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Part 3: Roots of Hate: Rwanda, 1959-1994

Chapter 11: The Roots of Hate I: Kingdom of Milk and Blood: Pre-colonial Rwanda

The mist on the high hills of central Rwanda was the first thing Gahigi knew of the world. It clung to the banana groves like a second skin and shrouded the terraced slopes of sorghum and beans that his family, and their fathers’ fathers, had tilled for generations. The land itself was his identity, its rhythm etched into the callouses on his hands and the muscles of his back. He was a son of the soil, a man of the hoe. He was Hutu. His lineage, his ubwoko, was Abagesera, a clan that, like every other, stretched across the hills and valleys and counted men of the hoe and men of the cattle among its many sons.

The local chief, a man named Ruzindana, was also of the Abagesera clan. But Ruzindana’s wealth was measured not in harvests, but in the elegant, lyre-horned beasts that grazed upon the lushest pastures—the living, breathing currency of the kingdom. Ruzindana was Tutsi. The distinction was as real as the cool morning air and as tangible as the tribute of crops Gahigi’s family owed him each season. But it was not a wall of blood. They were kin, bound by a shared ancestry that predated the labels they now wore.

Kinship did not erase hierarchy. Gahigi, like the other young men of the hill, owed his uburetwa, his labor, to the chief. This was not the chattel slavery of another continent; it was an obligation, a debt of muscle owed to the man who held the hill in trust for the divine Mwami, the king in far-off Nyanza whose heartbeat was the life of the kingdom itself. Gahigi spent weeks reinforcing the chief’s circular kraal with branches and mud, his shoulders aching from the repetitive work. He cut heavy bundles of thatch for the beehive-shaped huts of the chief's sprawling compound, the grass sharp against his skin. The work was hard, the sun merciless, but Gahigi was strong and, more importantly, observant. He watched the intricate dance of power and patronage that bound every family to the chief. He saw how Ruzindana managed his herds, how a sharp eye and patient strategy could turn one cow into a hundred, and he filed this knowledge away.

His quiet loyalty was noticed. That value was tested when the rains failed, and the parched land set hill against hill. A rival clan from the north, seeking to replenish their own dying herds, sent a raiding party across the valley under the cover of a moonless night.

The alarm was a chaos of shouting and the terrified lowing of stampeding cattle. The raiders were swift, their goal to scatter Ruzindana’s main herd and make off with what they could in the confusion. Gahigi, clutching a broad-bladed spear, saw a gap forming on the western flank of the compound. The raiders were trying to split off a small, precious group of birthing cows. In that moment, instinct and observation fused. Without waiting for orders, he rallied a handful of other farmers. "Hold this line!" he commanded, his voice steady amid the pandemonium. "Protect the mothers! Their calves are the future of the hill!"

He did not perform superhuman feats or slay a dozen men. His was a more fundamental courage. He stood his ground. He planted his feet in the earth he knew so well and formed a living wall of spears and bodies that the raiders, eager for a quick prize, were unwilling to test. They repelled two assaults, their discipline a stark contrast to the scattered fighting elsewhere. When Chief Ruzindana finally broke the main attack and rode to secure the flank, he found Gahigi, bloodied from a shallow wound to his arm but unyielding, standing guard over the frightened, pregnant cows.

His reward came a week later, not in private, but in the great central clearing of the compound with the entire hill assembled as witnesses. Ruzindana ordered a single beast to be brought forward. It was not just any cow. It was a magnificent inyambo, a sacred cow of the royal breed, its immense, perfectly curved horns seeming to trace the arc of a crescent moon. Its hide was the color of rich earth, and it moved with the grace of a queen. The crowd murmured in awe.

"A man who protects the mothers of the herd deserves to be the father of his own," Ruzindana declared, his voice ringing across the silent assembly. "This gift is from the Mwami, through me, to a loyal son of the Abagesera. May Imana bless her womb."

To receive an inyambo was to be handed a key to a new life. It was a mark of supreme favor, a sacred trust. Gahigi treated it as such. He built the cow the finest shelter, led it to the sweetest grass. The cow calved a healthy heifer. Gahigi felt the blessing of the creator-god upon him. Within a few years, his shrewd management—trading a bull calf for two young heifers from a lesser herd, making cautious alliances—had transformed the single cow into a small but growing line of cattle. He was no longer just a farmer; he was a man of property. The day a poorer neighbor, also Hutu, came to him asking for the use of a cow in exchange for loyalty and service, Gahigi knew he had crossed a threshold. He was entering the ubuhake system not as a client, but as a patron. He had earned icyubahiro—respect.

With status came new possibilities. He was a desirable match. He sought an alliance not with the daughter of a wealthy farmer, but with a Tutsi family of modest means and respected lineage. The father, a proud but land-poor man with only a few head of cattle to his name, saw the truth before him: Gahigi was a man of substance, of growing wealth, whose loyalty was publicly praised by a powerful chief. A man of cattle. The label he was born with no longer contained the reality of who he had become. The marriage was agreed.

Gahigi, the son of the soil, had become a man of influence. His children would be born into a world where their father’s cattle, not their grandfather’s hoe, defined their place. He had not crossed a racial line, for no such immutable line, fixed in blood and biology, existed in the Rwanda of his time. He had simply, and successfully, climbed the social ladder of his world. In the fluid reality of his kingdom, he had, in effect, a-Tutsi'd, or become Tutsi.

The Discourse 11: Deconstructing the "Ancient Hatreds" Myth

11.1 A Single People in a Unified Kingdom
The narrative that the Rwandan Genocide was the inevitable eruption of "ancient tribal hatreds" is perhaps the most profound and pernicious falsehood of the late 20th century. It is a myth that functions as an alibi, framing the genocide as a uniquely African pathology—primordial, irrational, and therefore unstoppable. This conveniently absolves the international community of its failure to act and, more importantly, it deliberately obscures the modern, political, and colonial origins of the identities that were set against each other. The pre-colonial Kingdom of Rwanda was, in fact, one of the most highly organized, centralized, and sophisticated indigenous states in Africa. It was a single political and cultural entity inhabited by a unified people: the Banyarwanda. All Banyarwanda spoke a single language (Kinyarwanda), shared a single set of religious beliefs centered on a creator-god, Imana, and pledged allegiance to a single monarch, the Mwami. The Mwami was not a "Tutsi king" ruling over a foreign people; he was the semi-divine embodiment of the kingdom itself, whose ritual health ensured the fertility of the land and the well-being of all his subjects, Hutu and Tutsi alike. See [citation 1].

The most powerful evidence against the "two tribes" theory lies in the social structure of the clans (ubwoko). Before any other identification, a Rwandan's primary lineage was to one of roughly twenty major clans. Crucially, and indisputably, every single one of these clans contained Hutu, Tutsi, and Twa members. A Hutu from the Abagesera clan would have considered a Tutsi from that same clan to be a closer kinsman than a Hutu from a different clan. This social reality, with loyalty and identity running vertically through clans rather than horizontally across a supposed ethnic divide, made a unified "Hutu consciousness" or "Tutsi consciousness" in the modern racial sense a political impossibility. See [citation 2].

11.2 A Society of Orders, Not of Races
The distinction between Hutu, Tutsi, and Twa was not racial; it was socio-economic, rooted in occupation and relationship to the levers of power. It is best understood not as a system of distinct ethnic groups, but as a system of social "orders" or castes, albeit one with a degree of permeability that would later be destroyed. The Hutu, comprising the vast majority (around 85%), were the cultivators, those tied to the land and the hoe. The Tutsi, a minority of around 14%, were the herders, whose wealth, prestige, and political dominance were derived from the ownership of cattle. The Twa, a tiny minority of forest-dwelling potters and specialists, existed on the margins of this central agricultural-pastoral system. Within the political theory of the kingdom, these roles were seen as complementary and interdependent. See [citation 3]. Over time, particularly with the consolidation of the Nyiginya kingdom in the 18th and 19th centuries, the term "Tutsi" became increasingly associated not just with owning cattle, but with holding political power and being close to the royal court, while "Hutu" became synonymous with the common, cultivating subject.

11.3 The Bonds of Interdependence and Exploitation
The relationship between these orders was governed by a complex web of obligation, the most important of which was the ubuhake system. This was a personal client-patron contract wherein a wealthy patron (usually a Tutsi) would grant the use of cattle to a poorer client (who could be Hutu or a less well-off Tutsi) in exchange for loyalty, labor, and political support (imirimo). While deeply unequal and exploitative, this system served as the primary social glue, creating strong vertical bonds of interdependence that cut directly across the Hutu-Tutsi distinction and militated against any horizontal, class-based solidarity. A powerful chief's network would consist of numerous Hutu and Tutsi clients, all personally loyal to him against his rivals. A second, more resented system was uburetwa, a form of impersonal corvée labor—a tax paid in work—that Hutu peasants owed to chiefs for the use of land. It was a clear source of class-based tension. See [citation 4]. Yet crucially, these pre-colonial tensions were rooted in class and access to power, not in any concept of race or ethnicity. It was precisely this social structure—with its established hierarchy, systems of clientage, and underlying class resentments—that the European colonizers would fatally misinterpret, mislabel, and re-engineer into the rigid racial categories that would form the foundation for genocide. The key feature of the pre-colonial system was that these categories, while real, were not yet sealed by blood. Through exceptional military service, loyal clientship, or the shrewd accumulation of cattle, a Hutu family could, over generations, effectively become Tutsi, just as a Tutsi family that lost its herd could sink into the status of Hutu. It was this social mobility, however difficult, that colonialism would definitively destroy.