Identity Is A Knife

"Identity is a knife": Must Tribal Identities be Repressed in Order for African States to Avoid Internal Violent Conflict? Discuss with reference to at least three countries.

Identity in Africa is an issue that, from the outside, is usually portrayed as primordial and intractable. This gives rise to the impression that there is nothing to be done, except perhaps suppress such tribal identities entirely. But by analysing the fluid history of tribal identities it becomes clear that the issue moves beyond mere tribalism. Often Tribal conflicts in Africa emerge out of a crisis of citizenship and representation that challenges the post-colonial state system. The tribes themselves emerge from the frozen, primordial culture in which they are cast and take their true, fluid and dynamic forms. While there are myriad examples of tribal conflict across the Continent this analysis will focus on the Issue within the Great Lakes region of Central Africa, specifically Rwanda, Burundi, and the eastern regions of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). To realistically comprehend how Tribalism is understood by communities in Africa today a better understanding of their complex history is needed. Often tribal conflicts are seen as eternal by outsiders; while others dismiss such grievances as an entirely colonial invention. The truth is far more nuanced than this, and the tribes of the great lakes provide strong evidence of this. The most significant ethnic cleavage in the region is the infamous distinction between Hutu and Tutsi. These (along with the Twa) form the three largest ethnic groups in both Rwanda and Burundi. Some have dismissed them as a colonial invention but there is clear evidence that these two groups existed in the region for centuries; but in the historic Kingdoms of Burundi and Rwanda the distinction was far more fluid than today. It is often described as akin to a class division, with the Hutu majority often subservient to the ruling Tutsi elite: and it was possible for a Hutu to "become" a Tutsi. There is little evidence of ethnic conflict between the two groups, conflict was more inter-elite; and while the Tutsi elite were noticeably taller than the hutu peasant class there was little biological difference. In fact, in Southern Rwanda the Tutsi farmers were indistinguishable from their Hutu neighbours. The more dynamic tribal region of what was to become the eastern DRC was more complex than the centralised kingdoms to the east, but identity was still clearly a fluid concept. The groups that inhabited this region had little fixed identity as tribes, but identity was still present. The Congolese historical tradition was centred on three strata: the house, village and the district. While these communities, to varying degrees, shared a common language and culture they were organised primarily for defence and thus there was no political centralisation or permanent authority. What these pre-colonial identities show is that tribal identity has not always been the divisive, rigid structure that one finds today, and to say that the rivalries between the tribes of the great lakes region are intractable is to project the present conflict back into the primordial past. What is this shows is that tribal identities in the pre-colonial era were relatively peaceful, context which can not be disregarded in favour of the total suppression of tribes. But establishing tribal identity as being neither fixed and primordial nor a colonial invention is not to discount the transformative effect colonialism had on Identity in Africa. The policy of "Indirect Rule" saw the colonial regimes` legitimacy secured through gaining the loyalty of tribal "chiefs". Regimes argued the policy protected indigenous culture but Ronald Aminzade contends that often officials devoted substantial energy to finding chiefs even when they knew that no such figure existed. Where Rwanda and Burundi saw ethnicity created out of a typical process of indirect rule Bogumil Jewsiewicki sees identity in the Congo come from a push towards regionalism. By drawing "reality out of fiction" the creation of a state-wide national space depended initially on developing regional ties. Regionalism saw the creation of "ethnicities" out of hitherto similar cultural spheres, for example the creation of a "Luba" identity out of an area that shared similar dialects. Moreover regionalism saw the creation of a feared internal enemy (a "Stranger"), be it the Luba in Kasai or the Kinyarwandese in the Kivus. A comparison can be made to the Jewish "enemy" in Europe. In the eastern country the Kinyarwandan population in North Kivu was swelled by the forced migration of up to 300,000 Rwandese throughout the colonial period. This process formalised and fixed identities that had previously been largely fluid, serving to both centralise authority to tribal chiefs and tying people to the land of their tribe. This type of colonial rule was not unique, but the Belgian regime were ardent enforcers of it. The aftermath of the First World War saw the creation of mandates which the League of Nations defined as "peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world."But in principle this was extension of the Belgian empire which had ruled Congo for the previous three decades. Ironically the mandate periods were often justified as a defence against the "Tribal divisions" that were a consequence of indirect rule. The former German regime had made extensive use of the Hutu-Tutsi divide. By co-opting the Tutsi to rule over the Hutu the German Empire had managed to rule Ruanda-Urundi with a minute number of personnel. The Tutsis themselves took advantage of their privileged position and there are cases of them even collecting taxes in areas outside of German control. The incoming Belgian regime took these divide and rule tactics further by fixing the identities through id cards, introduced in 1933-34. The arguments used by the Belgian Empire extensively employed the fashionable rhetoric of race science. Often this resulted in the creation of origin myths; the most infamous of these was the "Hamitic hypothesis" which contented that the Tutsi were not native to the region, or even a Bantu tribe, but were a more intelligent tribe who had descended from the Nile region to the north. What such myths did was exclude the Hutu from most aspects of public life on racial grounds, while simultaneously fostering resentment towards the "invading" Tutsi elite. Jan Vansina has shown that the power granted to chiefs was entirely at odds with the arangement of power prior to colonial rule, where power was organised primarily around defence and permanent authority over villages, or even individual houses, was uncommon. Crawford Young says it is not coincidence that colonialism in Africa "coincided with the historical zenith of virulent racism" and that the postcolonial states still feel the effects of this. But while the colonial regimes were clearly racially prejudiced this cannot be seen to continue unchanged, to argue this is to again cast identity as static and primordial. Rather Mamdani`s case that what the colonial regime did was create a "bifurcated state" where citizenship was granted to "civilised" men and entire groups were excluded because of their ethnicity, has far more relevance for the post-colonial states today. From this bifurcation one can see how the exclusion of groups in the colonial regime began a crisis of citizenship, of who was within the state and who was outside it; and identity`s fluidity, rather than primordial racism, makes such a crisis highly combustible. In describing Sierra Leone`s civil war Paul Richards saw violence as discourse and war as text: "a violent attempt to... `Cut in on the conversation` of others from whose company the belligerents feel excluded." This concept crystallises the logic of tribal violence not as a primal hatred but institutionalised exclusion. Rene Lemarchand finds this idea as central to explaining the Hutu-Tutsi animosity in the post colonial period; and the fact that the 1972 Burundian genocide of Hutu by Tutsi has been largely forgotten is telling. Between April-November, 1972, 100-200,000 Hutus were exterminated by the Burundian-Tutsi regime, and Lemarchand sees this context as crucial to subsequent Hutu-Tutsi relations. It significantly contextualises the seizure of power by Hutus in Rwanda in 1973 under Juvenal Habyarimana. Liisa Malkki also sees the subsequent refusal to incorporate Hutus into the Burundian state as fundamental to the radicalisation of the Hutu refugees in Tanzania and the formation of the PALIPEHUTU movement. That this movement would destabilise Burundi to such a degree in 1993 is a direct consequence of the ability of the Hutu ethnicity to give a "mythico-history" to what in other contexts would be a political identity. Both Lemarchand and Malkki concur that the ethnically driven political exclusion has a distinct toxicity, and it becomes clear that the living memory of ethnic violence explains the violent reaction of Hutus upon hearing that the first Hutu president of Burundi, Ndadaye, had been assassinated. The Hutu refugees who fled into Rwanda at this point needed little encouragement to join the Hutu militia. Lemarchand is prescient when arguing that the formation of a collective memory and mythology marks ethnic violence as distinct and more likely to escalate but this identifies a symptom rather than a cause. The distinct dynamics of the Hutu-Tutsi myth exemplify the fundamental issue that defined the post-colonial regimes. Returning to the origin myth and the Hametic hypothesis, Mamdani sees the ethnic violence as fundamentally a "Crisis of citizenship", by which the ethnic "Stranger" status of the Tutsi is projected onto the more fundamental issue of who is incorporated into the state. Morten Bøås expands this idea to a continental issue which he defines as "autochthony". He sees the European notion of citizenship within a civil society as unravelling across post-colonial Africa, as different groups claim "autochthonous", inalienable rights to the land. The groups identified as outsiders are more than just Mamdani`s "strangers" but are in essence denied citizenship. Bøås sees the Eastern DRC to be a prime example of this language of autochthony for while the Congolese 1964 Constitution grants that there is "only one Congolese nationality" the fact individuals had to prove ancestry dating back to 1908 meant that citizenship was tied to the land. For Stephen Jackson this dialogue between the "Strangers" and the "sons of the soil" is not present in the longue durée but a consequence of the colonial fixing of identity and the creation of homelands (the same process of regionalism outlined by Jewsiewicki). Throughout the post-independence period the question of which groups belonged to the land was central: from 1972 the influential Congolese Tutsi politician Barthélemy Bisengimana changed the law on citizenship to those living in Congo prior to 1950; but this was changed again when leaders of the "autochthonous" Babembe tribe from south Kivu pushed the date back to the Berlin Conference of 1885. As shall be shown below this conflict is still not resolved, but by connecting the language of autochthony with Mamdani`s crisis of citizenship one sees it as less a conflict over historical tribal differences and more a recent question over what constitutes the post-colonial state. By viewing the tribal identities not as fixed and historic but recent and fluid, and by viewing the post-independence conflict as more over citizenship and autochthony than primordial hatred, the most distinct period of violence in the region through the 1990s is no longer seen as incomprehensible, tribal chaos but as a crisis of statehood grounded in a distinct logic. The region`s first violent outbreak in the 1990s was not in Rwanda but in Burundi. Under pressure from international donors the Tutsi minority government of Pierre Buyoya held the first democratic elections. But the Buyoya government was shocked by the election of a moderate Hutu, Melchior Ndadye. More than a tribal rivalry, the Tutsi government feared that Ndadye`s election would see their removal from civil society, as the Hutu`s held an 85% majority and their diaspora movement had increased the autochthonous rhetoric within the Hutu community since 1972. The violent coup launched by the Tutsi military, and Buyoya`s assassination in October 1993, are seen by Lemarchand as another example of trying to "cut in on the conversation" of the Hutu Frodebu party. In 1994 the Hutu government of Rwanda also feared they were about to be excluded from the conversation. International pressure to pluralise and the Tutsi invasion of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) from neighbouring Uganda had led the Habyarimana regime to fear expulsion from the process of government. Key to the "Hutu Power" ideology was the claim the Tutsi were an alien race come to reconquer the land, and political broadcasts over the radio RTKM and in newspapers like Kangura pushed many in the Hutu community towards violence. The assassination of President Habyarimana began the orchestrated execution of at least half the Rwandan Tutsi population over the course of 100 days. But what must be stressed is that the Hutu genocidaires were not motivated by pure hatred but by the dual crises of immanent military defeat by the RPF and the memory of violence against Hutus in 1972. In this sense the genocidaires chose to "embrace death itself as an alternative to life without power". The violence against the Tutsi only ended once the RPF had seized power and pushed the Hutu genocidaires, along with 2 million Hutu refugees, into neighbouring Zaire (Congo). But the RPF`s victory did little to fundamentally alter ethnic dynamics in the region. Infused with their own mythology and ideology the RPF ensured that they were central to the formation of the state, and moreover, as Reyntjens has discussed at length, excluded the remaining Hutu from full political participation. This ideology helps one understand why the "counter-genocide" of the Hutu by the RPF was not only unreported but deemed acceptable, for the RPF`s constellation of morality firmly entrenched the Tutsi as the permanent victims just as the exiled Burundian Hutu had cast themselves. This also contextualises why the violence was so rapidly exported across the border to the Eastern DRC; not only did the RPF leader Paul Kagame sponsor the rebel movement that toppled Congo`s entrenched dictator Mobutu, but they launched a seven year long proxy war that saw Rwanda gain effective control over large swathes of Congolese territory. It has been claimed that this occupation was largely for control of resources but what cannot be ignored is Kagame`s desire for the Hutu Refugees (now the rebel FDLR movement) to permanently remain genocidaires outside the country, rather than to return as a political majority and once again remove the Tutsi from civil society. By analysing the cycles of blame and violence that occurred through the postcolonial period it becomes clear that suppression does not in any way address the fundamental issues. In Rwanda ethnic identification has been suppressed, and there is a strict bar on any form of ethnic politics. But this has had the adverse affect of excluding Hutu from the political process as they themselves have to identify with the RPF`s official truth; any attempt to do otherwise is punishable as "Genocide ideology". Moreover denying any form of identity politics has extremely hindered the political participation of other minorities. When Writing of the Batwa community Danielle Beswick has described how they have no representation in the state; and the Rwandan Ministry of Justice threatened to stop all NGO projects within the Batwa community if they continued to be referred to as a distinct ethnic minority. In this way the suppression of identity in no way incorporates the ethnic groups into the state; and the collective memory that ethnic conflict creates ensures that a return to violence remains a distinct possibility. But calls to abandon repression are often accompanied with pressure on governments to liberalise and pluralise; which can also result in internal conflict. It was precisely the pressure on the Habyarimana and Buyoya governments to liberalise and pluralise that frightened the extremist elite to stir up ethnic hatred and commit to genocide. Democratisation is likely to create ethnic conflict in countries with "a population with poor civic and underdeveloped representative and journalistic institutions; and elites who are threatened with democratic change". This is especially so in countries who still bear the legacies of colonial ethnic divisions. Instead a long period of developing institutions must first lay the groundwork for democratisation that does not produce ethnic violence. When describing identity as a knife Helen Hintjens makes the distinction that genocide is not a knife, but rather becomes one. This may be a fundamental point when arguing against the mere suppression of tribal identities. Identity became a knife when the fluid nature of it became fixed; when the colonial state became a bifurcated one; when the post-colonial state sees the question of citizenship transform into an issue of autochthony; and when the collective memory and mythology identifies one group as perennial victims, and the other as the sole perpetrators of violence. In this context merely suppressing identity does not address the fundamental issue of creating a pluralistic state; something that is urgently needed to defuse the "simmering volcano before it blows up yet again, this time engulfing the wider region."