Mamdani - When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda

WHEN VICTIMS BECOME KILLERS

MAHMOOD MAMDANI

WHEN VICTIMS BECOME KILLERS

Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
PRINCETON AND OXFORD

Copyright 2001 by Princeton University Press
Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,
Princeton, New Jersey 08540

All Rights Reserved

Third printing, and first paperback printing, 2002
Paperback ISBN 0-691-10280-5

The Library of Congress has cataloged the cloth edition of this book as follows

Mamdani, Mahmood, 1946
When victims become killers : colonialism, nativism, and the genocide in Rwanda / Mahmood Mamdani.
p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-691-05821-0 (alk. paper)

1. GenocideRwandaHistory20th century. 2. RwandaPolitics and government. 3. RwandaEthnic relationsHistory20th century. 4. Tutsi (African people)Crimes againstRwandaHistory20th century. 5. Hutu (African people)RwandaPolitics and government. I. Title.

DT450.435 .M35 2001

967.57104dc21 00-065213

This book has been composed in Galliard

Printed on acid-free paper.

www.pupress.princeton.edu

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3

FOR

ZOHRAN

Contents

List of Abbreviations

Preface and Acknowledgments: Decolonizing Area Studies

F OR MUCH of my life, I lived just over a hundred miles from the Uganda-Rwanda border. Only once can I recall going to colonial Rwanda. When I was a child of four, my maternal grandfather came to Masaka, which is where we then lived, and announced that he had come to take my mother and her two sons to Bujumbura (Burundi) for his daughters wedding. The drive over and back took us through Kigali and Astrida (contemporary Butare).

As we grew up, mostly in Kampala, less than another hundred miles from Masaka, Rwanda was seldom a part of our lived reality. That was until the genocide of 1994. Following reports of mass killings, we heard of bodies floating into Lake Victoria. Evidence of gruesome torture could be seen from the shores of the lake. Often, peasants would bring the bodies on shore, followed by periodic mass burials. I remember one occasion when busloads of people went from Kampala to a lakeside village, to attend a large burial and honor the dead. When they returned, word spread that several peasants involved in bringing and burying the bodies on shore had gone mad.

In the next few months, the Council for the Development of Social Research in Africa (CODESRIA) called a major Africa-wide conference in Arusha (Tanzania) to reflect on the tragedy. I was asked to write a paper, and decided that I must go to Kigali before doing so. I had little idea whom I would meet in Kigali. Imagine my surprise when I found a number of my former Makerere University (Kampala) studentswhom I had always assumed were Ugandan like the restholding important positions in the Rwanda Patriotic Army (RPA), the Front (RPF), and even in the reorganized gendarmerie and police. I met them individually, and as a group. The times were difficult, and the road ahead not easy to see. I was someone they knew from a comfortable past, and yet I was a safe outsider. The more we talked, the more they shared doubts and anxieties with me.

That was in 1995. I visited Kigali, Butare, and the church at Ntarama. It was a short visit, roughly ten days, but one that I could not and would not easily forget. Rwanda turned into a preoccupation. Most obviously, it was a metaphor for postcolonial political violence. Less obviously, it was a political challenge, a vantage point from which to think through the postcolonial political crisis. Even though the conference was over, and I had no immediate academic agenda in which Rwanda would feature, I kept on returning to Rwanda, usually a couple of times a year. When the RPF crossed the border into Zaire in 1997, I too went to Gisenyi, and then crossed the border with an RPA commander into Goma, to go and meet Laurent Kabila, the head of the anti-Mobutu rebellion.

Later that year, CODESRIA asked Jacques Depelchen, a Congolese intellectual then in Kinshasa, and me to undertake a research trip to eastern Congo. The object was to speak to non-governmental organizations about the citizenship crisis that had become publicly identified with the plight of the Banyamulenge. By then, the name Banyamulenge had ceased to identify simply those Tutsi living on the hills of Mulenge; instead, it had become a generic term for the Kinyarwanda-speaking minority in Congo. Depelchen was an old friend from the 1970s when we had both taught at the University of Dar-es-Salaam, and we traveled well together. We went from Kinshasa to Goma, Bukavu, Kisangani, and then back to Kinshasa. I was pleased to find out that Kiswahili was a popular lingua franca in the whole of eastern Congo, and that I could talk directly to those I met. Yet, the language of academic discourse was French, and I did not speak it. Jacques was fluent in French and was patient enough to translate for me so I could take notes every time we had an extended discussion with someone in French, which turned out to be often. When I returned to the University of Cape Town, which is where I had started teaching in 1996, I sought out a French teacher, to pick up from the one year of French that I had learned during my undergraduate years. Thus began the slow and laborious task of learning a new language in middle age.