Who Are My People?

Love, Violence, and Christianity in Sub-Saharan Africa

Emmanuel Katongole

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780268108465, 9780268202569
• eBook ISBN: 9780268202552
• Subtopic: African Politics

Who Are My People? explores the complex relationship between identity, violence, and Christianity in Africa.

In Who Are My People?, Emmanuel Katongole examines what it means to be both an African and a Christian in a continent that is often riddled with violence. The driving assumption behind the investigation is that the recurring forms of violence in Africa reflect an ongoing crisis of belonging. Katongole traces the crisis through three key markers of identity: ethnicity, religion, and land. He highlights the unique modernity of the crisis of belonging and reveals that its manifestations of ethnic, religious, and ecological violence are not three separate forms of violence but rather modalities of the same crisis. This investigation shows that Christianity can generate and nurture alternative forms of community, nonviolent agency, and ecological possibilities.

The book is divided into two parts. Part One deals with the philosophical and theological issues related to the question of African identity. Part Two includes three chapters, each of which engages a form of violence, locating it within the broader story of modern sub-Saharan Africa. Each chapter includes stories of Christian individuals and communities who not only resist violence but are determined to heal its wounds and the burden of history shaped by Africa's unique modernity. In doing so, they invent new forms of identity, new communities, and a new relationship with the land. This engaging, interdisciplinary study, combining philosophical analysis and theological exploration, along with theoretical argument and practical resources, will interest scholars and students of theology, peace studies, and African studies.

PART II

LOVE’S INVENTION IN THE MIDST
OF AFRICA’S VIOLENT MODERNITY

CHAPTER THREE

Ethnic Violence and the
Reinvention of Identity

Suffering is the true basis of human identity, the unifying factor that identifies us as humans.

—Fr. Jean Baptiste Mvukiyehe

My wounds can be a healing for others.

—Fr. Anthony

Love makes us inventors.

—Maggy Barankitse

Nyamata, August 1998

I am standing inside the church of Nyamata. Even though it has been four years since the genocide, the empty church carries fresh memories of what happened here. The corrugated tin roof has bullet holes and bears visible bloodstains; the main area of the church contains nothing except the bloodstained clothes of the victims. The cloth covering the altar, once white, is now dark with blood; a blood-stained machete, a spiked club, and a twisted metal cross lie on top of the altar. The marble baptismal font is chipped in a number of places, by either shrapnel from hand grenades or machete blows intended for some of the victims. The church basement, accessible down steep steps in the back, has been converted into a permanent catacomb. On either side of its narrow hallways are racks of skulls, bones, coffins, and the personal belongings of the more than eight thousand people who were killed inside the church.

As I stand inside the empty church in horrified silence, I keep wondering about the contradictions that Nyamata represents. How to fathom that over eight thousand people were killed inside what was supposed to be a sanctuary? How to reconcile that genocide happened in this beautiful and deeply Christian country?¹ Why was the church unable to provide a bulwark against the slaughter, and why was it even, as some cases indicated, a contributing factor in the killing?² That the genocide started during Easter week only adds further irony to the contradictions. For obviously, many of the victims had celebrated Christ’s resurrection from the dead, thus becoming the first fruit of God’s new creation, here in this very church together with their killers who were also a part of the congregation. Was all the talk of a new identity, a new life with God—words that describe the life of the Christian—nothing but mere spiritual platitudes, words that actually mean very little in the “real” world? Could it be true that in the “real” world, the blood of tribalism runs deeper than the waters of baptism?

These and similar questions confront me every time I return to Nyamata. And not only Nyamata but elsewhere—Ntarama, Nyarubuye, Nyange—churches that became killing fields during the 1994 Genocide. I have visited the church of Nyange, in the Kibuye district of Western Rwanda, and heard Aloys Rwamasirabo, a former parishioner who lost his wife and five children in the church killing, tell the story of what happened. A few days after the genocide started, the priest there, Athanase Seromba, encouraged Tutsi Christians to take refuge in the church. A ten-day siege by the militia ensued. They threw grenades into the sanctuary and set a fire around the perimeter of the church, but the attacks proved unsuccessful. It was then that Fr. Seromba conspired with the mayor and the local police inspector to destroy the building. They brought in two bulldozers to knock down the church. The drivers of the bulldozers were reluctant to follow the orders. One of them even asked the priest three separate times if this was absolutely necessary. Seromba, who was later convicted by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity and is serving a life sentence at the Hague, gave them a go-ahead, saying: “We Hutus are many, we will build another church.” The drivers proceeded to batter the building until the walls and the roof collapsed, killing the over two thousand men, women, and children who had taken refuge inside the church.³

Every time I stand on the grounds of that erased church, under which over two thousand victims are buried, I feel an overwhelming sense of shame, bitterness, and anger. But I also wonder at the depth of hatred that would bring someone like Seromba (a Catholic priest) to imagine that the killing of over two thousand Tutsis was such a good thing that it justified even the destruction of his church? What brings one to such hatred? What is the role of memory (of injustice suffered or imagined) in fueling this hatred and the search for revenge by the destruction of the perceived perpetrator? How does one break or move out of the endless cycle of revenge and counter-revenge that the victims seem to be calling for?⁴ What is the relationship between memory and identity? What kind of process is involved in forming an identity as Hutu, Tutsi, Igbo, or any other tribe that makes it so deeply rooted that being a Christian, a priest, or a religious does not seem able to alter it? Must identity always be an “us” against “them” zero-sum game? The more I ponder these questions on the ground of Nyamata and Nyange, the more I feel the need to think through the interrelated connections between identity, memory, and violence. The more I also wonder about the possibility of “reimagining” these issues in a way that would heed Paul’s exhortation to “not be conformed to the patterns of the world” but instead to be “transformed” by the “renewing” of the mind so as to “grasp what is good, pleasing and perfect” (Rom. 12:2). In this chapter, I attempt that reimagining.

The Invention of “Tribe” and “Ethnicity”:
Making Nyamata and Seromba Thinkable

The journey through the interconnected realities of identity, memory, and violence lands one in the rough terrain of political imagination. Thus a crucial starting point in rethinking these realities lies in understanding the role of colonial and neocolonial politics in “inventing” Hutu and Tutsi as polar identities within Rwanda’s politics. We are, of course, not used to thinking about “Hutu” and “Tutsi”—or for that matter “tribe” and “ethnicity”—in terms of their being invented. We tend to think about ethnicities as “natural” identities, the way that God created us, and about which we can do nothing. But that is misleading. For there is nothing “natural” about being white, being Hutu or Tutsi, Igbo or Ganda. These are identities, and like all identities, they are ideas, reflections of the way we have come to view ourselves, which are, in turn, connected to the way others view or imagine us. The story of Rwanda not only helps to confirm this, it makes nonsense of all so-called natural identities and their immutability.

For as mentioned before, the Rwanda Genocide tends to be depicted in terms of age-old animosities between Hutu and Tutsi tribes, which came to play out in 1994. Such a narrative assumes a cultural or biological difference between these two identities—differences that have existed for centuries and only came to be exploited within Rwanda’s colonial and postcolonial politics, solidifying historical injustices and an exclusionary politics of “Tutsi” privilege versus “Hutu” marginalization, a politics of “us” against “them.” The historical animosities finally exploded into “ethnic” violence during the 1994 Genocide. This account, however, is at best only half true, and is misleading in assuming Hutu and Tutsi as “natural” or “cultural” identities.⁵ For Tutsi and Hutu speak the same language, share customs, share religious beliefs, and have a high degree of intermarriage. In fact, as mentioned in the first chapter of this book, Monsignor Louis de Lacger, writing in the 1950s, was able to note that there were fewer people in Europe “among whom one finds these three factors of national cohesion: one language, one faith, one law.”⁶ How then did such a homogenous, closely knit society succeed in becoming the Rwanda of 1994, in which Hutu and Tutsi were such polar identities, united in their hatred and desire for violent elimination of the other?

The key lies in understanding the dynamics of political imagination and the role that story plays in it. For whatever else can be said about Hutu and Tutsi in precolonial Rwanda, these identities do not reflect either a cultural or a biological difference. Rather, they are “political” identities produced and reproduced through the political history of modern Rwanda. To appreciate this conclusion, one needs to pay attention to the crucial distinction that the Ugandan political scientist Mahmood Mamdani makes between “cultural” and “political” identities. According to Mamdani, cultural identities reflect something of the past—a shared history, a language, a set of customs or beliefs. Political identities, on the other hand, reflect a future political project, such as realizing specific political goals or allocating access to benefits and privileges.⁷ In the case of Rwanda, colonial mythology played a key role in the process of state formation. Using the biblical story of the cursing of Ham, nineteenthcentury Europeans obsessed with justifying domination came to cast (“imagine”) Tutsi-Hutu differences operating in precolonial Rwanda as essentially racial, a reflection of ontological superiority and inferiority, and one that came to play out historically as the conflict between invaders and natives.

This is what is meant by the invention of Hutu and Tutsi identities. It is not that the Belgians entirely cooked up these notions. Hutu and Tutsi were part of the repertoire of cultural and political notions operative within precolonial Rwanda, as were the clans: the Basingo, Basigwa, Banyiginya, Baziga, and so on. Clans contained both Hutu and Tutsi and were in fact far more determinative when it came to political access in precolonial Rwanda than Hutu or Tutsi identities. That clans were not viewed as (and thus did not become) the decisive factor in the understanding and reorganization of Rwandan society by the Belgians is the work of political imagination. Instead, when it came to thinking about reorganizing Rwanda and its major economic, social, and political institutions in a modern way, the distinction between Hutu and Tutsi became the decisive factor in allocating and accessing privileges.

In the transformation of Hutu and Tutsi from cultural identities to modern political identities, the most effective and enduring tool was their deliberate codification. These identities came to be inscribed in the legal framework of modern Rwanda and enforced through the mandatory issuance of an identity card that bore one’s Ubwoko. What is remarkable is that in spite of the so-called science of races with which Europeans mapped the differences in morphology between Tutsis and Hutus, when it came to the final determination of who was Tutsi and who was Hutu, the Belgians could not clearly tell those who were assumed to be tall with lean noses from their fellow Rwandans. They had to depend instead on a consideration as arbitrary as the number of cows that a Rwandan owned! Anyone with more than five cows was legally declared to be Tutsi. And when the law recognized one as Tutsi, one became Tutsi.

No doubt, a legal framework did exist in precolonial Rwanda within which Hutu and Tutsi (as well as the clans) operated, but that legal framework operated differently from its modern counterpart. The former recognized and ensured some form of fluidity in identities and relations between Hutu and Tutsi and in fact encouraged it: the whole system was set up to accommodate a large degree of in-between possibility. But the modern legal framework, grounded in neoclassical essentialism and Cartesian dualism, would not tolerate any such flexibility in identity. One had to be either Hutu or Tutsi.

We can make a number of conclusions from this simple overview regarding the formation of Hutu and Tutsi as political identities within Rwanda’s political history. First, just because we are referring to Hutu and Tutsi as “imagined” and as “invented” is not to say that these identities are any less real. To this point, Mamdani rightly notes:

Whatever Hutu and Tutsi identity may have stood for in the precolonial state no longer mattered: The Belgians had made “ethnicity” the defining feature of Rwandan existence. Most Hutus and Tutsis still maintained fairly cordial relations, intermarriages went ahead, and the fortunes of “les petits Tutsis” in the hills remained quite indistinguishable from those of their Hutu neighbors. But with every schoolchild reared in the doctrine of racial superiority and inferiority, the idea of a collective national identity was steadily laid to waste, and on either side of the Hutu-Tutsi divide there developed mutually exclusionary discourses based on the competing claims of entitlement and injury.⁸

The second conclusion that we can draw is that political imagination has power. As Mamdani confirms, the Hamitic mythology of the separate origins of Hutu and Tutsi not only was used to explain distinctions among a people who originally spoke the same language, lived on the same hills, and shared the same culture but was the basis for successfully forming a society (modern Rwanda) where Hutu and Tutsi actually became separate political communities.

A third observation is that Rwanda helps illumine the kind of political imagination at work across much of modern Africa. “Tribe” was imagined by Europeans as the way Africans naturally lived and was therefore “invented” as an unquestionable building block of the politics of the modern African nation-state. The power of the invention is that, in being absorbed through the legal, economic, and political institutions of modern Africa, it succeeds in transforming a myth into a reality. Given the colonial and neocolonial politics of divide and rule, it is not difficult to see how “ethnic entitlement” (it is our turn to eat), “ethnic hatred,” and “ethnic violence” became perpetual features of modern political life in Africa. Mamdani is therefore right to characterize Rwanda as a “metaphor for post-colonial political violence.”⁹ So we see that Rwanda in 1994 is not an exception but the most extreme manifestation of the same phenomenon of “ethnic violence” that we have witnessed in Burundi, South Sudan, Ivory Coast, and Kenya (following the 2007 elections).

A fourth conclusion has to do with how the politics of ethnicity both needs and creates registers of historical injustices and violence (violence suffered or perpetuated) that not only reinforce “our identity” but become a storeroom for volatile memories that easily unleash vengeance as a way either to “honor our dead” or to achieve a “fina...

Table of contents

• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PartI
• PartII
• Conclusion
• Afterword
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Author