The Dynamics of Violence in Central Africa. Rene Lemarchand
argument about the significance of “moral ethnicity” readily comes to mind. Drawing a distinction between “political tribalism” and “moral ethnicity,” he defines the former as “the use of ethnic identities in political competition with other groups” and the latter as “a positive force which creates communities from within through domestic controversy over civic virtue.”1 Moral ethnicity, he wrote, is an expression of “the common human instinct to create out of the daily habits of social intercourse and material labor a system of moral meaning and ethical reputation within a more or less imagined community.”2
Ethnicity does not necessarily mean conflict, nor is conflict everywhere traceable to politicized ethnicity. Illustrating this point are the violent struggles in Somalia, one of the most conflict-ridden states anywhere in the continent, and the class-based intra-Zulu confrontations that have punctuated the recent history of Natal. Similarly, the recent war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo cannot be reduced to ethnic polarities. Even where mass murder is clearly aimed at a specific ethnic community, as in Rwanda during the 1994 genocide, it is not easy to pin the blame on ethnicity. What, indeed, does ethnicity mean when the groups in conflict share the same language, the same national territory, the same customs, and have for centuries lived more or less peacefully side by side?
Clearly then, ethnicity can be many things, both good and bad. The crucial question, therefore, for anyone attempting to understand its role in conflict is, What causes it to become a force for evil? What, in other words, accounts for the transformation of moral ethnicity into political tribalism, and tribalism into genocide? What are the mechanisms through which peaceful ethnic cohabitation gives way to death and destruction?
John Lonsdale gives us a clue: “Tribalism,” he writes, “remains the reserve currency in our markets of power, ethnicity our most critical community of thought.”3 In the market place of electoral competition, tribalism is the bad currency that drives out the good currency, in a kind of Gresham's law of ethnic politics. Moral ethnicity is the first casualty of the inflationary spiral of ethnic claims and counterclaims. Nonetheless, to invoke political tribalism in an attempt to explain genocide leaves out a crucial dimension of ethnicity. Ethnicity has a capacity to be manipulated for the pursuit of preeminently immoral goals, to profoundly alter collective perceptions of the “other.” It can be distorted using images whose purpose it is to draw rigid boundaries between good and evil, civic virtue and moral depravity, freedom and oppression, and foreigners and autochthons.
This chapter focuses on the effect of mythmaking on ethnic strife in the Great Lakes region of Africa. After an examination of the meaning of ethnicity, attention is given to the origin and development of myths in central Africa, especially to the traditional Rwandan myths of origins and the so-called Hamitic hypothesis, a myth started by the Europeans. The last part of the chapter is devoted to a consideration of how and why these myths were turned to genocidal purposes. It is my contention that the history—in whose name hundreds of thousands of innocent Tutsi men, women, and children were slaughtered—is, in large part, myth. So is the view of the past that lies behind Rwanda's claims to huge chunks of North and South Kivu. And so, also, is the reading of history implicit in the construction of new identities in eastern Congo, the so-called Banyamulenge. Mythmaking, in sum, is what transforms social conflict into irreconcilable moral standoffs.
Ethnicity: Invented, Imagined, or Mythologized?
In order for ethnic entrepreneurs to make capital out of tribalism, a tribe must exist. The term tribe, however, as has been emphasized time and again, is hardly appropriate to describe communities whose pedigree is traceable to the accidents of colonial rule. The tribal names that have passed down into modern usage are, in most instances, misnomers. The tribes were born of European ignorance, with their existence given formal recognition in statistical records or in the writings of early European administrators, explorers, and missionaries. Prior to these European records, they had no real existence.
ETHNICITY INVENTED
Should we speak then, not of tribes but of “invented” communities? Examples abound of ethnic entities whose birth certificate bears traces of an “invented tradition,” to use Terence Ranger's phrase. The classic example is the case of the Bangala of northern Congo. First “discovered” by Henry Morton Stanley, who called them “unquestionably a very superior tribe,” the Bangala, as Crawford Young reminds us, “were accorded official anthropological recognition when an entire volume was devoted to them in 1907 in the first ethnographic survey of the Zaire peoples.”4 The Dinka of the Sudan, likewise, derive their ethnonym and thus part of their collective identity from a similar misreading of the facts by a European explorer who took the name of a local chief to designate a collection of quite separate communities.5 The Acholi of northern Uganda are another example. According to Atkinson, the term Acholi was invented by Arab traders (Kutoria) from the Sudan to refer to a variety of Luo-speaking lineages and chiefdoms.6 Even as late as the 1930s, “the Acholi were referred to as ‘Gangi’ or ‘Shuli’ and they had no fixed territorial boundaries.”7 Each of these invented communities, along with many others, would not have been out of place in the volume edited by Ranger and Hobsbawm on The Invention of Tradition.8
ETHNICITY IMAGINED
Evocative though it is, the term invention does not do justice to the diversity of voices that contribute to the making of a community. To speak of an invented tradition does little to illuminate the ideological orientation or normative underpinnings of such a group. Nor does it bring out the different constructions placed upon it by different categories of social actors at different moments of history. Ranger himself came to recognize the limitations of the term invention and to prefer the notion of imagination. Drawing from the insights of Feierman and Lonsdale, he noted that the word imagining has the advantage of stressing ideas, images, and symbols, which are useful vehicles for understanding how traditions are formed.9 The history of any modern tradition, Ranger emphasized, is immensely complex. It is not the product of one, but of many, conflicting imaginations. Over time, the meaning of the imagined is defined and redefined. In Africa, as Ranger explained, traditions imagined by whites were reimagined by blacks; traditions imagined by particular interest groups were reimagined by others.
We should therefore, perhaps, speak of imagined communities rather than invented ones. Ranger's understanding of the exegesis of tradition certainly seems to apply to the Great Lakes region of Africa. Here, Africans appropriated the Hamitic tradition imagined by Europeans. This same tradition was again reimagined by Hutu intellectuals to forge ideological weapons directed at the Tutsi minority. To describe Hutu and Tutsi as “invented communities” is hardly appropriate. Both existed long before the advent of colonial rule. To see them as imagined identities does point to the changing perceptions of one group by another, as well as to the processes involved in the emergence of a new “tribe” in eastern Congo, the Banyamulenge.
ETHNICITY MYTHOLOGIZED
Yet there is surely more than political imagination at work in the continuing carnage in the Great Lakes. What gives ethnic conflict in the region its peculiarly savage edge are the myths that have grown up around Hutu and Tutsi. Behind the twisted memories, distorted histories, and demonized ethnicities that have contributed to the bloodshed lie mythologies, which have thus been summoned to legitimize the butchery. Ironically, in Rwanda, it is the very thing that should have welded the people together that has served to do the most to tear them apart. The Rwandan myth of origins, at least in its original conception, conjures up a normative charter-holding society together in a unified trinity of Tutsi, Hutu, and Twa. And yet, in time, this very myth of origins became the quarry for destructive ideologies.
In the context of this discussion, myth is used in both its conventional and metaphorical senses. In its conventional sense, a myth is a legend. Mythmaking may thus simply refer to the creation of such a legend. In such an instance, the purposes of mythmaking are often benign. Myths of origins, for example, are not uncommonly designed to foster social cohesion. Mythmaking may, by contrast, carry far more negative connotations. In the metaphorical sense, mythmaking involves the deliberate denial or distortion of historical reality in a situation of crisis and conflict. The aim of mythmaking of this sort is to inspire division and to inflame ethnic