The Dynamics of Violence in Central Africa. Rene Lemarchand

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       Chapter 3

      Ethnicity as Myth

      Ethnicity is never what it seems. What some see as ancestral atavism, others see as a typically modern phenomenon, anchored in colonial rule. Where neo-Marxists detect class interests parading in traditional garb, mainstream scholars unveil imagined communities. And whereas many see ethnicity as the bane of the African continent, others think that it could provide the basis for a moral social contract and that it contains within itself the seeds of openness and accountability.

      So overwhelming is the evidence that points to the demonic face of ethnicity that it is tempting to forget its more benign traits. Yet not everything about ethnicity translates into bloodshed and genocide or into frenzied ethnic cleansing. Ethnic communities also generate responsible, civic-minded leaders, anxious to speak on behalf of their constituents and willing to protect them against the abuses of the state. The sense of belonging to an ethnic community need not be synonymous with conflict and competition. John Lonsdale's 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 СКАЧАТЬ