The Rwanda’s Minister of National Unity and Civic Engagement, Jean-Damascène Bizimana and the Resurrection of Colonial Hierarchies: When the Past Becomes a Weapon Against the Hutu

The Rwanda's Minister of National Unity and Civic Engagement, Jean-Damascène Bizimana and the Resurrection of Colonial Hierarchies: When the Past Becomes a Weapon Against the Hutu

Introduction

There is a tragic irony in the situation that many Rwandans of Hutu origin face today. An irony that history, read honestly in its entirety, renders particularly cruel. The Hutu were humiliated, exploited and dehumanised for decades under the Tutsi monarchical regime and under Belgian colonial tutelage. They were kept in ignorance, confined to the hardest agricultural labour, excluded from education and from spheres of power. This systematic oppression, documented and recognised by historians, left deep wounds. It engendered a collective frustration which, instrumentalised and manipulated by unscrupulous political elites, contributed to creating the conditions for the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi.

Yet what Rwandan citizens and diaspora members are denouncing today in the discourses of Jean-Damascène Bizimana is precisely an attempt to resurrect these same hierarchies, in a new and institutionally dressed form. By reducing Rwandan history to a Manichaean framework in which the Hutu embody evil and the Tutsi embody good, Bizimana is not engaged in memorial work. He is reproducing, in a superficially inverted form, the same schema of domination and dehumanisation that preceded and nourished one of the greatest tragedies of the twentieth century. To understand the gravity of this fault, it is essential to trace the historical roots of a Rwandan society profoundly marked by centuries of imposed and maintained ethnic hierarchies.

Pre-Colonial and Colonial Rwanda: A Society of Ethnic Castes

The history of pre-colonial Rwanda is complex and the subject of debate among historians. But a number of realities are documented with sufficient rigour to be stated clearly. Rwandan society was organised according to a hierarchical system in which the Tutsi, a demographic minority, occupied the summits of political, military and economic power. The Hutu, who were the majority, constituted the bulk of the peasantry, subjected to agricultural labour and service obligations towards Tutsi lords.

The ubuhake system, a form of feudal clientelism, bound Hutu peasants to Tutsi patrons through ties of economic and social dependence. In exchange for protection and access to cattle, a Hutu owed services, labour and near-absolute loyalty to his lord. This was not a relationship between equals. It was a relationship of structural subordination, inscribed in customs, institutions and collective representations.

When Belgian colonisers arrived in Rwanda in the early decades of the twentieth century, they did not create these inequalities from nothing. They found them, formalised them, rigidified them and radicalised them. Influenced by the Hamitic theory, a racial pseudo-science according to which the Tutsi were a superior race of Nilotic origin, closer to Europeans than the Bantu Hutu, the Belgians institutionalised ethnic segregation.

The Educational and Social Exclusion of the Hutu: Systemic Violence

One of the least known dimensions to the general public, yet one of the most determining in understanding the dynamics that would lead to genocide, is the near-total exclusion of Hutu from Rwanda's educational system during the colonial period. Schools, principally run by Catholic missions operating in close liaison with the Belgian administration, were de facto reserved for Tutsi children.

This discrimination was not the result of chance. It was deliberate, systematic and ideologically justified by the colonial conviction that the Tutsi, as a superior race, were alone capable of governing, administering and occupying representative functions. Hutu children therefore had no access to the rudiments of instruction that might have opened social, economic or political prospects for them. They were, from birth, condemned to the hoe and the field.

This educational exclusion had concrete and lasting consequences. It kept the Hutu in a state of economic and intellectual dependence. It deprived them of the conceptual tools necessary to understand, articulate and defend their rights. And it consolidated, generation after generation, the idea that Hutu inferiority was natural, normal and immutable. It was a structural violence of remarkable effectiveness, because it perpetuated itself without requiring permanent direct coercion.

The Ethnic Identity Card: The Bureaucratisation of Discrimination

In 1933 and 1934, the Belgian administration conducted a systematic census of the Rwandan population and introduced compulsory ethnic identity cards. Henceforth, every Rwandan was officially classified as Hutu, Tutsi or Twa, categories fixed and transmitted hereditarily. The criterion used was partly economic: those who owned more than ten head of cattle were classified as Tutsi, the others as Hutu. An arbitrary boundary, drawn by foreign bureaucrats, would now determine the destiny of millions of people for generations.

This ethnic identity card is one of the most consequential decisions in the entire history of African colonisation. It transformed identities that, according to many historians, had previously been relatively fluid and permeable into rigid, hereditary and hierarchised categories. It inscribed an inequality of birth into administrative marble. And it would provide, sixty years later, the most immediate and most lethal tool of the 1994 genocidaires: at roadblocks, it was the identity card that determined whether a man, woman or child lived or died.

From Oppression to Revolt: Understanding the Deep Causes of the Genocide

It is in this soil of systemic humiliation, institutionalised exclusion and accumulated frustration that the seeds of the 1994 tragedy were sown. It is essential here to be absolutely precise: explaining is not excusing. Understanding the deep historical causes of a tragedy is an intellectual and moral necessity for preventing its recurrence. The 1994 genocide against the Tutsi remains a crime against humanity of a scale and brutality that defies comprehension. Nothing can justify it.

But to ignore it in its causal complexity would be another form of intellectual violence. For serious historians are unanimous: the genocide did not arise from nothing. It is the product of a long history, a devastating colonisation, a poorly negotiated independence and the cynical instrumentalisation of accumulated grievances by political elites who chose to transform Hutu frustration into murderous hatred.

The social revolution of 1959, which overturned Tutsi power and led to Rwandan independence, is incomprehensible without the context of decades of oppression. Hutu peasants exhausted by being treated as subhumans, excluded from schools, subjected to forced labour, denied any access to power, finally turned their anger against their oppressors. The slide into violence was the direct result of the absence of any other channel through which this anger could be expressed, and of the deliberate manipulation of this energy by opportunistic political leaders.

This is not a justification of violence. It is a historical observation that any serious discourse on Rwandan reconciliation must incorporate, on pain of remaining at the surface of things and failing to build lasting peace.

What Bizimana Is Actually Doing: The Resurrection of an Inverted Logic of Domination

This is where Jean-Damascène Bizimana's conduct appears in its most troubling light. By reducing Rwandan history to a reading in which Hutu are collectively presented as the architects of an irrational and congenital hatred towards the Tutsi, the Minister of National Unity deliberately occludes several centuries of structural oppression. He erases from collective memory the sufferings of Hutu peasants under the monarchical regime. He ignores the educational exclusion imposed by Belgian colonisers. He passes over in silence the systemic dehumanisation of a majority of the Rwandan population.

In so doing, he is not presenting history. He is distorting it. And he is distorting it in service of a narrative that places the Hutu in a position of permanent guilt, without acknowledging the historical wrongs of which they were themselves victims. This is a reconstruction of the past that is not only intellectually fraudulent, but politically dangerous.

For if the Hutu were oppressed, excluded and dehumanised for decades, it is not so that this reality can be used honestly and pedagogically as an explanation for the genocide. It is so that this reality can be denied, erased and replaced by a narrative in which their sole historical role is that of perpetrators. This is not memory. It is propaganda.

The Structural Parallel: Two Forms of Inferiorisation, One Same Mechanism

It takes intellectual courage to name this mechanism for what it is. When Belgian colonisers decided that the Hutu were inferior, did not deserve to be educated and must remain confined to agricultural labour, they employed a discourse of ethnic categorisation to legitimise a domination. When Bizimana devotes his public interventions to maintaining the idea that Hutu are collectively suspect, morally deficient or politically dangerous, he employs exactly the same mechanism, in a different direction.

The structure is identical: define a group by its ethnic belonging, attribute collective moral characteristics to it, and use this framework to justify unequal treatment. The fact that this mechanism is dressed in the rhetoric of reconciliation and memory changes nothing about its deep nature. It remains a form of institutionalised ethnic discrimination.

This parallel is not an attempt to relativise the genocide or to establish an equivalence between the sufferings of different groups. It aims to name with precision the intellectual and political mechanism at work, in order to more effectively denounce its perversity.

The Concrete Consequences for Contemporary Rwandan Society

This type of discourse is not without concrete effects on Rwandan society today. Testimonies gathered within the diaspora, corroborated by reports from international human rights organisations, describe an atmosphere of fear and self-censorship that weighs heavily on citizens of Hutu origin. Rwandans who grew up after 1994, who have no direct connection to the events of that genocide, live with the permanent awareness that their background can, at any moment, be turned against them.

This chronic identity insecurity has devastating effects on civic trust, political engagement and social cohesion. A society in which a significant group of the population feels collectively suspect is not a reconciled society. It is a society under permanent tension, which represses its fractures rather than treating them.

Furthermore, the systematic concealment of the Hutu's historical oppression deprives Rwandan society of an honest understanding of its own past. Yet without this understanding, authentic reconciliation is impossible. One cannot heal a wound that one refuses to examine.

Towards a Complete History and a Just Memory

The memory of the genocide against the Tutsi is an absolute moral imperative. It must be transmitted, taught and protected against any revisionism or denialism. But this memory will be all the stronger and more legitimate for being inscribed within a complete and honest historical understanding.

A complete memory acknowledges the horror of the 1994 genocide without minimising it by a single iota. It equally acknowledges the centuries of oppression that the Hutu endured under the monarchical and colonial regimes. It names with precision the individual responsibilities of the genocidaires without extending them to an entire community. And it refuses to construct a hierarchy of victims or a hierarchy of perpetrators based on ethnic belonging.

It is only on this foundation of total historical honesty that a genuine national unity project can take root. A project in which every Rwandan, regardless of their origin, recognises themselves as carrying a complex, painful and shared history, and not as the representative of a camp that is eternally guilty or eternally innocent.

Conclusion

Jean-Damascène Bizimana, by reducing Rwandan history to a binary reading and deliberately concealing the centuries-long oppression of the Hutu under the monarchical and colonial regimes, is not building national unity. He is reproducing, in an inverted and institutionally legitimised form, the same mechanism of ethnic categorisation that served to dehumanise the Hutu for decades before serving to dehumanise the Tutsi in 1994.

The history of Rwanda is a history of shared sufferings, successive dominations and profound traumas. It cannot be reduced to a narrative in which one group bears all the guilt and another all the innocence. This reduction is not memory. It is a betrayal of memory.

Rwanda will only be able to build lasting peace by accepting to look at its history in all its complexity, all its pain and all its truth. This truth includes the 1994 genocide in all its horror. It also includes the centuries of humiliation and exclusion that the Hutu endured. Neither erases the other. Both must be spoken, together, with the same rigour and the same respect for human dignity.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What was the ubuhake and what role did it play in the oppression of the Hutu? The ubuhake was a Rwandan feudal clientelism system in which Hutu peasants were bound to Tutsi lords through obligations of labour and service in exchange for protection and access to cattle. This system maintained the Hutu in structural economic and social dependence.

How did Belgian colonisers aggravate ethnic inequalities in Rwanda? The Belgians institutionalised and radicalised existing inequalities by introducing compulsory ethnic identity cards in 1933–1934, reserving education almost exclusively for the Tutsi and drawing on the racist Hamitic theory to justify a formal ethnic hierarchy.

Does explaining the historical causes of the genocide amount to justifying it? No. Explaining is not excusing. Understanding the deep historical causes of a tragedy is an intellectual and moral necessity for preventing its recurrence. The 1994 genocide against the Tutsi remains a crime against humanity that cannot be justified by any historical cause.

In what way does Bizimana's discourse conceal part of Rwandan history? By presenting the Hutu as collectively responsible for an irrational hatred, Bizimana erases centuries of oppression that this community itself suffered under the monarchical and colonial regimes, providing a partial and distorted reading of history.

What constitutes a just and complete historical memory in the Rwandan context? A just memory acknowledges both the horror of the 1994 genocide and the historical sufferings of the Hutu under monarchical and colonial domination. It distinguishes individual responsibilities from collective responsibilities and refuses any hierarchy of victims or perpetrators based on ethnic belonging.

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References

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