The Dynamics of Violence in Central Africa. Rene Lemarchand

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      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 passions.

      The Origin and Transformation of Rwandan Myths

      Ancient Rwanda had a rich collection of myths and ideologies long before the coming of Europeans. The traditional myths of origins, which provided a virtual charter of Tutsi supremacy, continue to play a central role to this day, though their meaning has radically changed over time. They are still the main frame of reference for conservative Tutsi elites, but since the early fifties, they have been given a quite different symbolic meaning by Western-educated Hutu elites.

      These myths have been studied by Marcel d'Hertefelt,¹⁰ who identified five essential themes: the celestial origins of the Tutsi; the fundamental and “natural” differences among Tutsi, Hutu, and Twa; the superior civilization that the Tutsi brought to Rwanda; the threat of divine sanctions against those brazen enough to revolt against the monarchy; and the notion of divine kingship.

      The first of these themes finds expression in the story of Kigwe, the founding hero of the royal clan, who descended from heaven, accompanied by his bother Mututsi and his sister Nyamparu. The second is the subject of numerous folktales and dynastic poems. A typical story is that of the stratagem used by God to determine who should rule over whom. So as to test their dependability, God decided to entrust Gahutu, Gatutsi, and Gatwa each with a pot of milk to watch over during the night. When dawn came, gluttonous Gatwa had drunk the milk; Gahutu had gone to sleep and spilt his milk; only the watchful Gatutsi had stayed up through the night to keep guard over his milk. The third is the theme of Tutsi civilization as inherently superior. Nowhere is this theme more tersely summed up than in the opening statement of a folktale of central Rwanda: “Dead are the dogs and the rats, giving way to the cows and the drum.” (The cows here allude to the Tutsi, who, according to legend, introduced pastoralism; the drum was a symbol of power.) Rwanda has no official history before the arrival of the Tutsi. Just as in the dark ages of pre-Islamic civilization ( jahiliya), it is assumed that until the Tutsi arrived, there was little worth remembering, much less recording.¹¹

      Why did these early myths take this shape? “The function of myth,” says M. I. Finley, “is to make the past intelligible and meaningful by selection, by focusing on a few bits of the past that thereby acquire permanence, relevance, and universal significance.”¹² Rwanda's myths of origins did more than make the past intelligible. Their function was also to make the present legitimate in the eyes of both Hutu and Tutsi.

      In time, legends became reality. The myths gained a life of their own and came to be not so much fictitious stories but rather “a statement of a bigger reality.” Its precedents, laws, and morals were, as Bronislaw Malinowski put it, “partially alive,”¹³ and provided powerful moral justification for the all-encompassing “premise of inequality.”¹⁴ Indeed, it was this very ability of these myths to validate oppression that eventually led Hutu politicians to recast them in a radically new light.

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