On April 6, 1994, members of the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) shot down the plane of Rwandan president Juvenal Habyarimana. Later that day, the RPF assassinated the Hutu prime minister of Rwanda, Agathe Uwilingiyimana. In the following four months, the notoriously brutal genocide of the resident Tutsi population and suspected Hutu collaborators enveloped the nation. Though the estimates of the number of those killed in the violence range anywhere from 500,000 to 1.3 million,[1] it is undeniable that the Rwandan genocide of 1994 marks the single most pervasive and atrocious massacre of the post-Cold War era. What is even more disturbing is the fact that as thousands upon thousands of Rwandan Tutsis were systematically exterminated, the rest of the world simply watched on their television sets from the outside, unwilling to aid in the cessation of such an immense tragedy.

It is this significant and tragic event of recent African history that Mahmood Mamdani seeks to explain in his nuanced and groundbreaking book When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda (2001). Unlike most contemporary scholars focusing on the Rwandan genocide, Mamdani attempts to give his readers an understanding of all of the historical reasons underlying the massacre, rather than narrowly interpreting the particularities of 1994 in isolation. His holistic approach to explaining the Tutsi genocide in Rwanda makes Mamdani’s When Victims Become Killers a must read for anyone interested in knowing how such an enormous calamity could occur in modern Africa.

Mamdani, unlike most of his contemporaries, begins his explanation of the evolution of Hutu-Tutsi enmity (which would eventually culminate in the genocide) by examining the origins of the Hutu and Tutsi ethnicities in Rwanda dating back to the thirteenth century. He notes that the Tutsi population (about 15% of present-day Rwanda) migrated into Rwanda from the Kenyan and Tanzanian grasslands of the north and progressively overtook the resident Hutu population (about 85% of present-day Rwanda), transforming local Tutsi-dominated clans into chiefdoms around the fifteenth century.[2] Over time, the divisions between the Hutus and Tutsis grew both socially and economically through the nineteenth century, with the Hutu agriculturalist population gradually becoming more and more subservient to their pastoralist Tutsi superiors. Thus, contrary to popular belief, Mamdani points out that internal social and economic divisions in Rwandan society were indeed present upon the arrival of the Belgian colonialists.[3]

Upon their arrival, Mamdani shows how the Belgians subsequently created the notorious Hamitic hypothesis to justify the minority Tutsi rule over the majority Hutu population. Unable to accept the fact that a distinctly African race could be capable of such military and political sophistication, the Belgians systematically ingrained the idea that the Tutsis were the cursed “Caucasian” descendants of Ham (son of Noah), unlike the distinctly African Hutu. Thus, Mamdani claims, the tensions between the Hutus and Tutsis were magnified as the Belgian colonial rulers institutionalized Tutsi superiority in the colonial system by giving Tutsis preference in the public and educational sectors, primarily between 1927 and 1936.[4]

After his analysis of the impact of Belgian colonial rule on Hutu-Tutsi relations, Mamdani delves into the numerous contingencies leading up to the tragedy of 1994. He begins with the all-important 1959 Social Revolution, in which the maligned Hutu elite, led by Grégore Kayibanda, proposed a concrete segregation of the Hutu and Tutsi population upon independence from Belgian colonial rule. Although Kayibanda would ultimately be forced (by international pressure) to rule under a coalition of both Hutus and Tutsis in 1962, Mamdani contends that this separationist paradigm marked the beginning of an intellectual construct that would evolve into the genocidal ethos of 1994.[5]

After a decade of relatively peaceful rule, however, Kayibanda’s coalition began to fall apart as disgruntled Hutus claimed that he was reverting the Rwandan polity to its Tutsi-dominated past under Belgian colonial rule. Thus, Mamdani points out, General Juvénal Habyarimana (a Hutu) assumed power in a military coup in 1973 to prevent the widespread social chaos that was emerging between the resident Hutus and Tutsis.[6] As Rwanda prospered during the 1970’s and 1980’s (due to high world coffee and metal prices), Mamdani cites that relations between resident Hutus and Tutsis subsequently were mitigated.[7] However, at the turn of the 1990’s, Rwanda would enter a period of economic crisis in which their currency would be devalued 67 percent and their gross GDP would fall 15 percent as a result of falling world metal and coffee prices.[8] These factors, Mamdani maintains in his book, paved the way for the Tutsi Rwandan Political Front’s (RPF) invasion of 1993 and the ensuing Hutu backlash that would claim thousands of innocent Tutsi lives.[9]

The RPF, formed in Uganda by displaced Tutsi elites led by Paul Kagame, would ultimately penetrate Rwanda into its capital in Kigali in 1994 and murder General Habyarimana and his prime minister, Agathe Uwilingiyimana, as a result of the dismal economic situation of Rwanda at the time. The Hutu population (as Mamdani thoroughly explains in his book), terrified of reverting to Tutsi rule after decades of Hutu dominance, would eventually heed the calls of Léon Mugesera and systematically attempt to exterminate all Tutsis in Rwanda in an effort to prevent the RPF from establishing an effective political authority over the resident Hutu population.[10] Thus, Mamdani presents the conclusion of his research: the Hutu population killed out of a fear that had gradually developed from the relationship between the Hutu and Tutsi population in Rwanda since their initial interactions in the thirteenth century.[11]

To support his innovative conclusions in When Victims Become Killers, Mamdani extensively cites numerous historical and contemporary scholars of Rwanda, including Catharine Newbury, René Lemarchand, Gérard Prunier, and Alison des Forges. By combining the copious research of these and many other intellectuals with his own, Mamdani created a book that, unlike any of its kind, holistically encompasses all of the underlying factors of the 1994 Rwandan genocide. When Victims Become Killers would be useful to anyone who is interested in not only knowing more about Rwandan history, but also how such a tragedy could be occur in the modern era.

Vijay Sekhon
University of California, Berkeley

NOTES

[1] Sellstom, Tom, and Lennart Wohlgemuth. The International Response to Conflict and Genocide: Lessons from the Rwanda Experience, Study 1, Historical Perspective: Some Explanatory Factors. Uppsala, Sweden: Nordic Africa Institute, 1997. p. 32; Taylor, Christopher. Sacrifice As Terror: The Rwandan Genocide of 1994. Oxford: Berg Publishing Group, 1999. p. 1.

[2] Mamdani, Mahmood. When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and Genocide in Rwanda. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. p. 48-49.

[3] Ibid., p. 70.

[4] Ibid., p. 88.

[5] Ibid., p, 118.

[6] Ibid., p. 138.

[7] Ibid., p. 145.

[8] Sellstom and Wohlgemuth, p. 34-36.

[9] Mamdani, p. 149.

[10] Ibid., p. 195.

[11] Ibid., p. 231.