How to understand the Rwanda Genocide
Insights | BOOK REVIEW | August 7 - 13, 2005
http://www.monitor.co.ug/sunday/insights/ins08073.php
Title: Antecedents to Modern Rwanda: The Nyiginya Kingdom
Publisher: Fountain Publishers
Auhtor: Jan Vansina
Price: Shs35,000
Available: Leading bookshops
Reviewer: Gawaya Tegulle
People don't just wake up one morning and decide to systematically butcher one million of their fellow citizens simply because they don't like them or what they stand for. Neither do people just develop a heart of cruelty and brutality of the worst kind that harbours no remorse at the cold-blooded murder of their neighbours.
And if a Hutu woman assists others to kill her husband who is Tutsi, along with her children because they are also Tutsi, there must be something really wrong, nay, something really deep that lies behind all that behaviour.
Genocide is too big a thing to be described as an impulsive, unplanned, purely reactionary killing.
Beneath this horror is always an untold story of the genesis of resentment that builds into sheer hatred, boiling people's passions to temperatures that make hell, in comparison, appear a cool place to relax.
This is the sum total of Antecedents to Modern Rwanda, and also the underlying purpose of the author Jan Vansina who argues that anybody who knew the history of Rwanda should have seen the 1994 genocide coming.
Africa's most grisly massacre systematically dispatched a million Tutsi and moderate Hutu to their creator in a mere 100 days.
Vansina delves into Rwanda's pre-colonial history taking an in-depth look at the Nyiginya Dynasty in the 18th and 19th centuries and draws a sharp correlation between Rwanda's social history and political dynamics.
This book is obviously the outcome of a painstaking and protracted research that left no stone unturned, and the product of a man with an eye for detail.
He does not look at the general picture of the forest, but recognises that the forest is made up of individual trees, each with its peculiar leaves and branches and roots.
Vansina looks at violence, vengeance and vendetta not as a Hutu problem but as an inheritance - a legacy of Rwanda's forebears that was observed at family and societal level.
Unresolved social crisis
He also examines the social transformations that took place in Rwanda in the 19th Century that gave birth to the stratified social categories known today as the Tutsi and Hutu.
It emerges that there was never anything like Tutsi or Hutu as tribes or ethnic groups as we know them today. He traces the origin of these classifications, the expansion of egos and ruffling of feathers that took place with the result that Rwandan society was divided along the most undesirable lines.
It is these fatal social divisions that underlay all the internal and external politics of the kingdom and basically worked against the social cohesion of an otherwise smooth-run society. And the results were catastrophic.
Like fault lines that precede massive earth movements, tension began building between the Tutsi and Hutu from the 1870s onward, resulting in small insurrections that graduated into full-scale rebellions.
It is worthy of note that there were apparently no efforts to bridge the gap between the two groups and this gap kept widening - into a gully and finally into a valley or gulf that succeeded in ripping the society to shreds.
It became a story of 'them' against 'us' and thus begins a tale of constant struggle for not only supremacy, but more importantly, for survival.
Vansina details the mistakes that have been made in Rwanda's past and amply illustrates the biblical saying that "the parents ate the sour grapes; the children got the sour taste".
In the end, the reader will probably rethink his or her apportioning of the blame for the 1994 Genocide on learning that it was merely a symptom of a deeper social crisis that has never been resolved for centuries.
This is a book that anyone who would like to understand present-day Rwanda will want to read, on the premise that contemporary politics is best understood when placed in the context of social history.
Antecedents to Modern Rwanda offers a fine lesson in good governance, the making and breaking of societies and the importance of compromise and negotiation in both the social and political spheres.
It is the perfect illustration that it is always a good idea to wade the waters while still only knee-deep; and that a stitch in time saves nine.
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