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Chapter 12: The Roots of Hate II: The White Man's Science: Colonialism and the Invention of Race

Verviers, the Belgian colonial administrator, arrived in the hills of Rwanda a man of science and order, a true believer in the civilizing mission. The year was 1931. In his hands, he carried a set of gleaming calipers, the very instrument of objective truth. He traveled from village to village, filled with the certainty of European racial science, and he began to measure. He measured the height, the nose width, the skull circumference of the local people, noting his findings in a great, ordered ledger. He was not creating division; he was merely observing the self-evident facts of nature.

With his own eyes, he "saw" the proof of the Hamitic Hypothesis he had studied in Brussels. The Tutsi, with their taller frames and more "aquiline" features, were clearly the superior, non-African race who had migrated south, bringing civilization to these hills. The Hutu, shorter and more "Bantu," were the common, cheerful natives they had conquered. He visited the Catholic mission schools and saw this truth being put into practice. The priests, good men of God, were systematically favoring the bright Tutsi children for education and administrative training. They were, after all, the "natural" leaders. The colonial state and the church were working in perfect, destructive harmony.

The culmination of his work came in 1933. His task was to bring permanent, bureaucratic order to this fluid society. He was overseeing the mass registration of the population, stamping the new ethnic identity cards. He was the man with the rubber stamp, the final arbiter of identity. A family came before him, their heritage mixed, their status ambiguous. He glanced at the husband’s height, at the wife's features, and made a judgment. "Hutu," he stamped on one card. "Tutsi," on another for the next family. He was carving a clean line through the messy reality of centuries. He did not know that he was also carving a future grave. That evening, he wrote in his journal, proud of his work, having finally brought clarity to a chaotic, primitive society, blind to the cataclysmic social engine he had just set in motion.

The Discourse 12: The Codification of Otherness

12.1 The Hamitic Hypothesis: The "Science" of Racism
The rigid racial hierarchy that formed the precondition for the Rwandan Genocide was not an indigenous feature of Rwandan society, but was a deliberate political and administrative creation of the German and, more significantly, the Belgian colonial powers. By applying discredited racial science, institutionalizing a racialized government, and issuing ethnic identity cards, they systematically transformed a fluid class system into a fixed and fatal system of racial segregation.

The intellectual justification for this project was the "Hamitic Hypothesis," a racist and now completely discredited 19th-century theory most famously promoted by explorers like John Hanning Speke. [CITATION 1] This theory held that all significant civilization in Africa was brought by a taller, lighter-skinned "Hamitic" people of Caucasian origin who had migrated south. The Belgian colonial administration eagerly applied this theory to Rwanda, incorrectly identifying the Tutsi pastoralists as this lost "Hamitic" aristocracy and the Hutu cultivators as the "Bantu" indigenous people whom the Tutsi had conquered and civilized. This narrative, though entirely false, perfectly suited the colonial strategy of indirect rule through a minority elite. [CITATION 2]

12.2 Institutionalizing the Myth: The Church and The State
The Belgian colonial state systematically translated this racial myth into government policy. The Catholic Church, which controlled the educational system, became a primary engine of this segregation, providing educational and leadership opportunities almost exclusively to Tutsis, whom they saw as "natural" leaders. [CITATION 3] The colonial government mirrored this, replacing the remaining Hutu chiefs with Tutsi ones and locking Hutus out of all positions of power and influence. This created a system of dual colonialism, where the Hutu majority felt oppressed not only by the Belgians but, more immediately, by a privileged Tutsi minority that had been empowered by the colonial state.

12.3 The 1933 Law: Carving Race into Law
The most catastrophic and irreversible step was the 1933 census and the issuance of ethnic identity cards. This administrative act took the fluid, permeable, socio-economic categories of the past and permanently froze them into a legally defined, state-sanctioned "race," inherited from father to child. A Hutu who became wealthy could no longer become a Tutsi; his identity, and that of his children, was now a fixed, legal designation stamped on a card he had to carry for life. [CITATION 4] This single act destroyed the social mobility of the pre-colonial era and created a permanent, resentful Hutu majority and a privileged but vulnerable Tutsi minority. It was the administrative act that laid the essential foundation for a future genocide.

References

1. Speke, John Hanning. Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile. William Blackwood and Sons, 1863. (Note: Speke's work is the foundational text of the Hamitic hypothesis, cited here to establish its historical origin).

2. Mamdani, Mahmood. When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda. Princeton University Press, 2001.

3. Prunier, Gérard. The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide. Columbia University Press, 1995.

4. Newbury, Catharine. The Cohesion of Oppression: Clientship and Ethnicity in Rwanda, 1860-1960. Columbia University Press, 1988.