Contemporary Africa has been the theater for a genocide, and a great many Africans find it hard to understand or accept this. It will take a long time for them to come to terms with such a reality, just as it took an inordinately long time for Europeans and Americans to come to terms with the Jewish genocide.
Even more Africans deny the African origin of the Rwandan genocide, arguing that it is a tragedy fomented elsewhere, as Berthe claims: “The case of Rwanda goes beyond African customs. An African massacres from anger or hunger in the belly. Or he slaughters just enough to seize diamonds or a suchlike prize. He does not massacre with a full belly and a peaceful heart on hills covered with bean fields, like the interahamwe, who I believe mislearned a lesson from elsewhere, outside of Africa. I do not know who planted the idea of the genocide. No, I am not saying it was the colonists. Truly I do not know who, but it was not an African.”
Here, however, her judicious, generous, and open-minded intelligence fails her through lack of historical perspective. All genocides go beyond customs, be they European, American, Asian, or African. And those who thought that Africa’s wealth of flourishing cultures, ancestral wisdom, permissive traditions, and appetite for life would protect it from the danger of genocide were wrong.
I could use this comment about the universality of genocide to update some age-old questions: in the place of Pio, Fulgence,
Pancrace, and the others in the gang, what would Europeans or Americans have done? What would we have dared to do, or refused to do? What would have happened to us? But there is no point to those questions, not so much because we cannot get inside the skin of bean farmers on a hill in Rwanda, but because we cannot imagine being born and growing up under such a despotic, ethnocentric regime, and because outside of a few individuals secure in their courage and moral strength, most of us would come up with something like, “We would have slacked off, lagged far behind the group, and not dirtied our machetes”—privately hoping for better, without dispelling an iota of doubt.
Instead, let us replace the questions with a few observations. In postwar Germany, throughout forty years of trials of Nazi criminals, not one defense lawyer could cite a single case of a German who was severely punished for refusing to kill an unarmed Gypsy or Jew. During the operations of that 101st Battalion of police reservists, according to Christopher Browning, not one policeman was punished for refusing to shoot. (He estimates that 80 to 90 percent of the five hundred reservists did follow orders.)
In Rwanda the massacres were over too quickly for the administration implementing the genocide to hold trials and condemn anyone who refused to kill. True, tens of thousands of Hutus were murdered because of their moral objections to the slaughter, but no examples have surfaced of someone arrested simply for refusing to kill, except in very specific cases: spouses in mixed marriages or people accused of having hidden Tutsis. In Kibungo, Ntarama, Kanzenze, and throughout the commune of Nyamata, anyone who publicly opposed the genocide, by word or deed, risked being executed or condemned to kill a victim on the spot. Everybody had to participate in some way, to be involved in the killings, destruction, and looting, or to contribute
monetarily. Still, I repeat: no one was seriously threatened with physical harm for reluctance to use a machete on a Tutsi. And though it was possible to “resist” through auxiliary activities, exceptions, and simple shirking, the estimates of the number of killers in Nyamata are almost beyond belief.
Christine, daughter of a Tutsi father and a Hutu mother, tries to explain it this way: “I think someone who was forced to kill wanted his neighbors to have to kill, too, so they would all be considered the same. Compared to your neighbor who killed every day, you could seem lazy or recalcitrant and a really bad helper, but you did have to show yourself worthy by reddening your hands that one time.”
To understand the voluntary service of the thugs of the Third Reich, which was often most astounding outside Germany, historians and philosophers make much of the formidable discipline that a totalitarian state can impose upon its citizens; the effectiveness of constant and insidious propaganda; and above all, the power of social conformity in situations of fear and crisis (not to be confused with conditions during a war, which on the contrary can sometimes completely destroy social cohesion and conformity). But these arguments are not enough to explain the killing machine described by Christine. At some time in their history, Russians, Spaniards, Argentines, Romanians, Iraqis, and many other peoples have experienced the efficiency of machines designed to destroy the human spirit—machinery created by Stalin, Franco, Videla, Ceau
escu, Hussein, dictators who gained from their populations massive submission, renunciation, a kind of debasement, and a tolerance for denunciation, but who never raised enthusiastic processions of ordinary people who every day went singing off to work as killers.
escu, Hussein, dictators who gained from their populations massive submission, renunciation, a kind of debasement, and a tolerance for denunciation, but who never raised enthusiastic processions of ordinary people who every day went singing off to work as killers.If historians and philosophers were to gloss over the exceptional, irrational nature of genocide, they would risk appearing
ambiguous, even hurtful insofar as they might encourage pessimism and bigotry or, worse, spread the foulest social plague of all: cynicism. The simplest definition of this exceptional nature of genocide comes from Jean-Baptiste Munyankore, a teacher in Ntarama for forty-three years: “The things that happened in Nyamata, in the churches, in the marshes, and on the hills, were the abnormal actions of perfectly normal people.”
Or from Sylvie, who observes, “If you linger too long in fear of genocide, you lose hope. You lose what you have managed to salvage from life. You risk contamination from a different madness. When I think about the genocide, in moments of calm, I mull over where to put it properly away in life, but I find no place. I simply mean to say, it is no longer anything human.”