ADALBERT: Basically, Hutus and Tutsis had been playing dirty tricks on one another since 1959. That was the word from our elders. In the evenings, Primus in hand, they called the Tutsis weaklings, too high and mighty. So Hutu children grew up asking no questions, listening hard to all this nastiness about Tutsis.
After 1959 the oldsters jabbered in the cabarets about eliminating all the Tutsis and their herds of trampling cows. That came up often around the bottle: it was a familiar concern to them, like the crops or other business matters. We young people made fun of their old-folks grumbling, but we didn’t mind it.
All through his youth, a Hutu could certainly choose a Tutsi friend, hang out and drink with him, but he could never trust him. For a Hutu, a Tutsi might always be a deceiver. He would act nice and seem obliging, but underneath he was constantly scheming. He had to be a natural target of suspicion.
JEAN-BAPTISTE: Hutus have always reproached Tutsis for their great height and for trying to use this to rule. Time has never dried up that bitterness. In Nyamata, as I told you, people said that Tutsi women seemed too slender to stay on our hills, that their skin was smooth from their secret drinking of milk, that their fingers were too delicate to grab a hoe, and all that foolishness.
In truth, Hutus noticed none of that hearsay in the Tutsi women of their neighborhood, who bent their backs beside the Hutu wives and lugged water home the same way they did. Yet
Hutus enjoyed repeating such common talk. They would also murmur that a Hutu with a Tutsi wife, like me, was trying to show off.
They took pleasure in spreading the most unlikely rubbish so as to drive a thin wedge of discord between the two ethnic groups. The important thing was to keep a distance between them and try to aggravate the situation. For example, on the first day of school the teacher had to call out the background of every pupil, so that the Tutsis would feel timid about taking their seats in a class of Hutus.
IGNACE: If a Hutu youth wanted to marry a Tutsi girl, his family would refuse to mark off a section of its banana plantation for him to gather his personal harvest and feed his family. If a Tutsi youth wanted to marry a Hutu girl, his family would refuse to cut him out even one or two cows from the herd to begin breeding for the future. That way young people in both camps saw no interest in spending time together.
Hatred flourished in the fields because the plots of land were not large enough for two ethnic groups.
FULGENCE: Actually, Hutus did not detest Tutsis as much as that. Not enough to kill them all, anyway. Evil spells much worse than stubborn hatred meddled in this ethnic rivalry and sent us into those marshes. Lack of land, for example—we spoke seriously about that among ourselves. We could clearly see we would soon run out of fertile fields. We told ourselves that our children would have to leave one by one, seeking land over by Gitarama or farther away, toward Tanzania. Otherwise they would come under obligation to the Tutsis on their own hill, and we might see the confiscation of crops we ourselves had sown.
From what we learned from the old folks, we might even be
compelled to work clearing ground, tending stock, or doing masonry, as in the time of the mwamis. Forced, unpaid labor—that could pinch a farmer way beyond reason.
PIO: Maybe we did not hate all the Tutsis, especially our neighbors, and maybe we did not see them as wicked enemies. But among ourselves we said we no longer wanted to live together. We even said we did not want them anywhere around us anymore, and that we had to clear them from our land. It’s serious, saying that—it’s already sharpening the machete.
Me, I don’t know why I started detesting Tutsis. I was young, and what I liked most was soccer: I played on the Kibungo team with Tutsis my own age, we passed the ball around without any hitch. I never noticed any unease in their company. Hatred just showed up at killing time; I latched on to it through imitation, to fit in.
LÉOPORD: It is awkward to talk about hatred between Hutus and Tutsis, because words changed meaning after the killings. Before, we could fool around among ourselves and say we were going to kill them all, and the next moment we would join them to share some work or a bottle. Jokes and threats were mixed together. We no longer paid heed to what we said. We could toss around awful words without awful thoughts. The Tutsis did not even get very upset. I mean, they didn’t draw apart because of those unfortunate discussions. Since then we have seen: those words brought on grave consequences.
ALPHONSE: During the dry seasons of early childhood, the Hutu hears grown-ups repeating that Tutsis take up too many plots of land, that we cannot fight poverty in this situation, that those people are too in the way. Then the words are forgotten
after abundant harvests. But the child grows used to this grumbling.
Even sitting next to a muddy little Tutsi, a Hutu child feels a natural jealousy of the other child, sees him as a show-off. He gets used to following his parents’ lead. Afterward, when a problem arises, he no longer looks it full in the face, he prefers to glare at the Tutsi who just happens to be passing by.
PANCRACE: The radios were yammering at us since 1992 to kill all the Tutsis; there was anger after the president’s death and a fear of falling under the rule of the inkotanyi. But I do not see any hatred in all that.
The Hutu always suspects that some plans are cooking deep in the Tutsi character, nourished in secret since the passing of the ancien régime. He sees a threat lurking in even the feeblest or kindest Tutsi. But it is suspicion, not hatred. The hatred came over us suddenly after our president’s plane crashed. The intimidators shouted, “Just look at these cockroaches—we told you so!” And we yelled, “Right, let’s go hunting!” We weren’t that angry; more than anything else, we were relieved.
IGNACE: I do not know if killing Tutsis is different from killing non-Tutsis, since we have no experience of that. In Rwanda, if we don’t meet a brother Hutu, we meet a Tutsi, since the Twa pygmies are invisible in their forests and the whites are white. In harmony, in discord, it is impossible for us to encounter ordinary people, like us, who are not Tutsis. What I mean is, in private killings or bigger ones, all we know is killing Tutsis.
ÉLIE: In the cities, many Hutus envied the Tutsi women they could not have, because of their tall, slim figures, their polished features, and their fashionable ways of serving family meals or
dressing for ceremonies. And yet on the hills, the Hutus could see for themselves that the women all grew weary together out in the fields. I don’t know of any farmer who went to ask for a tall girl from a Tutsi neighbor for his son, so I don’t know of anyone who was refused.
The cows and the land are what came before the jealousies about looks. Especially the cows, because the Tutsis had the habit of herding them together so you couldn’t count anymore which were whose. They never wanted to admit how many they owned—not to their wives, or their sons, or the authorities. Us, we would see the herds going by, hidden in the thickets, tended by cowherds in rags, and it would eat at us. On the hills, secrets about possessions are dangerous.
ADALBERT: There are people like me who bad-mouthed the Tutsis easily. We repeated what we had been hearing for a long time. We called them arrogant, fussy, even spiteful. But we saw no such arrogance or haughty manners when we were together in the choir or at the market. Not even in the cabarets or on the banana plantations if a help-out came up.
The oldsters all had a hand in muddling things between us, but they did it in good faith, so to speak. Afterward the radios exaggerated to get us all fired up. “Cockroaches,” “snakes”—it was the radios that taught us those words. The evil-mindedness of the radios was too well calculated for us to oppose it.
ALPHONSE: As to the Tutsis’ fancy manners, I believe that in the end we were used to them. It was all the same to us, that gossip about dainty fingers and peculiarities of the sort. I do not believe the cows presented a truly hateful problem, or else we could just have slaughtered cows. I do not believe our hearts detested the
Tutsis. But it was inevitable to think so, since the decision was made by the organizers to kill them all.
To kill so many human beings without wavering, we had to hate with no second thoughts. Hatred was the only emotion allowed for the Tutsis. The killings were too well managed to leave us room for any other feelings.