pages (218–233). Drawing extensively from accounts of the genocide published by journalists other scholars, the value of this book lies less in its description of the events and more in the kind of theoretical explication that situates the Rwandan crisis comparatively within larger scholarly arguments concerning the nature of ethnic power, conflict, and genocide. While the real relevance of this book relies on this theoretical challenge to mainstream tendencies in the field of conflict studies, Mamdani too often avoids head-on confrontation with the very scholars he aims to disprove, using the catch-words of certain...