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

He arrived in the verdant hills of Rwanda in the dry season of 1931, a junior Belgian colonial administrator named Léon Verviers, a man who believed fervently in two things: the innate superiority of European civilization and the immutable, classifying power of science. He was not a brute or a tyrant, at least not in his own mind. He was an agent of order, a servant of reason, bringing the light of modern administration to a dark and disordered corner of Africa. In his travel trunk, nestled amongst starched white uniforms and manuals on colonial governance, he carried the gleaming instruments of his science: a set of calipers for measuring skull circumference, a craniometer, and an anthropometric chart for classifying the races of man. He was not here to create division, he told himself; he was merely here to observe and to catalog the self-evident facts of nature.

He did not see a unified kingdom of socially fluid classes. Through the powerful lens of his European education, he saw a living laboratory, a perfect, textbook illustration of the Hamitic Hypothesis, the grand racial theory most famously advanced by the British explorer John Hanning Speke. Speke had argued that all significant civilization in central Africa was the work of a superior, almost-Caucasian "Hamitic" race that had migrated south from Ethiopia. Now, traveling from one mist-laden hill to the next, Verviers saw this theory manifest before his very eyes. The evidence was irrefutable.

His work was methodical and detached. He would set up his small canvas-backed chair in a village clearing, the local Tutsi chief ensuring an orderly queue of subjects. One by one, the Banyarwanda would come before him. Verviers handled their heads as a phrenologist might, running the cold, brass arms of the calipers around their skulls, noting the circumference in a thick ledger. He measured the width of a nose, the height of a forehead, calling out the numbers in precise, clinical French to his native clerk. He measured their height, meticulously documenting the taller, more slender frames he instinctively labeled "Tutsi" and contrasting them with the shorter, stockier bodies of the "Hutu" cultivators. To him, the conclusion was inescapable, a matter of pure empirical observation. The Tutsi, with their more "aquiline" features and "dignified," detached bearing, were clearly the descendants of the Hamitic invaders. The Hutu, with their broader, more "Negroid" features and "common" physique, were the indigenous Bantu, a cheerful but fundamentally inferior stock, destined to be ruled.

This "science" was validated and reinforced by every institution of the colonial state. When he visited the sprawling Catholic mission school run by the White Fathers, he saw the priests, good men of God, giving systematic preference to the Tutsi boys for higher education and administrative training. It was only logical, the head Father explained over dinner. "The Tutsi are natural leaders, Monsieur Verviers. It is in their blood. They grasp Latin and mathematics with an ease the Hutu do not. They were born to rule; we are simply giving them the Christian tools to rule more justly." The church and the state were working in perfect, interlocking harmony, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy written in school registers, administrative appointments, and racial pseudo-science.

The grand culmination of Verviers’s work was the 1933 census, an administrative task of immense and terrible ambition: to register the entire population and issue every single person a permanent ethnic identity card. This was the moment where theory would be transmuted into irreversible, bureaucratic fact. Verviers was now one of the men with the rubber stamp, an arbiter of identity, charged with carving a clean line through the messy, interwoven reality of Rwandan society.

One morning, a family came before his trestle table. The husband was a successful farmer whose father had owned a few cows; his wife came from a family of herders. For centuries, their blended reality was a simple fact of life on the hill. Before Verviers, they were a problem to be solved, an untidy variable to be fixed into a clear category. He consulted his ledger of physical measurements. He looked at the husband’s strong, thick frame. He noted the wife's slightly finer features. He did not ask of their clan, their lineage, or their loyalties. Following the new directive from the capital—in all cases of ambiguity, status is to be defined by patrilineal descent, fixed in place by the Belgian assessment of the family’s primary identity—he made his judgment. He picked up his stamp, inked it on the purple pad, and brought it down with a satisfying thump on the man's new passbook. HUTU. His identity, and the identity of his children forevermore, was now a fixed, legal designation. The social ladder their ancestors had been climbing for centuries had just been kicked away.

Later that week, a different man stood before him, tall and thin but a pauper who had lost his small herd to disease. In the old system, his status was in freefall. But his features were "correct" according to the chart. Verviers did not hesitate. Thump. TUTSI. In that moment, he cemented a poor man into the elite, severing the link between identity and socio-economic reality and re-forging it based on biology alone.

That evening, Verviers wrote in his journal by the light of a kerosene lamp. "The work is progressing well," he wrote in his neat, slanting script. "We are bringing a modern clarity to this chaotic, primitive society. By giving these people a clear, scientific understanding of their own racial identity, we are laying the foundation for an orderly, well-governed colony for decades to come." He sealed the journal, profoundly satisfied, completely blind to the fact that he was not an observer of Rwanda's social reality, but its catastrophic architect. The identity card was a loaded gun, and he had just placed it in the hand of every man in the country.

The Discourse 12: The Codification of Otherness

12.1 The Hamitic Hypothesis: A Racist Science for Empire
The rigid racial hierarchy that formed the precondition for the Rwandan Genocide was not an indigenous feature of Rwandan society. It was a deliberate political and administrative creation of the German, and far more significantly, the Belgian colonial powers. The intellectual and ideological justification for this project was the Hamitic Hypothesis, a popular but now entirely discredited 19th-century anthropological theory. The theory held that all significant civilization and political organization in sub-Saharan Africa were the work of a superior, quasi-Caucasian "Hamitic" race that had migrated south from the Horn of Africa. The chief popularizer of this theory for the Great Lakes region was the British explorer John Hanning Speke. Confronted with a sophisticated, centralized state like Rwanda, Speke simply could not conceive of it as a native African achievement. It had to be, he argued, the work of these Hamitic "black Caucasians" who had conquered and civilized the "inferior" Bantu natives. See [citation 1]. This racist myth provided a convenient explanation that preserved European assumptions of superiority and was eagerly seized upon by the colonial administrators who followed him.

The Germans, during their brief rule (1894-1916), first embraced this narrative as a useful tool for indirect rule. But it was the Belgians, who took control of Ruanda-Urundi as a League of Nations mandate after World War I, who elevated this myth from a convenient justification into an all-compassing ideology of state, a process meticulously documented by the scholar Mahmood Mamdani. See [citation 2]. The Belgians became obsessed with racial classification, systematically measuring skulls, noses, and height differentials to create a "scientific" basis for distinguishing the "Hamitic" Tutsi from the "Bantu" Hutu. In the Belgian colonial mind, the Tutsi aristocracy was not just a ruling class, but a separate, superior race of foreign origin, and therefore the only suitable partner for European rule.

12.2 Institutionalizing the Myth: The Church and The State
This racial mythology was systematically translated into the formal policy of every institution of the colonial state, creating a self-reinforcing system of privilege and exclusion. The Catholic Church, which was granted a near-monopoly over the educational system, became one of the most powerful engines of this segregation. Acting on the belief that the Tutsi were inherently more intelligent and "natural" leaders, the Church established elite secondary schools, like the famous Groupe Scolaire d'Astrida, designed almost exclusively to groom the sons of Tutsi chiefs and elites for positions in the colonial administration and the clergy. See [citation 3]. The colonial state mirrored this preference perfectly. As it consolidated its power, it systematically deposed the remaining Hutu chiefs, dismantled the complex checks and balances of the pre-colonial monarchy, and concentrated all local power in the hands of a now racially-defined Tutsi elite. This created a system of dual colonialism, where the Hutu majority felt the oppression not just of the distant Belgians, but more immediately, of the Tutsi chiefs whom the Belgians had empowered as their agents. Some in the Tutsi elite, in turn, embraced and internalized the Hamitic myth, adopting the belief in their own foreign origins, which further alienated them from the Hutu population and bound them ever closer to their colonial patrons.

12.3 The 1933 Census: Engineering a Racial State
The most catastrophic and irreversible step in this process was the territory-wide census conducted in 1933-1934 and the subsequent issuance of a mandatory ethnic identity card to every single Rwandan. This administrative act took a racist anthropological theory and transformed it into a permanent, legal, and inescapable fact of life for every citizen. Based on a crude combination of physical stereotypes, local informants' testimony, and records of cattle ownership, Belgian administrators assigned a definitive and patrilineally-inherited identity—Hutu, Tutsi, or Twa—to every man, woman, and child. This identity was then stamped onto a passbook that every adult male was required to carry for the rest of his life.

The political scientist Scott Straus has analyzed the profound consequences of this single administrative act. See [citation 4]. It definitively destroyed the remnants of social mobility that had characterized pre-colonial Rwanda. A Hutu who acquired wealth could no longer aspire to become Tutsi; his identity, and that of his descendants, was now a fixed, legal cage. The identity card became the single most important document of a Rwandan's life, the determinant of access to education, employment, and political power. It was the bureaucratic tool that, sixty years later, made the genocide possible on an administrative level, providing the killers at the roadblocks with a simple, state-certified document to distinguish victims from perpetrators. The census did not merely record a social reality; it created one, and in doing so, it set Rwanda on a fixed and fatal path.