Tag Archives: bahutu

Time has come to rewrite Africa’s great lakes history

Since the leaked report alleging that Rwanda and Uganda troops committed genocide against Rwanda and DR Congo Hutu in DRC, Rwanda’s Minister of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation and government spokesperson Hon. Louise Mushikiwabo has been talking negatively and discouragingly about rewriting the history of Africa’s great lakes region. In contrast, many believe that the region is and has been unstable precisely because the history of the region was not properly written.

Influenced by European race theories that put a black person at the bottom of the race pyramid and the white person at the top, aristocratic explorers, missionaries and colonial officials in the great lakes region (Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi) credited all the magnificent civilizations they found in the region to Bahima and their Batutsi and Bahororo (Batutsi from Rwanda) cousins whom they described as ‘white’ people who got lost in the region and turned dark because of tropical sunshine. Further, they described them as intelligent, physically attractive and born leaders to indefinitely rule others in the region. On the other hand, Bantus or Negroes (especially Bahutu and Bairu) were described as a race of ugly and unintelligent human beings without leadership qualities and only fit for menial work. They were denied the civilizations they had developed in a region that had been described as part of the ‘Dark Continent’ without a history and civilization.

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When someone treats you like a slave you have got to defend yourself

According to Webster’s New Universal Unabridged Dictionary a slave is, inter alia, (1) a bond servant divested of all freedom and personal rights; a human being who is owned by and wholly subject to the will of another, as by capture, purchase, or birth. (2) one who has lost the power of resistance, or one who surrenders himself to any power whatever… (3) …one who labors like a slave.

A number of developments with reference to the Great Lakes Region (especially Rwanda and south west Uganda) have forced me to revisit the issue of being a slave. First, my visit to Burundi, DRC and Rwanda in January/February 2010 and the detailed stories I heard in formal and informal settings in addition to information from other sources has made me realize that groups of human beings in the region have been deprived of their human rights. Reports about massacres or should we say genocide of Hutu people in Rwanda and Eastern DRC committed by Tutsi, the hidden mass graves of brutally murdered Hutu people some of them under buildings in Rwanda and DRC, the comments from people who should know better but think Hutu people – all Hutu people – are barbaric, wild beasts, genocidaires and assassins that deserve to be punished made me wonder where the world is headed.

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Ethnic relations in the Great Lakes region are antagonistic

Let me begin with two statements.

First, when my article on “How Rujumbura’s Bairu got impoverished” appeared in (Uganda) Observer, some Uganda readers were convinced that I was sectarian and hated Bahororo (another name for Batutsi who sought refuge in Rujumbura when the short-lived Mpororo kingdom disintegrated and Rwanda and Nkore troops moved in). Since 1986, Uganda government has been led by Bahororo many of them from Rujumbura or with roots in Rujumbura. With Uganda currently experiencing un-preceded poverty, hunger, unemployment, marginalization and functional illiteracy, many Ugandans have revisited the above article and drawn parallels with how the whole country of Uganda has been impoverished.

Second until the 1960s, the history of the Great Lakes Region was dominated by followers of J. H. Speke, C. G. Seligman – British explorer and academic, respectively – and African scholars mostly from aristocratic families who shared the two British biased opinions led by Alexis Kagame, a Catholic priest and historian associated with Rwanda royal court. The writings of these people were extremely biased in favor of Batutsi (Bahima, Bahororo and Banyamulenge are clans of Batutsi) who were described as white or black Caucasian, intelligent, well built, civilized, wealthy through invasion and plunder of Negroes and born to rule. On the other hand they portrayed Bantu-speaking people (dubbed Bairu and Bahutu {slaves or servants} by Bahima) as reported by J. H. Speke (1863, 2006) as black Negroes, without a civilization, poorly built or ugly and short, unintelligent and born to serve the rulers. They used these racist and psychological instruments to rob Bantu-speaking people of their true identity, civilizations and wealth and reduced them to servants or serfs as in Rwanda.

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