The Dangerous Dilettantism of Journalism

I sometimes wonder if anyone who has a great deal of knowledge on a particular subject is bound to be outraged regularly by reputable journalistic enterprises when those organizations discuss his area of expertise. I am sure the New York Times and BBC News and the other paragons of journalism regularly annoy scholars the world round. It truly causes me to wonder how many other things journalists misrepresent as thoroughly as the Rwandan genocide and the history that preceded it.

As usual today, I compiled my list of material to read by sifting through my RSS feeds. One of the stories I selected for closer reading was the story of a Rwandan in Germany, a Mr Murwanashyaka, whom German prosecutors were considering investigating for war crimes in Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Along the side of that story was a heading titled Background, and under that heading was a link called How the genocide happened. It came as no surprise that what followed did a terrible job of living up to its title. It did not take long for the article to blunder into the realm of the thoroughly misinformed. Under the heading History of violence, the article immediately states: “Ethnic tension in Rwanda is nothing new.” That is an amazingly wrong sentence. It actually hurts me to read things that wrong—hence the current post. I suppose if people had only lived in the geographical location now called Rwanda for 50 or 100 years, “ethnic” tension might be something that could be referred to as nothing new. Unfortunately, Rwanda has been inhabited for thousands of years, and the sectarian strife that resulted in the Rwandan genocide is new and is not ethnic in nature.

As I have stated in an earlier post, there are not multiple ethnic groups in Rwanda. Hence, “Ethnic tension in Rwanda” is an absurdity. Obviously there was a tension of some kind in Rwanda—hundreds of thousands of dead Rwandans attest to the very real nature of that tension. But it was far more complex than the ethnic paradigm implies. There is no question that groups believing themselves to be “Hutu” were set against people they called “Tutsi”. However, this Hutu-Tutsi dichotomy is a contrivance, a fiction. These words are the tools of political fraud: a fraud that relies upon the creation and maintenance of a minority group that can be vilified and scapegoated as necessary.

Do the terms "Hutu" and "Tutsi" have meaning? Of course. However, they do not locate people on a Cartesian plane of ethnic identity. That these two words are so important today says more about European colonizers than it does about Rwandan identity. Rwanda prior to colonialism was a complex society with permeable boundaries between groups. Peasants could become pastoralists and vice versa. The complex topography of Rwandan society was flattened by European eyes that only saw what they knew: rigid class structure and ethnicity. This is not to imply that Rwanda was an egalitarian utopia. The Kingdom of Rwanda was hierarchical and increasingly centralized by the time it came under German rule. However, the rigidity of the terms “Hutu” and “Tutsi” was introduced by the Belgians through the institution of identification cards that mandated the stipulation of Hutu, Tutsi or Twa. These three terms broadly refer to primary means of production and social reproduction: agriculture, pastoralism and craftsmanship respectively. However, as befits a complex society, the relationship of the terms “Hutu”, “Tutsi” and “Twa” to the three categories of social reproduction is not one-to-one.

The pseudo-ethnic paradigm used so effectively to orchestrate mass murder was synthesized by elites to maintain power. It is a cudgel that prior to the genocide and since just before independence had been used intermittently by those in power to distract a poorly governed populace from the inadequacies and corruption of the policies of those in power. It is truly sad when respected sources of information such as the BBC recapitulate the fraudulent identity politics that was used to kill so many.