The Unanswered Question: Attempting to Explain the Rwandan GenocideWhen Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and Genocide in Rwanda by MahmoodMamdaniReview by: Jeffrey HerbstForeign Affairs, Vol. 80, No. 3 (May - Jun., 2001), pp. 123-126Published by: Council on Foreign RelationsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20050156 .

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Review Essay

The Unanswered Question

Attempting to Explain the Rwandan Genocide

Jeffrey Herbst

When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism,

Nativism, and Genocide in Rwanda.

by MAHMOOD MAMDANi. Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 2001,

380 pp. $29.95.

The Rwandan genocide?in which more

than 500,000 Tutsi were killed from

April to July 1994?will be remembered as one of the seminal events of the late

twentieth century. This Central African

holocaust demonstrated that genocide is

still possible five decades after Nuremberg. It also showed that politics in an African

country can spiral downward to catastrophe

with stunning speed, that African countries

cannot always provide solutions to their

problems, and that Western, especially

American, declarations about a new

interest in Africa are cheap talk. The

killings, and the subsequent destabilization

of the entire Great Lakes region, have

justly attracted a tremendous amount of

attention in the last seven years. Indeed, due to the work of individual scholars

and investigative commissions sponsored

by several Western countries, the Organi zation of African Unity, and the United

Nations, we now know with some certainty who plotted the genocide (the Hutu-led

government); how it was executed (by the

army and by ordinary Hutu); what were

the consequences; and, to some extent, until what point intervention could have

stopped the killings. Despite the thousands of pages devoted

to the Rwandan genocide, however, we

still do not have a good answer to the most

basic question: Why? Why did tens of thousands (if not more) of Hutu citizens

join with their government to kill their Tutsi neighbors, their Tutsi wives, and

Jeffrey Herbst is Chair of the Department of Politics at Princeton

University and the author most recently ofStates and Power in Africa: Com

parative Lessons in Authority and Control.

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Jeffrey Herbst

fellow Hutu thought to be Tutsi collabo rators? Unlike the Nazi killings, the

Rwandan holocaust was not an industrial

process carried out by special units at

the outskirts of the country. Rather, a

large percentage of the Hutu population is individually guilty: machete-wielding

Hutu civilians often massacred their own

neighbors in and around their homes and

churches. Although Rwanda's previous

history was itself bloody, no one

predicted the genocide. Indeed, even the Tutsi?

presumably the group with the greatest interest and the most information?were

taken by surprise when the slaughter

engulfed them.

IDENTITY POLITICS

Mahmood Mamdani has written When Victims Become Killers in order to address

this great unanswered question. In a com

plicated book, he argues that the genesis of Hutu-Tutsi violence can be traced

back to the period of Belgian colonialism. Unlike the situation in many African countries?where supposedly ancient

ethnic identities were actually formed

during the colonial period?Hutu and

Tutsi groups did exist as transethnic identi

ties of "local significance" before the

Europeans came to Rwanda. Mamdani

argues, however, that the Belgians turned

Hutu and Tutsi into racial identities and

then constructed the Hutu as indigenous and the Tutsi as alien. These categories

were enforced through state-issued identity cards that proclaimed the holder's race, a

segregated education system that amplified the supposed racial distinctions, and the

exclusion of Hutu from the priesthood and local governments. According to

Mamdani, the "Social Revolution" of

1959 that preceded independence?in

which the majority Hutu overthrew the Tutsi monarchy and sent thousands

of Tutsi fleeing into exile?reinforced the notion of Tutsi as aliens. Finally, the 1990 invasion of Rwanda by exiled Tutsi and the threat of a Tutsi diaspora population in Uganda both furthered the notion that Tutsi were foreign and led directly to the common acceptance by the Hutu

population that the Tutsi had to be eliminated as a race.

Perhaps inevitably in the face of an event that almost everyone finds unfath

omable, Mamdani's book both succeeds

and fails in important ways. The strengths of the book are clear and admirable.

First, it provides what might be called an intellectual history of the Hutu-Tutsi

division that is invaluable and, in some

ways, unique. Using nuance and detail,

Mamdani describes what he sees as the

formation of Hutu and Tutsi identities as

we now know them. Although the book is anchored in its analysis of the colonial

era, perhaps Mamdani's most interesting contribution is the manner in which he

is able to tell a coherent story of race

formation, starting in the colonial period and continuing through independent

Rwanda. Indeed, his understanding of the

Social Revolution and of Rwanda in the 1980s and 1990s commands attention

as an important and provocative reinter

pretation of the country's recent history.

Anyone from now on who writes on

identity in Central Africa?and there

will be many?will have to wrestle with

the case that Mamdani has made.

Mamdani has also made a critically

important contribution in his analysis of how events in Uganda?whence the

Tutsi invasion of Rwanda was launched?

affected the course of Rwandan history.

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The Unanswered Question

This dimension of the crisis has not been

ignored by other authors, but Mamdani?

a Ugandan who taught in Kampala for

many years?is an

especially sensitive

observer of regional politics. In a clever

application of his ideas regarding the nature of alien and indigenous identities,

Mamdani argues that it was when the

Tutsi realized that they would always be seen as alien in Uganda that they decided to return forcibly to Rwanda. Once again this argument will not be accepted uni

versally, but the evidence that Mamdani

is able to bring forward to support it,

his personal experience as chair of the

Ugandan Commission of Inquiry into Local Government from 1986 to 1988, and the theoretical apparatus on which

the argument is built will force a major reconsideration of the external dimensions

of the Rwandan crisis.

BETWEEN FACT AND THEORY

In addition to these strengths, however, Mamdani's book has one minor and one

major flaw. The lesser problem is the author's occasional willingness to criticize

faceless intellectual adversaries with

whom he wants to pick a fight. One

target is the "area studies" school, which

he faults for paying paramount attention

to geography, with the result that "we have

experts on Rwanda, and others on Uganda, but not on both." The practitioners of

area studies, found only in the West, are

also accused of being "profoundly anti

theoretical." No particular person is cited

in these attacks on whole schools of

scholarship, perhaps because the criti

cisms are demonstrably false. Indeed, Mamdani's own work depends heavily on

books and articles by Western scholars of

Africa, who recognize regional dynamics

and who have tried hard to put years of

fieldwork into coherent intellectual

frameworks. Invariably, Mamdani treats

the work of individual area scholars with

respect and deftness. That Mamdani has

chosen to fabricate a collective, faceless,

"Western" enemy, while at the same time

writing about how political identities can lead to violence and disaster, is a

profound and somewhat sad irony. The book's major flaw is that it does

not persuasively link its elaborate historical and theoretical argument to the genocide itself. Mamdani does not actually get to

the genocide until page 218 of his 282

pages of text, and then devotes a paltry

15 pages to how it was carried out. This

crucial section presents simply a series

of anecdotes, without even an attempt to

suggest that they are intended to portray the complex implementation of the

genocide. Most of the stories, moreover,

give the perspective of the Tutsi victims?

when for Mamdani's theory to be persua

sive, it would have to be linked to the actions and motivations of the Hutu

killers. To be fair, telling their stories would have been difficult because many of the Hutu killers fled to eastern Zaire

(as it was then known) to continue their

struggle against the Tutsi from exile.

Mamdani writes defensively that he is interested not in narrating atrocity stories

"ad infinitum" but rather in understanding the political nature of the crimes in histori

cal context. Still, the imbalance between

the book's elaborate theoretical and histori

cal apparatus and its empirical evidence is a

central problem. Mamdani does not even

take full advantage of the analysis of the

local politics of the genocide produced by Human Rights Watch in its excellent

study, Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide

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Jeffrey Herbst

in Rwanda. Without a much more thor

ough linkage between theory and fact, the

book's central historical and theoretical

propositions must be viewed as unproven. The mere existence of even extremely

antagonistic racial divisions does not ex

plain why so many individual citizens ap

pear to have participated so enthusiastically in the genocide, especially given the long

history of coexistence and intermarriage between Hutu and Tutsi. Indeed, the

variation in local responses by Hutu once

the killings began?which Mamdani fully acknowledges?suggests that factors other

than the drama of national identity may have been at work, including differing local histories of Hutu-Tutsi relations, the

nature of the link between central political leaders and localities, and the decisions

made by prominent local individuals. Mamdani's failure to draw in more evi

dence in support of his arguments means

that despite the sophistication of his theoretical work, there is simply

no way of knowing how much he has contributed

to the understanding of the genocide. What Mamdani has done successfully

is to pose in stark terms how difficult it is to explain

a genocide. The rich, complex

history of identity formation that he

develops makes other interpretations?in

cluding the notion that ecological pressure in the densely settled country somehow

led to the genocide, or that individual

Hutu were simply following orders?seem

too mechanical. Rather than settling the

argument, however, Mamdani's explana tion should serve as a useful invitation for

further empirical studies that systemati

cally explore how different local Rwandan

communities responded to calls for geno cide and then link those particular local ac

tions to overarching explanations.

AN UNCERTAIN FUTURE

The central issue for the future of the

Great Lakes region is how the security of the Tutsi will be assured. From the

Tutsi perspective, the genocide's lesson

is that as a vulnerable minority in the

population, they must monopolize political

power in order to survive. But the perma nent exclusion of the majority Hutu

from political authority hardly seems

likely or workable. Mamdani wrestles

with this question and produces some

suggestive hints regarding the complexity of Hutu and Tutsi identity. Especially salient is his appreciation of the need

to distinguish among the Hutu?in

particular, between those who had been

involved in the genocide but who may now want to reach an accommodation

with the Tutsi, and those who continue

to be obsessed with Hutu solidarity. This seems at least vaguely plausible,

as

it will probably be impossible to find a

significant number of Hutu without blood

on their hands to participate in a political

settlement. The problem, however, is that

even after the genocide, precious few Hutu

have stepped forward to join in a political

solution, and it is not clear how much of

the Hutu population they represent. It is hardly a criticism of Mamdani

that he does not provide a "solution" to

Rwanda and the Great Lakes region. No one else, including the Rwandans, has

come up with anything that looks even

remotely viable. But Mamdani does do a

good job highlighting the obstacles to any long-term settlement. Their identification

is one important step toward a stable

peace for this troubled region.?

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