Twas the Night before Christmas

“What was all the Genocide in Rwanda all about anyway?” my sweet daughter asked. The family was crowded into our cozy family room, the lights winking on the tree. It was a typical Christmas Eve at our house.

I was ready to explain colonialism, the exploitation of tribalism by manipulative Europeans, the collapse of Western dominance, the resurgence of ancient hatreds exaggerated by generations of European exploitation and rivalry.

But my son, majoring in anthropology and languages at the University, said he knew all about it. Ever ready to learn the truth I deferred to him. He prefaced his exposé by pointing out that he had the scoop right from Paul Rusesabagin, the heroic hotel manager on whose life the book and movie Hotel Rwanda was based. Rusesabagin had been visiting Weber State and told the story.

My son’s thumbnail synopsis ran something like this: There had been no distinction between Hutu and Tutsis before the arrival of the Belgians. All these people lived together in peace and spoke a common language. It was the Belgians who, by measuring noses and publishing racial identity cards, created the entire mess. According to our report, Rusesabagin had claimed that “Hutu” and “Tutsi” were even words invented by the Belgians.

I began to smell a rat, not my son, but hero with an agenda. I mentioned that it reminded me of that famous non-Indian American, Ward Churchill, who routinely portrays pre-Columbian America as a virtual paradise of peace until the white man arrived to murder and corrupt the innocence.

My skepticism about Rusesabagin was not received without challenge by the young idealist in the overstuffed chair. He was ready with a barrage of questions of his own. Where did I get my facts? How didI know it wasn't my old-fashioned history lectures that were flawed? Why should we doubt the testimony of a man who actually lived there and experienced the genocide in Rwanda and who had acted to save many by his courage?

A quick check of history reveals that the original people of what would become Rwanda were the Twa, the people I grew up calling pygmies. The Hutu arrived in the area some thousands of years ago and proceeded to all but annihilate the Twa; the few survivors fled to the deep forest to survive. As recently as the 15th century the Tutsis arrived in Rwanda to subjugate the Hutu in a sort of serfdom where the Tutsis remained herdsmen; dominant over their vegetable growing predecessors. A sort of replay of Cain and Able, with plenty of jealously and murder to come.

The Belgians arrived in the 19th century and found things divided. They chose to exploit the division to their advantage. Their alliance with the Tutsis assured the power and position of both against the more numerous Hutu people.

The unbelievable slaughter of the late twentieth century, observed but not interrupted by either the U. N. or the Clinton administration, can trace its origins to many roots; but Rusesabagin’s explanation, which seeks to place all the blame on the evils of Colonialism, is troubling. Which is more demeaning to the Hutu and the Tutsis; that they allowed their already existing hatred for each other to be manipulated by the Belgians and then, once turned lose by the collapse of Western paternalism, proceeded to hate and murder each other once again? Or what seems an even more demeaning scenario that Rusesabagin suggests? That the Belgians were able, in less than one hundred years of dominance, to create artificial lines of separation and train the "natives" to hate each other without reason or history, like so many trained apes, who sought to destroy each other once the trainers had abandoned them to their mindless monkey business.

“What was all the Genocide in Rwanda all about anyway?” It seems a fitting topic for Christmas Eve contemplation.