Read my latest story, "The All-Nighter", at 52|250.

A guest post at Racialicious shows how 19th-century divide and conquer tactics constructed the identities that turned deadly in Rwanda in 1994:

Tutsis were the minority then (around 15% of the population) and now. But the difference between Hutu and Tutsi has always been, from what I understand, a false distinction. There wasn’t a perceived difference among Rwandans between Hutu and Tutsi until the late 19th century, when European colonizers (first the Germans, then the Belgians) insisted on that ethnic divide for their own political gains. In the 1930’s, the Belgians went so far as to issue ID cards to all Rwandans identifying them as belonging to one group or the other. In ‘94, Rwandans still carried such cards. And if yours said that you were Tutsi then, it soon became your death certificate, too.

It is unsurprising that it would take a number of generations born with into a society conscious of this divided for the identities to develop into something people would kill over. The avoidance of such horrors is one of many reasons for the necessity of anti-racist work. No matter how far removed it may seem, the possibility of such slaughter lurks everywhere that one racial group denigrates and exploits another, even if it could only happen after a few more generations. Any difference between two groups had this potential, but the differences must be reified in racial terms if not specifically labeled racial before the despeciation required for slaughter can occur. (A different religious sect, for instance, must be seen as wholly and essentially different for this to happen.)

Memorials such as the one Jen describes visiting, however, are not there for people to learn lessons like this, or at least not exclusively. They are there to acknowledge and record the humanity of people whose humanity was denied in truly horrific fashion.

The memorial is in what was once a Catholic church where an estimated 2,500 Tutsis were massacred in April 1994. The Nyamata church is virtually untouched from the time of the killings, with the exception that skeletal remains have been removed. Blood staining the altar, bricks walls, and rafters has never been washed away, and bullet holes perforate the tin ceiling in pretty constellations. The ground is carpeted with the dirt- and blood-soaked garments of the victims. You literally can’t walk through the church without stepping on a murdered person’s clothing.

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