When Blood Red Was Not the Color of Rwanda’s Soil

Back in the year 1879, at about 4 o’clock on a tropical afternoon, a youthful Scottish botanist and adventurer reached the outskirts of a village in unknown East African country far from the coast, and “boldly marched in.” He had little or no idea of what awaited him, but had just celebrated his 22nd birthday and was full of confidence. Young enough to shake off fears of peril, he was, at any rate, aware of his own ignorance, more than could be said of many such explorers.

James Thomson was prepared for surprises. He was given them. But they were not of a kind to match East Africa’s tough and turbulent reputation. The infamous East Coast slave trade was scarcely ended, and what he could expect was misery and mayhem. But Thomson saw what could not be expected. “The scene that opened before me,” he recalled a couple of years later, “I beheld with astonishment: It seemed a perfect Arcadia.” Amid “a magnificent grove of bananas,” he found handsome village huts arranged within the shade of immense sycamores, while everywhere about them “all seeds, garbage and things unsightly” had been carefully cleared away. The village people were resting after their day’s work, enjoying a siesta and gossip before their evening meal, utterly naked as God had made them but “unconscious of any want, and apparently fearing no danger.” They made him welcome.

Thomson traveled far, but found no reason to unsay these opinions of a place and people a few hundred miles south of today’s bedeviled Rwanda and Burundi, where tens of thousands are said to have been killed after the two countries’ leaders died in an airplane crash. Were his opinions those of permissible but unreliable exaggeration? The odd thing is that in the East African interior of those times, beyond and outside the devilish reach of the slaving caravans from the coast, Thomson’s opinions would not have sounded strange to other long-distance wanderers. Indeed, they would have gibed with their own.

Modern historians, looking back before the slave trade and the colonial dispossessions, have not found Arcadia. But nor have they found anything like the hell on Earth that erupts and burns across so much of Africa today. On the contrary, however little to be expected from current affairs, that old Africa had built a world of tolerance and compromise.

If this remains hard to believe, consider only the case of the kingdoms of Rwanda and Burundi lying not far north of Thomson’s route. We have no worthwhile external descriptions before the 1890s, and few until the early 1950s. But then came a notable harvest of hard-headed information on the nature of these kingdoms before the colonial dispossessions. Ethnographers well-respected in their time and place, older than Thomson and infinitely better prepared in their scholarship, described communities of stability and good sense, equipped with laws and customs such that the peoples of these kingdoms, the Tutsi and the Hutu, had been able to live peacefully together, and over a long period.

These ethnographers were working in the midst of a remarkable reassessment of historical Africa that got into its stride after World War II and the onset of decolonization. The task they so fruitfully undertook meant quarrying for dates and sequences, but, more important, they were concerned with the inward and innate process of this unresearched history. They wanted to understand Africa’s cultures in their conceptual and aesthetic dimensions.

This has been an enterprise with many and large enlightenments to its credit, even if the world at large has still to come to terms with its insights. In projecting their findings, the historians have had one great difficulty: that of steering between the Scylla of being suspected of spinning fairy tales, and the Charybdis of writing with such difficulty--admittedly on difficult matters--as to be unreadable or, at any rate, unread. Admirably often, however, they have brought their cargoes of unfamiliar knowledge safely into port.

Perhaps healthily, skepticism on all this stays vividly alive. It seems to be hard even for sympathetic readers to accept that the influence of centuries of African pre-colonial development, political or social or aesthetic, must have a therapeutic value for the solving of present ills. Yet, the evidence goes in that sense. On the crucial issue of controls on the abuse of power, for example, or on the efficacy of systems of conciliation between neighboring peoples, the experience of the African past does indeed, and repeatedly, point to attitudes and concepts, and even to instrumentalities, that may usefully apply in the ferocious conflicts of today.

A frequently heard reply to this is that there were, in fact, no such concepts and principles outside the reach of heated imagination, or else, at best, those old modalities of reconciliation were no more than rustic folklore. And yet today, there are the examples of Rwanda and Burundi, as described by our ethnographers of long years ago. What they made perfectly clear is that the twin peoples of these now ravaged countries, the Hutu and the Tutsi, did in fact achieve, centuries before any European arrival, the development of an effective system of mutual rights and duties, and one that long stayed intact.

Today, after some 90 years of colonial dictatorship and post-colonial confusion, all that well-tried tolerance seems entirely swept away, its old structures unrecoverable and its old social and artistic amenities banished from the scene, while years may pass before current passions of hatred are assuaged. The certain fact is that it was not so in pre-colonial times. With no more than the frailties and abrasions of everyday experience, these two peoples lived together in cultures of a flexible amity such as can be barely imagined now.

In that past, however simple in its material capacities, the Tutsi and the Hutu shared life together, depended upon one another, intermarried with each other, and upheld beliefs in a valued co-existence. How and why they were able to do this, and by means of what ideas and beliefs, must surely compose a body of knowledge that may inspire new hope in the miseries of now.*