1
The Great Lakes Region Through the Prism of History:
Oblivion, Memory and Myth-Making
(René Lemarchand, University of Florida)
Marburg, 15/08/08
There are as many paths to speculating about the future as there are ways of interpreting the past.
Hence my sense of ambivalence as I try to deconstruct the overarching theme of this
conference: are we to understand that “coming to terms with the past” is the key to a
brighter future for the people of the Great Lakes, and if so, what, exactly, does it mean?
Does it mean, as Ernest Renan insisted, recasting the past into a selective historical
frame, where amnesia sifts out of the historical record the horrors of ethnic killings? Does
it mean recourse to a Truth and Reconciliation Commission as the ultimate tribunal for
apportioning guilt and innocence? Does it mean, as Ranke’s would put it, Wie es
eigentlich gewesen ist, in short, “telling it like it is” – or, to put it differently, getting an
empirical handle on the facts, the better to understand the complexity of the
circumstances that led into the abyss?
If the past is preface to the future my own inclination is to follow Ranke’s footsteps and look for
the facts. Admittedly, attention to factual evidence is no guarantee of objectivity -- but it
helps. It helps to know that Hutu and Tutsi both have blood on their hands and that
neither group can be held collectively responsible for such crimes; that genocide is not
the shameful privilege of any single group; that rape has been and continues to be the
weapon of choice of all militias in eastern Congo, and that includes Kabila’s rabble army.
It helps to know that guilt and innocence are shared by all communities. Group
culpability is no less of a myth than group virtuousness.
This said, and as anyone with any degree of familiarity with the region knows, nothing is more
elusive than the “facts.” It is one thing to take historical events into account; how history
is reinterpreted, rewritten, manipulated, amputated, twisted and ultimately pressed into
the service of a particular cause is an entirely different matter. Whether we like it or not
it is the latter phenomenon – how the past is remembered, perceived and reinterpreted -that makes analysis of the past so problematic, and weighs most heavily on the future of
the Great Lakes. This is not to suggest that historians have no choice but to abdicate their
professional responsibilities – only to stress the distance between fact and fiction,
description and perception. How to bridge that space is what this discussion is about.
Although I would hesitate to call myself a devotee of post-modernism, I am just as wary of what
might be called “brute empiricism.” My skepticism requires little elaboration: it stems
from the very nature of the subject at hand. In a region that has been so thoroughly
2
soaked in blood, and where the intensity of ethnic feelings often distorts reality,
perceptions tend to become reality. The central question, I would suggest, is not what
happened as much as how did it shape the vision that one group has of the excesses of the
other. I am not suggesting that the basic historical facts be treated as epiphenomena -whether it be the Hutu revolution, the mass killings of 1972 in Burundi, the monstrosity
of the 1994 carnage in Rwanda, or the civil war in Burundi. The point, rather, is that
these events, filtered through the lens of ethnicity, have transformed victimhood into an
identity marker, highlighting the crimes of one group to the exclusion of the other’s. This
is where the past intrudes into the future in ways that are profoundly subversive of a
peaceful tomorrow.
The Uses of History
Its limitations notwithstanding, something must be said at the outset of the merits of the
historical approach, if only because it sets the parameters within which memory and
oblivion combine to produce potent myths and lasting hatreds.
Besides providing the indispensable tool for comprehending the root cause of conflict, history
is the most effective antidote to the despotism of facile formulae. “Ethnic hatreds”,
“ancestral enmities”, “tribal antagonisms”, the “contagiousness of ethnic conflict” are
obvious examples. These are by no means illusory phenomena. They are indeed part and
parcel of the human drama unfolding through much of the region. But they do not happen
in a void. They are the product of a concatenation of events that need to be factored in
and critically examined.
Just as conflict does not materialize in an empirical void, neither does it occur within
hermetically sealed boundaries. What history brings into relief is the interconnectedness
of ethnic crises across national frontiers. Something in the nature of Huntington’s “kincountry syndrome” comes to mind: where ethnic communities straddle geographical
boundaries the gravitational pull of their kinsmen across the border is hard to resist. To
explain the Rwanda genocide while ignoring the wider regional setting is no less risky
that to try to comprehend the 1972 bloodbath in Burundi in isolation from the Rwanda
revolution and the strategic proximity of Tanzania and eastern Congo. Or take the case of
the 1996-1997 killings of Hutu refugees in eastern Congo: the security threats posed by
Hutu extremists to the newly enthroned government of Rwanda are undeniable, but
President Kagame’s decision to cleanse the refugee camps must be seen against a
broader canvas, including the military assistance given by Mobutu to the interahamwe,
the vicious attacks mounted by the provincial authorities of South Kivu against the
Banyamulenge, and the moral and logistical support extended by the government of
Burundi to the Rwandan army.
3
There is a sequential rhythm to these ruptures, and here again history helps illuminate the chain
of events that links one to the other. Seen in a time-space perspective the human dramas
that have swept across the Great Lakes take on the quality of a Greek tragedy, where the
ultimate denouement is already inscribed in the first act: as the curtain rises on the
revolutionary havoc of the Belgian-sponsored Hutu insurrection of the late fifties –
misleadingly named “révolution sociale” -- the dramatic spin-offs are already looming
on the horizon: the mass exodus of Tutsi civilians, the hardening of Hutu-Tutsi relations
in Burundi, culminating in the 1972 genocide, followed in 1973 by the vicious backlash
of anti-Tutsi pogroms in Rwanda, triggering yet another wave of refugees to neighboring
states. It would take another twenty years for the sons of the Tutsi diaspora to turn back
the tide of history and re-establish the hegemonic claims of their ancestors. No small feat
indeed when one considers the odds. Nonetheless, the price exacted by their victory
leaves one to wonder whether the long-terms costs will not exceed the unevenly shared
short-term benefits.
While turning the spotlight on a seemingly relentless Hutu-Tutsi conflict, history also shows that
there are many exceptions to the rule. In particular, and most importantly, it brings out
the “grey zones” in the social landscape. The phrase is borrowed from Primo Levi’s
moving meditation on the ambivalent relations between victims and oppressors in the
Nazi death camps. His commentary deserves to be quoted at length:
“We also tend to simplify history; but the pattern within which events are ordered is not
always identifiable in a single, unequivocal fashion, and therefore different historians
may understand and construe history in ways that are incompatible with one another.
Nevertheless, perhaps for reasons that go back to our origins as social animals, the need
to divide the field into ‘we’ and ‘they’ is so strong that this pattern, this bipartition –
friend/enemy – prevails over all others. Popular history, and also the history taught in
schools, is influenced by this Manichaean tendency, which shuns half-tints and
complexities: it is prone to reduce the river of human occurrences to conflicts, and
conflicts to duels – we and they, Athenians and Spartans, Romans and Carthaginians.” 1
And so also with Hutu and Tutsi. Levi’s reflections are a plea to transcend the all-encompassing
Hutu-Tutsi duality, and take notice of those countless acts of heroism that gave the lie to
the notion of a perennial, rigidly structured Hutu-Tutsi template. We know, for example,
that the victims of the Rwanda genocide were not all Tutsi, and that many Hutu took
enormous risks in trying to save Tutsi lives. It is equally plain that the 1972 genocide of
Hutu in Burundi is not wholly reducible to a straight Hutu-Tutsi conflict, and that here
too many Tutsi saved Hutu lives. And yet the binary Hutu-Tutsi model continues to
dominate much of our discourse. Here again history helps dispel our illusions. No one
familiar with the years that followed their independence in 1962 can overlook the intra1
Levi, Primo, The Drowned and the Saved, New York, 1989, p. 36.
4
Hutu splits (Kiga vs. Nduga) that led to the overthrow of Rwanda’s first president
Grégoire Kayibanda, or the bitter intra-Tutsi squabbles (Banyaruguru vs. Hima) that
preceded – and precipitated – the 1972 Hutu uprising in Burundi, the trigger that
unleashed the Tutsi-led genocidal backlash. That ethnicity is neither eternal nor
immutable is the central lesson history teaches us.
The case of eastern Congo is no less instructive. It brings into focus some startling mutations of
ethnic identities in response changing circumstances. Thus in parts of the Kivu the
widespread use of the Rwandophone label as a way of discriminating between “natives”
(Swahili speakers) and “foreigners” (Kinyarwanda-speakers) has resulted in a spectacular
reformatting of Hutu and local Tutsi identities. Language has become the touchstone of
collective selves. Not only are divisions between Hutu and Tutsi receding under a shared
linguistic label, but by the same token the sub-divisions within each group tend to
evaporate.
Language is indeed the single most powerful bond between the
Banyamulenge of South Kivu and the ethnic Tutsi of North Kivu, between the so-called
“fifty niners”, who left Rwanda during the 1959 Hutu revolution, and the refugees who
came in after the 1993 progroms. That this phenomenon is happening at a time when a
number of Hutu and Tutsi indigenous to North Kivu are joining hands against “native”
Congolese, with the apparent blessings and support of Rwanda, is not a matter of
coincidence. The potential for conflict arising out of this situation can hardly be
overestimated.
Thinking prospectively, then, the good news is that ethnic identities are not fixed once and for
all. Exemplary in this regard is the case of Burundi, where decades of bitter ethnic strife
have given way to a relatively peaceful modus vivendi between Hutu and Tutsi.
Attempts to de-polarize the social field of the region may thus effectively result in
lowering the potential for conflict. The bad news, however, is that no matter how fluid,
the binary structuring of group identities has remained a constant in the history of the
region . Whether the shifts have been from Kiga vs. Nduga to Hutu vs. Tutsi (as in
Rwanda), from Bezi vs. Batare to Hima vs. Banyaruguru to Hutu vs. Tutsi (as in
Burundi), from Banyamulenge vs. “native” Congolese
to Rwandophones vs.
Swahiliphones, the we/they dichotomy has been a persistent element in the ethnic
landscape. To make the bad news even worse, the mythic representations that have
accompanied such shifts of identity have added a powerful normative dimension to social
conflict.
Mythologies
In the Great Lakes as elsewhere myths materialize in different forms at different epochs. Some
are traceable to pre-colonial times (e.g. the myths of origins of the Nyiginya monarchy);
others are the product of colonial historiography (e.g. the Bantu vs. Hamites fantasy);
5
others still, of more recent vintage, are part of the ideological ammunition of political
parties.
Myths are nowhere more likely to flourish than where violence becomes endemic. That the Great
Lakes happens to be the most violent region anywhere in the continent and at the same
time one where myths have never ceased to grow and proliferate is not a matter of
coincidence. As Chris Hedges perceptive noted, “the potency of myth is that it allows us
to make sense of mayhem and violent death”.2 And what makes sense for one
community is rejected as nonsense by the other. Since myth-making puts a normative
construction on the excesses committed by one group against the other, the chances of
ever reaching agreement on who did what to whom are all the more remote.
Recourse to myths is nowhere more tempting than where the evidence is missing or subject to
debate. The greater the uncertainty surrounding past events, the more tempting it is to
treat as solid evidence what is in fact a phantasm in service of an ideology. The “double
genocide” thesis to describe the Rwanda tragedy is a case in point. While there can be no
question about the crimes committed by the Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) in its quest for
power, there is simply no equivalence in terms of numbers between the killings
perpetrated by the RPF and the sheer scale of the mass murder committed by the
interahamwe-cum-ex-FAR. This is but one example among others.
On a number of critically important events the best we can do is to speculate on the basis of
fragmentary evidence. Just how many lives were lost during the 1972 Burundi genocide
will never be known. Although there is a broad consensus about the number of Tutsi
victims in Rwanda – between 800,000 and a million – one can only guess how many of
them were Hutu, and how many died at the hands of the genocidaires or under the blows
of the RPF. Much the same guesswork applies to the number of Hutu killed by the RPF in
eastern Congo in 1996/97, how many were interahamwe or ex-Forces Armées
Rwandaises (FAR) and how many were innocent civilians. The same is true of the human
looses incurred by both Hutu and Tutsi in Burundi during the ten-year civil war that
followed President Melchior Ndadaye’s assassination in 1993. Little wonder in such
circumstances if each victimized community tends to inflate the number of casualties it
has suffered at the hands of the other.
What has been called “the numbers game” is not the only source of confusion. At a different
level of analysis, even more congenial to the efflorescence of myths have been the
traumatic events that constitute the tipping points in the blood-stained trajectories of
Rwanda and Burundi. To return to Ndadaye’s murder, the pivotal event that led to the
civil war: as one reflects on the incredible story pieced together by some Tutsi extremists
to explain away Ndadaye’s assassination one is forcefully reminded of Chris Hedges’s
2
Hedges, Chris, War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning, New York 2002, p. 23.
6
contention that “myth gives justification to what is often nothing more than gross human
cruelty and stupidity.”3 Ndadaye’s murder, we are told, was not a random act, let alone a
politically motivated attempt to reverse the verdict of the elections : it was dictated by a
moral imperative, i.e. to prevent him from carrying out his long-standing plan to commit
genocide against the Tutsi minority. But the one issue about which the evidence is most
violently contested – even though recent testimonies have greatly reduced the range of
speculation – concerns the identity of those responsible for shooting down President
Juvenal Habyalimana’s plane, the real detonator that ignited the 1994 genocide. Despite
the substantial body of circumstancial evidence pointing to the involvement of the future
president of Rwanda – much of it available from the report of the French magistrate in
charge of investigating the matter as well as from the detailed account of an RPF defector
who also happened to be leading participant in the military operations that led to the
crash – the “official truth” is that the shooting down of the presidential plane was the
dastardly act of Hutu extremists.
Rwanda is the locus classicus of myth-making. From early missionary fantasies about Bantus
and Hamites to the scurrilous cartoons and ethnic slurs of Kangura, not to mention the
rabidly racist “Hutu Ten Commandments”, from the rituals of the genocide
commemorations -- which, as Claudine Vidal observed, explicitly deny the status of
victims to those Hutu who fell under the blows of the interahamwe 4 – to the drastic
redrawing the country’s ethnic map, Rwanda has never ceased to nurture and disseminate
one set of mythical representations after another. In its latest avatars the phenomenon has
as much to do with the semantics of genocide as with the perception that the new
Rwandan authorities have of the root cause the bloodbath: since Hutu-Tutsi enmities
were the moving force behind the killings, the most obvious remedy against a recurrence
of such horrors is to do away altogether with such nefarious labels and replace them with
the term Banyarwanda. To this extraordinary exercise in ethno-surgery we shall return in
a moment.
As for the term “genocide”, it evokes visions of the extreme, among which the Holocaust is first
and foremost. It tends to eclipse all other crimes by its scale and cruelty. We are thus
confronted with the paradox that although civil strife in the Congo has claimed more than
five times the number of human lives lost in Rwanda (i.e. approximately 5.4 million
according to the International Rescue Committee), the far greater tragedy suffered by the
Congo has attracted relatively little attention compared to Rwanda. What makes the
carnage in Rwanda uniquely memorable is that it is, after the Holocaust, the biggest
genocide of the second half of the last century.
3
4
Ibid.
Vidal, Claudine, “Les commémorations du génocide au Rwanda”, Les Temps Modernes, 2001, p. 613.
7
There is nothing mythical of course about the Rwanda genocide. Where fantasy creeps in is in
the assumption that it is reducible to a carbon copy of the Holocaust. From this blinkered
perspective the Tutsi are the symbolic incarnation of the Jews, and thus globally
identified with the good guys, while the Hutu are seen as stand-ins for the Nazi bad guys.
As readers of Philip Gourevitch and Jean Hatzfeld must surely realize, the parallel,
however flawed, owes much to the pen of journalists of Jewish origins, who can hardly
be blamed, I hasten to add, for seeing in the Rwanda genocide a re-enactment of the
Shoa. More intriguing, however, is how some Tutsi are returning the favor: I refer to the
appropriation of Jewish identity by a small group of Tutsi intellectuals from Burundi and
Rwanda who, under the banner of a Brussels-based association (Havila), quote chapter
verse from the Bible to reclaim their Kushitic-based Jewishness. Even more surprising is
the spin-off effect of this initiative to the Congo, and of all places Katanga! Thus in a
lengthy statement issued in 2004 we learn that “the Imperial Lunda House of
Shaba/Katanga proclaims its historic alliance with the Tutsi Jews within the SouthKushitic Confederation”, a natural alliance given that “we Lunda have been linked to the
Tutsi since times immemorial, share the same roots and are part and parcel of the same
history”.5 A more sustained exploration of the Tutsi-Jewish nexus would take us too far
afield. Suffice to note that Rwanda’s legacy of genocide has produced some of the most
startling mutations of identity.
The Judeization of Tutsiness may conceivably be dismissed as an aberration; the official
obliteration of Hutu-Tutsi identities for the sake of a unified Rwandan selfhood confronts
us with a phenomenon of a very different nature. What we are dealing with here is a
political decision made at the highest level. The aim is a drastic reconfiguration of
Rwanda’s ethnic map. The underlying logic is disarmingly simple: if awareness of ethnic
differences can be learned, so too can the idea that ethnicity does not exist. In other
words, since Hutu-Tutsi enmities have been the bane of Rwanda, the time has come to
create a national community free of the taint of ethnicity. In line with this reasoning the
constitution has been duly amended to sanction the crime of “divisionism” as a
constituent element of genocidal ideology. Besides providing the government with a
convenient pretext to ban all forms of ethnically inspired opposition, it offers the new
nation-builders an ideological justification for legislating ethnic ties out of existence. The
question is whether the ban on ethnic memories is the safest strategy for building a new
Rwanda.
Memory and Oblivion
5
Kayemb Uriel Nawej, pour le Prince Impérial Ruund-Lunda Jimb André Tshombe, “La Maison Impériale Lunda
proclame son alliance historique avec les juifs Tutsi au sein de la confédération Sud-Kushitique”, Lubumbashi, 5
septembre 2004.
8
It is in the nature of memory to be selective. Oblivion and memory are but two faces of the same
coin. Yet there is an obvious difference between the blank spots in individual or
collective memories and the hijacking of ethnic memories by the state. Oblivion in this
case is ordained from above; it is enforced by the courts; it reflects a political agenda.
Seen from this perspective the elimination of ethnic identities in contemporary Rwanda is
a recipe for failure.6
To this day the clash of ethnic memories continues to draw apart perpetrators and victims, not
only for what they have suffered at each other’s hands, but because their respective
agonies are seen through radically different lens. At stake here is not the reality of the
horrors committed by one group or the other, but the circumstances that led to the
carnage, the identity of the participants in the killings, the responsibilities of the leaders
who carried out such crimes. This is where the clash of memories takes the form of
conflictive and seemingly irreconcilable narratives.
There is, on the one hand, the familiar tale of woe of the blood-soaked Hutu genocidaires,
inflicting mass murder as well as unspeakable sufferings on innocent Tutsi civilians, and
there is, on the other, the untold story – except only recently by Abdul Ruzibiza,7 -- of
the countless Hutu civilians killed in cold blood by RPF soldiers, the responsibility borne
by the RPF leadership in the shooting down of Habyalimana’s aircraft, the mass murder
of refugees in eastern Congo. Not only are these narratives not mutually exclusive, they
are complementary. They each reveal a fundamental aspect of the gruesome reality, yet
they have yet to be brought into a common historical memory. Referring to the
abominations that have accompanied the Armenian genocide, Chris Hedges writes:
“These atrocities – denied by the perpetrators and sanctified by the victims – leave huge
chasms between peoples. They serve to create two distinctive and antagonistic histories.
It is only with an historical consensus that there can be reconciliation”(my italics).8 The
thwarting of ethnic memories is unlikely to heal the scars of genocide; the recovery of
such memories, I would suggest, is the indispensable first step for each community to
acknowledge their share of the blame. That there is such a thing as a shared responsibility
for the bloodbath of 1994 is what Rwanda’s ideologues refuse to admit. The same applies
to other tragedies, including the 1972 genocide in Burundi, the massacres of innocent
Tutsi populations in 1993, following Ndadaye’s assassination, the 1996-1997 cleansing
operations conducted by the Rwanda army in eastern Congo, and the murderous civil war
that engulfed Burundi from 1993 to 2003.
In his magisterial work on Memory, History and Oblivion, the late Paul Ricoeur reminds us of
the difficulties involved in getting a memorial grip on the past. He refers to “thwarted
6
This section draws heavily from my chapter on “The Politics of Memory” in my forthcoming book, The Dynamics
of Violence in Central Africa, University of Pennsylvania Press.
7
Abdul Ruzibiza, Rwanda: L’histoire secrète, Paris, 2005.
8
Hedges, op. cit. p. 126.
9
memory, manipulated memory and enforced memory” (“mémoire empechée, mémoire
manipulée, mémoire abusivement commandée).9 Contemporary Rwanda, as I have shown
elsewhere, offers a perfect illustration this trilogy. By way of a conclusion I want to draw
attention to what he calls “le travail de mémoire”, or “the labor of memory”, by which he
means a sustained effort to probe the relationship between history and memory, and
between memory and recognition. It harks back, says Ricoeur, to Freud’s concept of
Durcharbeiten (which he translates as “translaboration”); just as the obsessive, repetitive
memory of traumatizing events can be seen as an obstacle to the psychoanalytic cure, the
compulsive urge to rehash the sufferings endured by one group at the hands of another,
stands in the way of the healing process. What is needed instead is a new kind of
narrative history, where the past is seen from the vantage point of the other; this does not
mean forgetting the past but rather “narrating differently the stories of the past, telling
them from the point of view of the other – the other, my friend or my enemy”.10 As
alternative perceptions are brought into view, the past takes on a different meaning: “Past
events cannot be erased: one cannot undo what has been done, nor prevent what has
happened. On the other hand, the meaning of what has happened, whether inflicted by us
unto others, or by them upon us, is not fixed once and for all… What has changed is its
moral freight (sa charge morale), the weight of the debt it carries… This is how the
working of memory opens up the way to forgiveness to the extent that it settles a debt by
changing the very meaning of the past”.11
Echoes of Ricoeur can be detected in Eva Hoffman’s wonderfully sensitive essay on “The Balm
of Recognition”. Yet she goes further in her attempt to situate the experience of trauma in
historical perspective. She invites us “to look beyond the fixed moment of trauma to
those longer historical patterns, to supplement partisan memory with a more complex and
encompassing view of history – a view that might examine the common history of the
antagonistic groups and that might, among other things, enable us to question and
criticize dubious and propagandistic uses of collective memory”.12
Such indeed is the message that I would want the theme of this conference to convey to all of us,
and to all the people of the Great Lakes – that the time has come for a constructive
recovery of the past. Which doesn’t mean to forget but to transcend the horrors of
reciprocal killings, to look beyond the fixed moment of trauma, so as to supplement
ethnic memory with a more encompassing, and ultimately more generous vision of the
future.
9
Paul Ricoeur, La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli, Paris 2002.
Paul Ricoeur, “Le pardon peut-il guérir?”, Esprit, March-April 1995, p. 78.
11
Ibid.
12
Eva Hoffman, “The Balm of Recognition”, in Human Rights, Human Wrongs, Nicholas Owen ed., Oxford, 1999, p.
296.
10
10