instead a giant plastic bottle of Heineken beer. Apropos of which, and of a pair of stumbling-drunk,
armed policemen we’d recently passed, Deo said, “This is a country of alcoholics now.”
A lot about Bujumbura felt familiar, common to the capitals of impoverished countries: the potholes, the
dust and noise, the hydrocarbon haze, the close calls between pedestrians and vehicles traveling too fast
—“If you drove like this in the States, you would lose your license,” Deo said. “Even in New Jersey.”
But much was strange to me, especially the bicyclists with sheaves of fresh-cut grass heaped on their
backs, processions of them bringing fodder for the herds of cows that milled around the tents and
makeshift huts in the urban camps of the internally displaced. “This is so pitiful,” said Deo. “I mean,
cows in the city. All these are internally displaced cows. Most of the people here just say, ‘Our land has
been taken,’ or ‘We can’t live next to people who killed our families.’” Here was the teeming market.
“It’s still a chaos. Look at this, look at all these people waiting for something, and people really cross the
street without looking. This is mental retardation, right here. People simply don’t care. Oh, see this
cow?” The animal, being led down the street on a rope, had one long horn, but the other was missing. It
must have been knocked off by a taxi, Deo said. “I mean, this is the heart of disorganization, right here.”
Deo remembered, from a previous trip, taking a walk here in Bujumbura with his beloved older brother,
Antoine, and coming upon a corpse. This was back during the war. The body was laid out on top of a
heap of garbage. Deo had yelled at the sight, frightened and appalled. His brother had looked at the
corpse and said, “What’s strange here?” Then he’d looked at Deo and said, “You’ve been away too
long.”
In Bujumbura, Deo told me now, the dreadful had become normal. Just as in some troubled dreams.
His litany of passing sights went on and on: young men racing barefoot down the sidewalks in hopes of
getting a little job unloading a truck; men and women and children washing themselves in the dirty
water of open storm drains. Goats around gas stations; half-destroyed buildings; children playing in
trash heaps; dump pickers. “All these are people who are in misery. This is another abandoned health
center. It’s big, totally abandoned. Public. Of course. Now it’s trash. Look at the destruction. Abandoned
abandoned abandoned.”
He had never liked Bujumbura. Now, he said, he loathed it. The ostentatious corpulence of the well-todo,
the huge gold cross he saw hanging from the neck of a priest—“God knows how many people are
dying in Congo in a bloody war for diamonds, for gold.” A woman with a baby at her breast came up to
our vehicle, begging. He shooed her away, she wouldn’t leave, and he said angrily to her, “Next time I’ll
bring a stick.” It is possible to hate people for their weakness. They can excite your fears about yourself.
I thought that for Deo the begging woman personified the problems of his country, and his fears for it.
He said, as the woman walked away, “I hate these people!” I gathered he was speaking about all his
people. He paused and looked at me and said, “And of course I love them.”
Deo had given me two cautions before our trip. He had said it would be best if I didn’t take notes openly.
And he had told me I must never use the word “genocide” or the terms “Hutu” and “Tutsi” in public.
I had done some reading on the history of those fatal names in Rwanda and Burundi. Who were the
Tutsis, the people who, most scholars write, made up about 14 percent of the populations of both
countries? Who were the roughly 85 percent called Hutus?
There are no simple answers. For decades, ideologues of Hutu or Tutsi supremacy have borrowed or
invented myths about the origins of their ethnic groups. The real history remains uncertain, mainly
because of a lack of records. Even the composition of the two countries’ populations is, as historians say,
“contested.” But there are scholarly hypotheses on the origins of the two groups, and a great deal is
known about their evolution, about how the difference between Hutus and Tutsis became lethal in
Burundi and Rwanda. These, it seemed to me as I read, are the essential facts:
Hutus and Tutsis might once have been separate peoples, maybe several separate peoples, back in
unrecorded days. By the time the European colonists arrived, late in the nineteenth century, Hutus and
Tutsis had a great deal in common: language, religion, and for the most part culture. (Later, they would
come to look much alike as well, at least in general.) There were many exceptions but, very broadly
speaking, the aristocracies of the kingdoms were drawn from the populations of cow-owning Tutsis, and
their inferiors or dependents were predominantly Hutu farmers. (There was a third group in both
kingdoms, called the Twa, usually described as pygmies, who made up about one percent of the
populations and had very low status.) Not all scholars agree that Hutus and Tutsis have ever constituted
“ethnic groups,” but some use the term—to describe two groups that are different because they have
been treated differently and because they believe they are different.
It was the colonizers—first the Germans, then the Belgians—who simplified what had been complex
societies and made the Hutu-Tutsi difference a paramount and rigid fact of life for Rwandans and, to a
lesser degree, for Burundians. The colonizers introduced a racist myth: Tutsis were Caucasians with
black skin who had come from somewhere else—Ethiopia, perhaps—and civilized the native blacks, the
Hutus. In effect, the Europeans altered the societies to fit that myth and to suit their main purpose, which
was to make profits for themselves. The Europeans never occupied Rwanda and Burundi in large
numbers. They kept their expenses down by governing indirectly. They made Tutsis (and in Burundi,
both Tutsis and a small princely class) into their intermediaries. Most Tutsis didn’t benefit, and no doubt
many suffered. As one historian puts it, 90 percent of “ordinary Tutsis” were all but invisible to the
colonists. But Hutus suffered most. Colonial administrative changes made them powerless. They were
completely vulnerable to the demands of the colonizer and to the demands and depredations of the Tutsi
chiefs. They were subject, among many other things, to onerous taxes, to the forced planting of certain
crops, to involuntary, unpaid labor on projects designed by the Belgians and Tutsi chiefs, and to
whippings for disobedience. One result of all this appears to have been periodic famines, and, in
Rwanda, great resentment among Hutus, easily generalized to all Tutsis.
Burundi and Rwanda became independent again in 1962. In both countries, political struggles
accompanied independence, old and new elites vying for control of the state. Ultimately, in both
countries, the contests were organized around ethnicity. But the results were roughly opposite,
mirrorlike. What one scholar calls a “vicious dynamic” was established, “with events in each country
presenting to the other, in a kind of distorted mirror, the proof of its worst fears, its worst nightmare.” In
short, Rwanda and Burundi accentuated each other’s path toward mass violence.
In Rwanda, Hutus took power. The “Hutu Revolution” grew increasingly bloody. Small attacks by Tutsis
in exile led to larger and larger reprisals by the new Hutu authorities. Thousands of Tutsis were killed.
By the middle 1960s, something like 140,000 Rwandan Tutsis had fled to neighboring countries. Ethnic
violence lent strength both to Tutsi supremacists in exile and to ideologues of Hutu power, ascendant
inside Rwanda. Ironically enough, each side adopted parts of the European colonists’ racist myth. To the
Tutsi supremacists, God and nature had chosen them to rule the inferior race of Hutus. To the ideologues
of Hutu power, Tutsis were an alien race that had conquered the Hutus, stolen their lands, and held them
in bondage. After a coup in 1973, a new Rwandan military government allowed Tutsis a small role in
politics. Some Tutsis prospered economically. But they remained potential scapegoats, available when
needed.
In Burundi, by contrast, the postcolonial political struggles weren’t ethnic. Not at first. In Burundi,
social divisions had long been more complex and the barriers among them more permeable than in
Rwanda. In Burundi, it was mainly the small princely class, called the ganwa, whose members fought
each other for power when the Belgians left. But that fight led to the assassination of Prince Rwagasore,
the newly elected prime minister, immensely popular with both Tutsis and Hutus. In his absence, politics
devolved into struggles among the old and a new elite, among ganwa and Hutu and Tutsi, and the
struggles gradually became infected by events in Rwanda. During the Hutu Revolution, many Rwandan
Tutsis fled across the border into northern Burundi. The refugees and the example of the new Rwandan
state terrified Tutsi elites. They feared the loss of power and privilege at best, pogroms and exile at
worst. And the Rwandan example whetted the appetites of some of Burundi’s Hutu elites.
The terms of Burundi’s political competition became simplified into Hutu versus Tutsi. Attempted coups
and killings were perpetrated by both sides. Eventually, a faction of Tutsis deposed the king and took
control. Over the next twenty-seven years, from 1966 to 1993, three Tutsi military governments ruled
Burundi. Power changed hands, through coups, but its geography remained the same. All three of
Burundi’s unelected presidents came from the same town. Two of them were cousins.
Rwanda and Burundi had a lot in common, linguistically, historically, culturally. And from the early
1970s until the early 1990s, their governments also looked similar. Both were military dictatorships.
Both were dominated by cliques from a small region. Each clique ruled for its own benefit, mainly, and
used repression and violence and forms of ethnic politics to hold on to power. That is, both countries
looked like versions of the colonial state.
But they also differed, fundamentally. Indeed, they could stand as a textbook case against the notion that
countries are shaped by the intrinsic qualities of their people. In these two cases at least, the shaping was
done by the competition for power and privilege among a relative few.
In Rwanda, it was competition among Hutus. The winners practiced self-serving government while
claiming to represent the majority. For this, anti-Tutsi prejudice was essential. The government
portrayed itself as a bulwark against the return of alien, Tutsi hegemony, the ever-present threat, which
events in Burundi made entirely plausible.
Burundi’s Tutsi military rulers couldn’t claim to represent the ethnic majority, of course. So they found it
expedient to claim that ethnicity was a colonial invention, that all Burundians were just Burundians,
equal in the eyes of the law. An enlightened-sounding position, completely at odds with the fact that
discrimination against Hutus—and indeed against many Tutsis—was the rule, in education and business,
in the army and the institutions of government. To maintain their power, the various military
governments resorted to violence, considerably more violence than in Rwanda, until the 1990s. The
pattern of bloody Hutu uprisings and even bloodier repressions by the army reached its height in the
slaughter of 1972. This was much more than a reprisal. It was, as one historian writes, a state-sponsored
“selective genocide,” clearly designed to eliminate all potential Hutu leaders, even including children in
secondary school.
The massacre lasted two months. At least 100,000 Hutus were murdered, not a few, it seems, in
ingeniously horrible ways. About 150,000 fled, many across the border to Rwanda. The mass killings of
Hutus in Burundi reaffirmed long-standing fears and anti-Tutsi prejudice among Rwandan Hutus, further
strengthened the position of the ruling faction, and inspired massacres of Rwandan Tutsis and more
flights of Tutsi refugees into Burundi. This in turn justified, for some Burundian Tutsis, both the
slaughter of ’72 and continuing discrimination against Hutus. Meanwhile, Hutu and Tutsi refugees
outside Burundi and Rwanda became some of the principal and angriest keepers of the memories of
massacre and injustice, and their camps became staging areas for opposition movements—most
consequentially, settlements of Rwandan Tutsis in Uganda and of Burundian Hutus in Tanzania. Each
group’s fear of the other ethnic group had long since become a justified reality for everyone in both
countries and, in both, a tool for those in power.
From 1972 until 1988, the years of Deo’s childhood and adolescence, Burundi looked fairly calm on the
surface. The military government and its supporters referred to the bloodbath of ’72 as “the events.”
International donors seemed content with the euphemism and continued sending development aid,
crucial to the very existence of the government and, of course, a principal source of wealth for the few.
But the apparent calmness rested on fear. For years, it is said, “the events” had left many Hutu families
afraid even to send their children to school. As for the top dogs in the government, it may be axiomatic
that those who rule by fear also rule in fear. The government tightened its control over every aspect of
the country’s life. It also made a shambles of the economy, among other ways by creating a bunch of
new state-owned enterprises and with them new opportunities for cronyism and corruption.
The seeming calm ended in 1988, with the revolt and army repression that caused Deo and his family to
spend a week or so hiding in the woods. For once, international donor nations responded. Facing losses
of foreign aid, among many other problems, Burundi’s president instituted reforms, bringing a number
of Hutus into the government. The elections five years later, in 1993, were widely praised by outside
observers, but they also represented a grave threat to Burundian Tutsis with positions in the middle and
lower levels of the government. Many lost their jobs soon after Ndadaye took power, and the loss of a
job often meant rejoining the impoverished masses. For many Tutsis, and many in the military, an end to
