Ethnicity In Rwanda Research Articles

Ethnicity without labels?

Following the 1994 genocide, the government of Rwanda embarked on a “deethnicization” campaign to outlaw Tutsi, Hutu, and Twa labels and replace them with a pan-Rwandan national identity. Since then, to use ethnic labels means risking accusations of “divisionism” or perpetuating ethnic schisms. Based on one year of ethnographic fieldwork in the university town of Butare, I argue that the absence of ethnic labels produces practical interpretive problems for Rwandans because of the excess of possible ways of interpreting what people mean when they evaluate each other's conduct in everyday talk. I trace the historical entanglement of ethnicity with class, rural/urban, occupational, and moral distinctions such that the content of ethnic stereotypes can be evoked even without ethnic labels. In so doing, I aim to enrich understandings of both the power and danger inherent in the ambiguous place of ethnicity in Rwanda's “postethnic” moment.

How is ethnicity experienced? Essentialist and constructivist notions of ethnicity in Rwanda and Burundi

This article argues that the mainstream (constructivist) theorizing about ethnicity should be expanded in order to take essentialist aspects that are present in the notions of “potential ethnics” into account. By focusing on the notions of “potential ethnics”, that is, in this case Rwandans and Burundians, one avoids the oversimplification that still persists in the debate about essentialist and constructivist approaches to ethnicity. Qualitative interviews conducted between September 2007 and May 2008 show that Rwandans and Burundians do not conceive of ethnic categories as either constructivist or essentialist, but that constructivist and essentialist notions exist next to each other and are strongly intertwined in the different lines of reasoning. These findings support arguments criticizing the dominant constructivist theories (about being Hutu and Tutsi) as being unable to capture the complexity of ethnic realities.

Killing Neighbors: Webs of Violence in Rwanda (review)

Reviewed by: Killing Neighbors: Webs of Violence in Rwanda Christopher C. Taylor Lee Ann Fujii, Killing Neighbors: Webs of Violence in Rwanda. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009. 212 pp. Was the Rwandan genocide of 1994 an example of atavistic African tribalism run amok? According to Killing Neighbors: Webs of Violence in Rwanda, it was not. Lee Ann Fujii sets out to refute two related hypotheses about the genocide: that it was the direct result of long festering ethnic hatred between Hutu and Tutsi, and that it was the product of ethnic fears. Fujii uses her fieldwork from two sites in Rwanda, one in the northern prefecture of Ruhengeri and the other from the central prefecture of Gitarama, to advance the claim that national and local politics as well as the allure of gain were the primary motivating factors inducing Rwandans to join with Hutu extremists to assault, pillage, and kill their Tutsi neighbors. Although this book demonstrates that those who joined in the genocide (termed “joiners” by the author) had a variety of motivations, that often their reasons for continued participation differed, and that their murderous behavior varied from individual to individual, the central argument of the book is something of a straw man. No serious student of Rwanda and the genocide of 1994 advances the idea that the conflict was due solely or primarily to simple ethnic hatred or fear. The sources that the author cites as exemplars of this ethnic hate/fear thesis include Goldhagen (1996), Kaufman (1996, 2001), and Petersen (2002); not one of whom devotes primary attention to Rwanda. Fujii is correct, however, in recognizing that there were other political and social tensions, besides ethnicity, that contributed to the violence between 1990 and 1994. This does not mean that in some media the explanation was advanced that the genocide was due primarily to the straightforward expression of ethnic hate and fear. For example, in some journalistic accounts of the [End Page 1069] tragedy during the genocide and shortly after its end, it was not uncommon to read that African pastoralists and African cultivators had been fierce rivals for as long as can be determined, implying that the Rwandan genocide was merely the latest expression of a visceral antagonism between peoples practicing two competing modes of subsistence. This view concurred with many popular opinions about the genocide. Fortunately, the scholarly literature following in the wake of the genocide corrected many of these received ideas. Additionally, journalistic accounts after the first wave of writings tended to be more careful. Fujii also emphasizes the adventitious nature of ethnicity in Rwanda before the genocide. This is partly correct, but may be overstated. In terms of the theoretical approaches to ethnicity in Rwanda, there are basically two poles: primordialist and constructivist. According to the primordialist view, people develop strong filial attachments to those who share the same ethnicity. Ties to those of the same ethnicity are seen as natural. Extreme primordialism closely resembles biological determinism and echoes the Great Chain of Being ideology that many colonialists brought with them during their conquest of Africa. In Rwanda, for example, Europeans deemed Tutsi to be closer to Europeans in physiognomy and in intellectual capacity. They favored Tutsi in education and reinforced the powerful political position that members of the Tutsi elite already enjoyed. At the opposite pole is the theoretical approach known as constructivism. From this stand point, ethnicity is a social construction, highly malleable, invented largely as a function of the political and economic exigencies of the moment, and supported by a symbolic system that serves as a classificatory operator with regards to persons, things, aliments, social relations, etc. For the most part, scholars who have studied Rwanda in recent times adhere to stronger or weaker versions of constructivism. But constructivism also has its weaknesses. Stated briefly, it does not explain why some ethnic identities are more “constructed” than others. Moreover, some ethnic constructions are extremely recent, while others go back centuries. The tenacity of the latter is not easily explained by extreme constructivism; nor is the fact that some ethnic identities are highly malleable, while others are much less so. All ethnic constructions have a history, none have been created ex...

Molders of Mud: Ethnogenesis and Rwanda's Twa

When discussing the politics of ethnicity in Rwanda, most authors discount the role of Twa. Because the latter are Rwanda's least numerous ethnic group, the tendency is to dismiss their importance. This dismissal may seem justified in instrumental terms, but it is not true in symbolic terms. Twa were the first of Rwanda's three ethnicities to suffer stigmatization, and this predated European colonialism by several centuries. If we think about ethnicity according to an instrumentalist model, placing primary causal weight on social rather than cultural factors, we misconstrue how Rwanda's pre-colonial opposition of disgust vs. esteem provided fertile grounds for later European biological determinism. Practices of avoidance in commensality, marriage, and other activities – called ‘kuneena batwa’ – lie at the heart of this opposition. This paper traces its processual development, demonstrating that it is incorrect to think of Rwandan ethnicity either in purely instrumentalist terms or in simple binary cultural terms.

Accounting for Horror: Post-Genocide Debates in Rwanda, and: Surviving the Slaughter: The Ordeal of a Rwandan Refugee in Zaire (review)

Reviewed by: Accounting for Horror: Post-Genocide Debates in Rwanda, and: Surviving the Slaughter: The Ordeal of a Rwandan Refugee in Zaire Phillip A. Cantrell II Eltringham, Nigel . 2004. Accounting for Horror: Post-Genocide Debates in Rwanda. London: Pluto Press. 232 pp. $79.95 (cloth) $24.95 (paper). Umutesi, Marie Béatrice . 2004. Surviving the Slaughter: The Ordeal of a Rwandan Refugee in Zaire. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. 258 pp. $65.00 (cloth) $19.95 (paper). Few parts of the world have endured more postcolonial conflict and disorder than the Great Lakes region of Central Africa. In 1994, Rwanda experienced one of the century's worst genocides, following decades of strife since the country achieved independence from Belgium. The eastern regions of the [End Page 131] Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC, formerly Zaire) that are nearest to and bordering Rwanda, in particular North and South Kivu, have been the scene of almost continual chaos and civil war since 1997, resulting in close to four million deaths. In the past ten years, millions of Africans have suffered predation at the hands of soldiers and rebel militias. One of them was a Rwandan refugee named Marie Béatrice Umutesi, who fled across the DRC on foot from 1994 to 1997, ultimately arriving in Kinshasa, from where she secured passage to Belgium. Her memoir of the journey, Surviving the Slaughter, originally published in France in 2000 as Fuir ou Mourir au ZaVre, translated by Julia Emerson, reveals the depth of human suffering resulting from the Rwanda–Congo crisis and the political complexities surrounding it. Umutesi's story reminds readers of the anguish experienced by all sides in the Rwandan conflict and its aftermath. Nigel Eltringham, who performed doctoral research in Rwanda and among Rwandan exiles in Europe, offers a different perspective on the genocide in Accounting for Horror: Post-Genocide Debates in Rwanda. As a worker for three years in postgenocide Rwanda with a conflict-resolution NGO, he is well suited to offer a scholarly work that examines the historical thought processes in Rwanda that led to the genocide. He also seeks to understand the way the genocide is viewed in post-1994 Rwanda. Taken together, Eltringham and Umutesi offer a more complete picture of the level of human suffering experienced in the Rwanda–Congo crisis and a fuller understanding of why it happened. In 1959, Belgium yielded self-government to Rwanda and Burundi. In the years that followed, both countries endured almost perpetual conflict between their two main ethnic groups, the majority Hutu and the minority Tutsi. In Rwanda, conflict simmered intermittently until 1994, when the assassination of Rwanda's Hutu president, Juvénal Habyarimana, sparked a conflict that ultimately cost the lives of more than 800,000 Rwandans. The massacre, carried out by the interahamwe militias and regular army units (the Forces Armées Rwandaise [FAR]), was directed mostly against ethnic Tutsi. Many in the West viewed the conflict dichotomously, as between Hutu and Tutsi, and explained it as a reversion to tribalism, but Umutesi and Eltringham illustrate that the conflict was far more complicated. Umutesi recalled her youth in postindependence Rwanda by observing, "I had to realize that I was Hutu. All Rwandans share the same language and culture, and there is no specific region that is identified with an ethnic group, no 'Hutuland' or 'Tutsiland'" (Umutesi, p. 6). Eltringham supports this assertion by demonstrating that ethnicity in Rwanda was a historical construct, aided and abetted by the colonial authorities. He suggests that the while the terms Hutu and Tutsi are significant, in precolonial times they were understood as social distinctions, and only later evolved into ethnic stratifications: "Both over time and at any given moment in time the terms 'Hutu' and 'Tutsi' were polyvalent—there was no single meaning valid for the whole territory at any one time" (p. 13). [End Page 132] The 1994 genocide ended when the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA), led by current Rwandan President Paul Kagame, intervened with force, stopped the bloodshed, and established a government of national unity. The RPA was the military arm of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a political faction made up of Tutsi exiles living in Uganda and backed...

Final Solutions: Mass Killing and Genocide in the twentieth Century

Reviewed by: Final Solutions: Mass Killing and Genocide in the Twentieth Century Jessica Priselac (bio) Final Solutions: Mass Killing and Genocide in the Twentieth Century, by Benjamin Valentino (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004) 317 pages. $29.95. Episodes of genocide in the 20th century have been blamed on many "root causes"—hatred among ethnic groups, unresolved historical grievances, the embrace of a radical ideology, etc. The international system's record in preventing or resolving these types of conflicts was abysmal. Unable to handle these conflicts in an effective manner, diplomats and leaders became defensive and began to blame their failures on the nature of the conflict itself. Describing the war in the former Yugoslavia in 1992, Acting Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger commented that "[t]his war is not rational. There is no rationality at all about ethnic conflict. It is gut, it is hatred; it's not for any set of values or purposes; it just goes on. And that kind of warfare is most difficult to bring to a halt."1 His comments reflected the view of a significant portion of the policy community—a view that leaves little hope that such atrocities can be prevented in the future. In his excellent book, Final Solutions: Mass Killing and Genocide in the Twentieth Century, Benjamin A. Valentino, an assistant professor of Government at Dartmouth College, argues that the characteristics of a society do not, in fact, determine whether mass killing and genocide will occur within it. Instead, Valentino convincingly asserts that there is a "strategic logic" to mass killing and that it is used when powerful groups within a society believe that it is the best way to achieve their political or military objectives. In essence, Valentino believes that when leaders choose to embark on the path to genocide, they do so for reasons that are far from irrational. After defining mass killing as the intentional killing of noncombatants resulting in 50,000 or more deaths within a five-year period, Valentino examines a number of specific cases to explain his theory. In this "strategic approach" to assessing mass killing, Valentino divides his case studies into three types: Communist, ethnic and counter-guerrilla. He examines the communist regimes of Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot; mass killing based on ethnicity in Rwanda, Nazi Germany, and Turkey; and mass killings during counter-guerrilla operations in the Guatemalan civil war and under the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. One of Valentino's central arguments is that "characteristics of society at large, such as pre-existing cleaves, hatred and discrimination between groups and non-democratic forms of government, are of limited utility in distinguishing societies at high risk for mass killing." Valentino's strongest arguments in support of this statement are his comparative studies of regimes that committed mass killing with similar regimes that did not. Why did genocide take place [End Page 207] in racist Nazi Germany while it did not take place in South Africa? Why did mass killings occur in Communist Cambodia but not in Vietnam? His answers are compelling. Through his case studies, he presents evidence that, in each case, a concentrated group of leaders is generally responsible for formulating and organizing the mass killings after concluding that this is the best way for them to advance their own interests and solidify their power. Moreover, leaders do not need widespread support in order to conduct such policies; in each case, a relatively small group of people carried out the actual killings. In essence, Valentino argues that the overall characteristics of a society have little to do with whether or not it is at risk for genocide, because leaders who devise these plans are not responding to a society's calls for action, nor do they need a majority of society to support their actions for the results to be deadly. Despite the popular perception, these killings are not done for killing's sake—they are done with a specific goal in mind. Leaders take these actions after coming to believe that the alternative paths to their goals are either impractical or unfeasible. Valentino emphasizes that while mass killing can be seen as a strategic decision, this does not mean that...

A Catholic Mass in Kigali: Contested Views of the Genocide and Ethnicity in Rwanda

A Catholic Mass in Kigali: Contested Views of the Genocide and Ethnicity in Rwanda

A Catholic Mass in Kigali: Contested Views of the Genocide and Ethnicity in Rwanda

ResumeLe 1 octobre 1994, un Hutu, le ministre de la Justice du gouvernement rwandais domine par le FPR, a souhaite qu’une messe soit celebree pour commemorer le genocide qui a eu lieu six mois auparavant. Le gouvernement a ignore sa suggestion pour plutot celebrer l’accession du FPR au pouvoir. Une initiative hutu pour commemorer l’extermination, dont les victimes etaient en majorite des Tutsi a ete ignoree par un gouvernement controle par des Tutsi. Du point de vue des relations inter ethniques, il se pose alors une importante question: etait-ce le signe d’assouplissement des frontieres entre les ethnies; un Hutu prenant l’initiative de commemorer l’extermination dont surtout les Tutsi ont ete victimes? S’agit-il, au contraire, d’un renforcement des frontieres ethniques, puisque un gouvernement domine par des Tutsi a rejete la proposition d’un Hutu? Cet article explore les ambiguites de l’ethnicite lors du genocide en situant les faits dans le contexte des evenements qui l’ont precede — le contexte qui a...

Contested Identities: Power and the Fictions of Ethnicity, Ethnography and History in Rwanda

Abstract: This article examines the process through which different interpretations of ethnicity and statehood in Rwanda have been used to create and justify policies of exclusion, inclusion and claims to legitimacy, from the colonial period to the present day. Arguing that the roots of such politics can be found in the politics of the precolonial state, it considers how they have been transformed, not created, by colonial and postcolonial governments. Viewing the representation of ethnicity and statehood over time as fictions of ethnicity, ethnography and history, this article illustrates the process of creation and recreation of these fictions and their impact on Rwandan lives.In the fall of 1994, during a private conversation, an officer of a large donor organization expressed her amazement to me that two different ministers of the Rwandan Patriotic Front government which had just been installed in Kigali placed the rewriting of books as a first priority of the government. Given the general devastation found in the country, this seemed an incomprehensible priority to her. She asked me why this aspect of Rwandan culture was so overwhelmingly important to the current government. Any observer of Rwanda quickly becomes aware of the powerful hold that the interpretation of and the nature of ethnicity has on any discussion of Rwanda. The origin and meaning of ethnicity in Rwanda, and the nature of the precolonial state have been topics of debate since the first German set foot in the region. For Western observers, these debates have been largely academic, but for the people living in the region these controversies have had serious consequences. Different interpretations of ethnicity and statehood have been used to create and justify policies of exclusion, inclusion and claims to legitimacy, from the colonial period to the present day.Most recently the whole issue of ethnicity and the precolonial, colonial and postcolonial state in Rwanda has been reopened by the events of 1959-94. In different ways the Rwandans who fled Rwanda in 1959, the Rwandans who remained in Rwanda after 1959, the three successive governments since 1959, the extremists, the opposition and the propagandists of the various political parties in the region, and politicians in the neighbouring countries have interpreted and reinterpreted the history of the precolonial and colonial state to justify various policies and actions.Viewed through the lens of serious research this whole debate can be seen as a series of fictions: fictions of ethnicity, ethnography and in Rwanda. Rwanda is a particularly fascinating case, because the manipulation of these fictions has been so transparent, and because it has affected the lives of all the people living in the Great Lakes region of the country. This article will illustrate these characterizations of ethnicity, and the state in Rwanda and will present an alternative perspective on them, showing how various concepts of ethnicity and history have been manipulated by successive governments. It will then consider the genocide in the light of this review.Fictions of HistoryMany discussions of Rwandan precolonial history, and of the construction of the precolonial state continue to be highly reductionist (for recent examples see African Rights, 1994; Braeckman, 1994; Destexhe, 1994; Mamdani, 1996). This is due, in part, to the complexity of the subject and the need to make it easily comprehensible, but it is also the result of manipulation for political ends by various groups. Beginning in the precolonial period, intensifying and transmuting under the Belgian colonial period, undergoing further transformation under the first and second Republic and altering again under the current government, the rewriting of has been a major academic and political project in Rwanda. Central to this project has been the characterization of the nature of precolonial rule, and the role played by various ethnic groups in the precolonial state. …

The Cohesion of Oppression: Clientship and Ethnicity in Rwanda, 1860-1960

The Cohesion of Oppression: Clientship and Ethnicity in Rwanda, 1860-1960

The Cohesion of Oppression: Clientship and ethnicity in Rwanda, 1860-1960,/

The Cohesion of Oppression: Clientship and ethnicity in Rwanda, 1860-1960,/

The Cohesion of Oppression: Clientship and Ethnicity in Rwanda 1860-1960; A Question of Intelligence

The Cohesion of Oppression: Clientship and Ethnicity in Rwanda 1860-1960; A Question of Intelligence

The Cohesion of Oppression: Clientship and Ethnicity in Rwanda 1860-1960.

The Cohesion of Oppression: Clientship and Ethnicity in Rwanda 1860-1960.

The Cohesion of Oppression: Clientship and Ethnicity in Rwanda, 1860-1960

The Cohesion of Oppression: Clientship and Ethnicity in Rwanda, 1860-1960

The Cohesion of Oppression: Clientship and Ethnicity in Rwanda, 1860-1960.

The Cohesion of Oppression: Clientship and Ethnicity in Rwanda, 1860-1960.

The Cohesion of Oppression: Clientship and Ethnicity in Rwanda, 1860-1960

Part 1 Statebuilding in pre-colonial and colonial Rwanda: Kinyaga and Central Rwanda - early contacts state and society under Rwabugiri dual colonialism. Part 2 Patron-client politics: early clientship the changing status of corporate Kin groups the transformation of client institutions. Part 3 The cohesion of oppression: Kinyaga and the Kivu complex pre-independence politics and protest.

The Cohesion of Oppression: Clientship and Ethnicity in Rwanda, 1960-1980

The Cohesion of Oppression: Clientship and Ethnicity in Rwanda, 1960-1980

The Cohesion of Oppression: Clientship and Ethnicity in Rwanda, 1860-1960.Catharine Newbury

<i>The Cohesion of Oppression: Clientship and Ethnicity in Rwanda, 1860-1960.</i>Catharine Newbury

The cohesion of oppression: clientship and ethnicity in Rwanda, 1860-1960

The cohesion of oppression: clientship and ethnicity in Rwanda, 1860-1960

Ethnicity in Rwanda: the Case of Kinyaga

Opening ParagraphThe nature of ethnic interaction has been at the heart of a longstanding debate on the characteristics of Rwanda's precolonial political system. Until recently, the historical referents for such discussion, and in particular the origins of the Rwandan state and its social institutions have been seen as far too remote to base conclusions on empirical data. Consequently the debate has tended to be formulated in terms of logical constructs, rather than in terms of empirical reconstruction of the historical processes involved.