An Ordinary Man (4 page)

I cannot tell you how much I loathed myself that day for having been lucky. It was the first time I became aware of myself
not as “Paul” but as a “Hutu.” I suppose this dark epiphany is an essential rite of passage for anyone who grew up in my country,
one of the most physically lovely places on the globe, but one with poison sown in its heart.

I have to tell you more.

One of those beads I mentioned on our necklace is 1885. This was the year of the famous Conference of Berlin, which put the
seal on what was to become nearly seven decades of colonial government in Africa. This was also where Rwanda’s fate was to
be determined.

Representatives from Austria-Hungary, Denmark, France, Great Britain, Spain, the United States, Portugal, Holland, Sweden,
and Norway met to sort out the conflicting claims their agents had made to vast pieces of real estate in Africa—most particularly,
the forests of the Congo that had been turned into a private reserve for King Leopold II of Belgium. The Berlin conference
was remarkable not just for the lack of African participation, but also for laying out a few key principles. The first was
that a European nation couldn’t just draw lines on a map and claim that area as a protectorate. They had to prove they could
“effectively occupy” and defend that territory. The second was that if a navy could seize a piece of coastline it would also
have the rights to whatever lay inland for a virtually unlimited distance. The African continent was then sliced up with borders
that frequently had no logical relation to watersheds, trade patterns, linguistic groups, or geography. Remarked the British
prime minister: “We have been giving away mountains and rivers and lakes to each other, only hindered by the small impediment
that we never knew exactly where they were.”

Rwanda fared well in some ways—at least, better than most of our neighbors. The borders shaved some corners from the rugged
area claimed by the
mwami,
but we retained a certain amount of territorial integrity. Our colonizing power would be Germany, a nation that generally
did not share the worst rapacious tendencies of some of the other conquerors of Africa. They had won our aerie as a compromise
and they showed little interest in taking advantage of what little natural resources we could offer them. It took German agents
more than nine years to arrive in Rwanda and thirteen before they finally got around to establishing an administrative office.
Our nation was assigned to the same colonial department as the neighboring nation of Burundi and renamed
Ruanda-Urundi
.

The Germans looked on their new possession with indifference. It was a country far from the ocean. The most important provision
of the Berlin Conference—the one that required “effective occupation”—was also a problem. The government of Otto von Bismarck
simply did not see the value in sending a large portion of its army and civil service to rule a poor chunk of landlocked farmland.
What this meant, in effect, was that the kaiser’s flag flew over our country as a matter of appearance, but the real power
continued to be the top-down apparatus run by the Tutsi royalty. After the Germans’ catastrophic loss in World War I we were
handed over as a spoil of war to the government of Belgium. That was the beginning of real change, for the Belgians showed
more of an interest in us.

Belgium wanted to get the most profit out of Rwanda while expending the least amount of men and effort. The new colonizers
looked at the social rift between our leaders and farmers and saw an easy way to rule by proxy. It was a version of the old
divide-and-conquer tactics used so effectively by colonizers throughout history. The Aztec empire in Mexico was finished the
moment that Hernán Cortés realized he could exploit minor resentments between tribes to his own advantage, making friends
with one tribe to beat the more powerful rival and thus subdue the entire region for the Spanish Crown. And so the Belgians
adopted the bizarre race theories of John Hanning Speke to turn the Tutsi aristocracy into something like junior managers.
It was no longer enough to simply co-opt the royal court as the Germans had. There was now an explicitly racial way of separating
the haves from the have-nots.

Here’s how crazy it became. Belgian scientists were sent down to Rwanda with little measuring tapes. They determined that
a typical Tutsi nose was at least two and a half millimeters longer than a Hutu nose. This brand of “scientific” race theory
led directly to a particularly dark bead on our necklace: the year 1933, when all people in Rwanda received identity cards
known as
books
that specified their ethnic class. Years later these cards would become virtual death warrants for thousands of people, as
we will see. But the immediate effect of these cards was to crystallize the racism into a Jim Crow system. Almost all the
colonial administrative jobs were reserved for Tutsis. When categories were written down, it became harder for Hutu to pass
as Tutsi, even after they had accumulated many cows.

The doctrine of Tutsi superiority was taught in schools, preached in churches, and reinforced in thousands of invisible ways
in daily Rwandan life. The Tutsi were told over and over that they were aristocratic and physically attractive, while the
Hutu were told they were ugly and stupid and worthy only of working in the fields. An early colonial film described the farming
class as “souls sad and passive, ignoring all thought for the morrow” who viewed their Tutsi masters as “demigods.” This was
the message that our fathers and mothers heard every day. One of the most distingished scholars on our nation, the American
professor Alison Des Forges, has described the net effect this way: “People of both groups learned to think of the Tutsi as
the winners and the Hutu as the losers in every great contest in Rwandan history.”

It saddens me to tell you that one of the archetypical images of my country became the Tutsi king borne on the shoulders of
a platoon of Hutu laborers. It is true that my country, just as every civilization on earth, has economic and social inequalities
in our past. What makes Rwanda particularly tragic, however, is that our unhappiness was given its shape by the indelible
contours of race, making it all the easier for the great-grandsons of the whipped to find someone’s head to chop off.

Rwanda’s apartheid system began to fall apart in the 1950s, when it was becoming increasingly clear that the European powers
could no longer hold on to their colonies in Africa. Independence movements were sweeping the continent—violently in some
places, such as Kenya, Algeria, and the Belgian Congo. Nearly every nation that had participated in the Berlin Conference
had been shell-shocked by World War II and no longer had a taste for empire. Under pressure from the United Nations and the
world community, Belgium was getting ready to let go of its claim on Rwanda. But one last surprise was in store.

The Tutsi aristocracy had, not surprisingly, been generally supportive of their Belgian patrons through the years. But it
was a devil’s bargain. The Tutsis received a limited amount of power and a condescending recognition of the
mwami
in exchange for their ultimate loyality to Brussels. They also cooperated in the oppression of the Hutu, who were forced to
harvest timber and crops in crews of road gangs, with Tutsi bosses. As any social scientist can tell you, any system of organized
hatred also damages the oppressor, if in less obvious ways. Tutsi were forced to punish their Hutu neighbors for misdeeds
or face punishment themselves. And Belgium left no doubt who was in charge in 1931 when they deposed the
mwami
Musinga, who had resisted all the arguments of all the Catholic priests sent from Europe to convert the natives. The colonizers
ignored the squash seeds and handpicked a successor, King Rudahigwa, a man considered sufficiently pliable. He was also an
ardent Roman Catholic. His example led Tutsis and Hutus alike to convert to the new faith. Almost overnight Rwanda became
one of the most Christian nations on the globe, albeit with a strong flavor of the old mysticism. The Catholic priests from
Europe, however, helped foment a revolutionary twist in the history of Rwanda.

A well of sympathy for the Hutu underclass had been building throughout the late 1950s. The key role was played by the Roman
Catholic Church. Perhaps it was the words of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount: “Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the
kingdom of heaven . . . blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.” Or perhaps it was that Belgium itself is a
nation of competing ethnicities and that many of the Catholic priests sent to Rwanda were from the historically abused Flemish
communities. Perhaps there was finally a sense that too much was too much. Either way, the authorities took steps to empower
the people who had been suffering for so long. The Hutus had always had superior numbers, and official policy began to reflect
that mathematical reality—and then some. The Hutu slowly assumed power as the ruling class. One administrator in Kigali issued
the following secret order: “I deem it necessary to rapidly put into place a local military force officially composed of 14
percent Tutsi and 86 percent Hutu but in effect and for practical purposes, 100 percent Hutu.” Fearful of losing their longstanding
grip on power—and perhaps also fearful of retributive violence—the Tutsi commenced a period of sharp opposition to Belgium’s
continuing hold on Rwanda. This course would prove disastrous for them, as it finalized the shift in Belgium’s favor over
to the Hutu they had mistreated for sixty years.

On July 27, 1959, our king died of a cerebral hemorrhage, and speculation ran wild that he had been secretly assassinated
by the Belgians. His successor, the teenage ruler Kigeli V, would last only a few months before the ancient dynastic line
would be snuffed out forever. Belgium called for the first free elections in Rwanda’s history, but soon found itself trying
to put down a rebellion of Hutu insurgents, who had set about murdering Tutsis and setting fire to their houses. Despite the
centuries of coexistence, this marked the very first outbreak of systematic ethnic murders in Rwanda. The killers were rewarded
with some of the first prosperity they had ever tasted. The homes, fields, and stores of the Tutsis often went into the hands
of those who had hacked them apart, establishing a link between patriotism and money that has yet to disappear. I’ll never
forget sleeping outside at night during that time, wondering if somebody was going to burn our house down for harboring Tutsis.

The national elections were held in a climate of fear and—not surprisingly—the Hutus won 90 percent of the open seats. Suddenly
it became desirable, even necessary, to have an identity card that called you a Hutu. Public schools were soon open to the
majority, and children who had been denied education for years began learning to read and write and add figures just as adeptly
as the Tutsi. This should have given the lie once and for all to Speke’s idiotic racial ideas—as if they had not been discredited
already. Belgium and the United Nations handed the nation over to a Hutu government and left the nation after a brief ceremony
on July 1, 1962, at 10 o’clock in the morning. A new flag was hastily designed and raised: a tricolor banner with a plain
letter R in the middle. These events, taken as a whole, came to be called the “Hutu Revolution.”And there was to be no sharing
of power.

Tens of thousands of persecuted Tutsis fled the country to the safety of Uganda and other neighboring nations. One of the
refugees was a small child named Paul Kagame, who was said to have been carried on his mother’s back.

Rwanda had not seen the last of him.

The exiled Tutsis would eventually number more than a quarter million. The angriest young men among them began launching guerrilla
raids into Rwanda from their hiding places across the border. They were called “cockroaches” because they came out at night
and were hard to kill. This military slang would soon be applied to the Tutsi people as a whole, a term as pernicious and
dehumanizing as the American word
nigger.

The raids were mostly amateur affairs, but they gave a pretext for our new government of President Grégoire Kayibanda to wrap
itself in the flag of the Hutu Revolution and begin a purge of the Tutsis who remained inside Rwanda. There is no greater
gift to an insecure leader that quite matches a vague “enemy” who can be used to whip up fear and hatred among the population.
It is a cheap way to consolidate one’s hold on power. And this is just what the new regime did.

The persecution was made all the eaiser because Rwanda is a meticulously organized country. The nation is arranged into a
series of twelve prefectures, which look a bit like American states, except they have no powers. Within every prefecture are
several communes, which are the real building blocks of authority in Rwanda. The head of the commune is known as the
bourgmeister,
or mayor, and he usually gets his job through a personal friendship with the president. This is the real seat of power in
tiny Rwanda, which is like one giant village. Four out of five of us live in the rural areas and nine out of every ten people
here draws some income from farming the hills. Even the most urbanized among us has a close connection with the backcountry.
And so the orders came down to every hill: It was the duty of every good and patriotic Hutu to join “public safety committees”
to periodically help “clear the brush.” Everyone understood this to mean slaughtering Tutsi peasants whenever there was a
raid from the exiles across the border. In 1963 thousands of Tutsis were chopped apart in the southern prefecture of Gikongoro.
These countryside massacres continued off and on throughout the decade and flared up again after the trouble in Burundi in
1972 that caused the education of my best friend, Gerard, to be stolen.