Genocide is the deliberate and systematic killing of a racial, cultural or religious group. The Rwandan Genocide, which resulted in the mass murdering of over 800 000 Tutsi people, was one of the shortest but largest civil wars in earths history. Its cause, which is still debated about by historians today, has been a controversial topic since its occurrence. While it was sparked directly by the death of the Rwandan president Juvenal Habyarimana (a Hutu) when his plane was shot down, many believe that it was the build up of events leading up to this that primarily caused the genocide.
The Tutsi and Hutu division began much before the colonisation of Rwanda. Historical records of the area begin when Rwabugiri came to power in 1860, and ruled based on a feudal system in which the Tutsi tribes (despite being the minority) were aristocracy, and the Hutus were peasants. Initially this divide was based on the racial differences of the two tribes, however over time and through inter-tribal marriage and the movement of people between the tribes, this distinction became blurred. Albeit the increasing similarities between the tribes, the Tutsi became upper-class herdsmen and the Hutu remained lowerclass farmers.
By 1894, Rwanda had been captured by Germany, and any existing divisions that were present in Rwanda were intensified, as the Germans ruled the country through the Tutsi King. Then later in 1918, and succeeding the war, Belgium was issued a mandate over Rwanda. Under their rule, they introduced many new policies, such as the one that called for all Rwandans to carry identity cards. This enabled authorities to be able to easily differentiate between the Hutu and Tutsi, and many journalists like Fergal Keane believe this was an integral factor in the causing of the genocide.
Fergal Keane, the author of Season Of Blood (1996), is a well-credentialed author and journalist, who has received numerous awards in literature and journalism, from universities like Staffordshire, Strathclyde and Bournemouth. Keane also had the opportunity to travel through Rwanda during the last weeks of the genocide, allowing him to understand on a deeper level, the causes and effects of the genocide.
He believes that “The introduction in 1933 of a mandatory identity card system deepened social divisions… Hutus were in effect told that their mission in life was to toil… and the Tutsi overlords were given extended powers over the lives of the Hutus”, and that this new law caused even more resentment to build between the two groups. Due to his immense appraisal for his work, the information he provides relating to Rwanda may be used as a reliable source for the basis of forming a view on the cause of the genocide. Curtis Abraham, on the other hand has a very different view on why the Rwandan genocide of 1994 began. Abraham believes that the Hamite Hypothesis, which first emerged in the bible, was integral in causing the Rwandan genocide, some 3500 years later.
The meaning behind the myth was greatly misinterpreted after Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798, allowing many of the European scholars who visited Egypt to claim that “everything of value ever found in Africa was brought there by Hamites”, and that well-developed civilisations like Egypt were in fact created or inspired by people of the Caucasian race, rather than by people with dark skin. According to Abraham, In Rwanda, the Hamite Myth was essential in the creation of the ideology of ethnicity, which under the Belgian rule, claimed that the Tutsi minority were vastly superior to the Hutus.
It inflated the Tutsi’s cultural ego, whilst it crushed the Hutus until they were so resentful that they decided to fight back. Gerard Prunier, a French historian who specialised in Africa, supports Abraham’s theory on the matter. He believes that “if we combine the subjective feelings with the objective political and administrative decisions of the colonial authorities, favouring one group over the other, we can begin to see how a very dangerous social bomb was almost absentmindedly manufactured”.
This is another fairly credible theory that accounts for the genocide in Rwanda, which provides reasoning and explanation for the way in which the European officials enforced rule in Rwanda through the method of divide and conquer. This method of ruling may have been brought about because of the way in which the Europeans viewed the Hamite Hypothesis, or just as a way of enforcement, which has later been deconstructed as taking a twist on the myth, but either way, it was a major factor in causing the tension between the Hutu and Tutsi to build to boiling point.
The last viewpoint, which was first introduced by Timothy Longman in his book “Commanded by the Devil”, studies how and why Christian institutions in Rwanda helped prepare the way for the genocide in 1994. Since its release, the theory has accumulated a large following, due to the immense research that Longman conducted before and after the war. Longman first visited Rwanda in 1992, when he researched the relationship between various churches and the Rwandan state.
He then left the country less than a year before the genocide began, and returned in 1995, giving him an insight into the possible causes and the effects of the genocide in Rwanda. His theory works on the fact that the majority of Rwandans belong to a Catholic or Protestant Church, and Longman believes that rather than individuals being held responsible for the mass killings, instead the churches, which rallied large groups together, should bear the responsibility.
According to Longman, Christian churches were deeply implicated in the 1994 genocide f ethnic Tutsi in Rwanda and the historic link between the churches and the state as well as the acceptance of ethnic discrimination among church officials can help to explain this theory. He claims that “Churches were a major site for massacres, and many Christians participated in the slaughter, including church personnel and lay leaders”. Doris L. Bergen in his novel Twisted Cross (1996) supports Longmans theory when he relates the Rwandan genocide with the German holocaust.
Bergen forms a link between the relationships between the churches in Germany and how through their lack of opposition towards the Nazis, tacitly supported the regime. He states that “Christianity did play a critical role, not perhaps in motivating the top decision makers, but in making their commands comprehensible and tolerable to the people who actively carried out the measures as well as those who passively condoned their implementation”“.
Bergen believes that the Christian churches were certainly not the sole factor in the causing of the holocaust, and then later the genocide, but without them, the events could not have occurred as they did. All three philosophies on how and why the genocide in Rwanda may have been caused are supported and theorised by wellcredentialed journalists and historians, allowing the information to be found as quite reliable.
The first theory, which was released in Fergal Keane’s journal Season Of Blood, believes that the deep ethnic divisions were created under the colonial rule of the Belgians and that this caused a build up of resentment for the Hutus, giving them reason to fight back. The second theory, by Curtis Abraham, states that the Hamite Hypothesis, which was first introduced in the bible, may have been twisted by European officials to justify creating the divisions between the two social groups in Rwanda.
The third theory, on the other hand, believes it was instead the churches that created these divisions, and that they used this to create authority. Longman and Bergen who are backing this theory, also claim that many of the killings took place around the churches and that a lot of Christians even went against their fellow church members during the war. Despite varying quite greatly in their reasoning, all three theories always link back to the fact that the increased divisions that were created between the two ethnic groups was the major causing of the Rwandan Genocide in 1994.