“Good Governance” & “State Failure:” How Colonialism Caused the Rwandan Genocide

On June 4, 1994, Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM) broadcasted the following: “We must fight the inkotanyi. Finish them off. exterminate them. sweep them out of the country ... because there is no refuge, no refuge then! There is none, there is none” (UNICTR, 1994, Transcript excerpt)! The “inkotanyi” in question (roughly translated to “cockroaches” in English) were the Tutsi people, who according to the RTLM were responsible not only for the assasination of Hutu President Habyarimana that same year, but for the entire plight of Hutus over the course of hundreds of years. By mid-May of 1994, roughly 800,000 “inkotanyi” were dead (Ferroggiaro, 2004).  This act of violence and subsequent call for slaughter of the Tutsis reflected a deep, open wound in the fabric of Rwandan society inflicted in the late 1880s by Belgian colonizers. Through the colonial framework of so-called “good governance,”  European powers reorganized Rwandan society along rigid racial and ethnic lines (Mamdani, 2001).  Under Belgian rule, the Tutsi minority were elevated as “superior” and deemed more fit to govern than their Hutu counterparts, resulting in the impoverishment of the greater Hutu population. These colonial policies, like so many others, were justified through the language of order, efficiency, and modernization (Mamdani, 2001). By 1994, these oppressive and manufactured divides between the Tutsi and Hutu peoples had not only polarized Rwanda, but they laid the foundations necessary for genocide.  In this way, the Rwandan Genocide cannot be understood as a random, sporadic eruption of ancient racial hatred, but rather as the cataclysmic result of colonial policy. The intent of this essay is to argue that the Rwandan Genocide was a direct outcome of what Branwen Gruffyd Jones terms “good governance” and colonial conceptualizations of “state failure,” using Mahmood Mamdani’s When Victims Become Killers as a primary analytical framework. 

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