European Theories on Rwandan Immigration and Settlement

1The source: an explorer's "discovery" of 1863

In unit 5 you met John Hanning Speke, the first European to see Lake Victoria. In his Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile (1863) he wrote that, among the peoples of the Great Lakes, he had found a "superior race" of "men who were as unlike as they could be from the common order of the natives", whom he believed had come from Ethiopia. Among the peoples he placed in this "race" were the Tutsi.

Analyse it. What was Speke's evidence? Only what people looked like to him, his reading of the Bible, and stories told by some ruling families about founders who had come from the north. He depended on interpreters and never entered Rwanda. He did not test his idea; he started from the belief, common among Europeans of his time, that Africans could not have built complex states on their own, so any impressive kingdom must have been founded by outsiders who were closer to Europeans. This lesson examines that belief, the theories that grew from it, and why they are false.

2Three European theories

3Why did Europeans believe it, and why did it spread?

• Racism: Europeans who believed themselves superior could not credit Africans with an impressive state such as Rwanda, so they invented outsiders to explain it.
• Science of the time: race science was taught in European universities until the mid-20th century; Seligman's book kept the theory unchanged in new editions into the 1960s.
• Usefulness to colonisers: a "natural" ruling group made indirect rule look scientific (lesson 2).
• Usefulness to a Rwandan elite: Human Rights Watch shows that, as Europeans favoured the Tutsi elite in the late 1920s and early 1930s, court poets and historians supplied information that fitted the theory, producing "a sophisticated and convincing but inaccurate history". Packaged in Europe, it returned to Rwanda through schools and seminaries, and was accepted by many Rwandans of all categories.

From the 1960s a new generation of scholars, foreign and Rwandan, overturned this history, showing that Hutu and Tutsi had built the Rwandan state together. But the myth lived on outside universities. After 1959, and in the propaganda of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi, its claim that Tutsi were "foreigners" was turned against all Tutsi.