Global Historical Sociology of Race and Racism by Alexandre I.R. White Katrina Quisumbing King

Author:Alexandre I.R. White, Katrina Quisumbing King [Alexandre I.R. White, Katrina Quisumbing King]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, Social & Cultural Studies, Social Science, Sociology, Political Science
ISBN: 9781801172202
Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
Published: 2021-09-30T04:00:00+00:00

Conclusion

In Rwanda's past, precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial elites have all sought to manipulate the meanings of the Hutu and Tutsi categories to serve their political interests. But it is not clear that ordinary Rwandans have always ideologically succumbed to these projects. In fact, as our review shows here, ordinary Rwandans frequently resisted these projects during the genocide, when the meanings attributed to the Hutu and Tutsi categories mattered most.

Moreover, that regional differences mattered more for politics than race in the 1970s–1990s shows there was once a potential for alternative cleavages to drive Rwandan politics and the Hutu/Tutsi binary was not always the master political cleavage. This suggests that colonialism's impact is not fixed. Rather, the significance of race and other categories for politics is continuously made and remade as race is tied, whether overtly as in the past or covertly as in the present, to structural inequalities.

In contemporary Rwanda, the government is led by ethnic Tutsi tied to Kagame's RPF. Access to politics, education, land, money, and, of course, the law hinges on loyalty to the party, compliance with its dictates, and alignment with its false narrative of the genocide. Rwandans who try to step outside the proscribed frames of National Unity and Reconciliation are met with quick and relentless punishment: imprisonment without charge, disappearance, intimidation, even death (Reyntjens, 2013, pp. 90–93; Thomson, 2018, p. 197). This means that perpetrators (read as Hutu) and survivors (read as Tutsi) have been cast into essentialist categories of killer and victim with no room for variation despite significant behavioral variation during the genocide (Fujii, 2009; Luft, 2015). Thus despite the illegality of public discourse using the words “Hutu” and “Tutsi” lest one be accused of ethnic divisionism, in practice, what it means to be Hutu or Tutsi is once again being tied to ideas about inherent difference by those with political authority with consequences for Rwandans who seek to challenge these classifications. All this is in addition to the lack of accountability for the RPF's own crimes under then-military commander Paul Kagame during the civil war, as well as its ongoing perpetration of violence both directly and by proxy against Hutu rebels and refugees in the Democratic Republic of Congo (Loyle & Davenport, 2015, p. 140). If President Kagame truly wished to help Rwanda overcome its violent past, he could therefore start with some mechanism of finding out what actually happened during the genocide and civil war and introducing justice on an evidence-based procedure rather than race as a synonym for behavior. Our analysis of Rwandans' resistance to state symbolic power makes this clear.

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