Africa's murderous professors.

• Author: Chege, Michael

In his much-praised History of the Jews, Paul Johnson reminds us that through the ages European "anti-Semitism was fueled not just by vulgar rumor but by the deliberate propaganda of intellectuals." This was a pattern that reached its apogee in the murderous mind of the Nazis, whose genocidal impulse was amply decorated and abetted by a phalanx of "scientific" and intellectual justification. Indeed, this is one of the reasons that the Holocaust still exerts a dark fascination over us, for it represented a "civilized" barbarity on a scale that had hitherto been thought impossible.

The phenomenon is not merely historical, nor is it limited to Europeans and Jews. Sub-Saharan Africa is today the site of genocides recently attempted, as well as those in what may be their planning stages. But, it is widely assumed, these matters are different - primitive "tribal" affairs, carried out with spears or garden tools, not gas chambers. While, certainly, there are differences, there are also striking similarities. Conspicuous among these is the key role played by intellectuals, and the active complicity of the most sophisticated strata of several African societies in fomenting, planning, supporting, and participating in mass murder.

This should not surprise us. Barrington Moore pointed out thirty years ago that, under approximately similar social conditions, proto-fascist ideas and their institutional attire could be found in less industrialized societies as well as in modern Western ones.(1) He pointed to the Black Hundreds movement of czarist Russia, the Nohon-shugi movement in turn-of-the-century Japan, and similar, if more feeble, movements in imperial China and colonial India.

On the African continent, South Africa's white supremacist Afrikaner Broederbond - whose stormtroopers marched to the drum of the Hitlerian Brown Shirts in the late 1930s and '40s - and its doctrine of apartheid were instances of this political phenomenon. Eventually, too, black African leaders, their intellectual propagandists in tow, made their own contributions to infamy. Today, there is genuine cultural diversity in the gallery of twentieth-century political demonology, the late arrival of black fascism providing the ultimate testimony that political sin, as with all other kinds of sin and virtue, truly knows no color.

A Rwandan Autopsy

Rwanda, a small, hilly, agricultural country tucked in the middle of the African continent, is composed of two main ethnic groups: Hutus, who until recently made up 74 percent of the population, and Tutsis, who made up 24 percent - the total estimated at 7.6 million in 1993. (What the precise figures are today, it is impossible to say.) Two of the most authoritative sources on the events leading to the 1994 genocide of the Tutsis show clearly that the most effective mobilization tool for the killings was the propagation of a mythology of Hutu ethnic supremacy and supposedly innate Tutsi evilness, spread mostly through radio and a variety of mass-circulation publications.(2) This mythology rested on a pseudo-science of local ethnic stereotypes and African eugenics - the Hutu version of Nazi "science" - propagated by Rwanda's Hutu intellectual elite.

Other factors clearly played a significant role in the catastrophe: a menacing insurgency, population pressure, external arms deliveries to rival sides, chicanery and lack of nerve by leading Western states, and dereliction of duty by international civil servants supposedly responsible for peacekeeping in the country.(3) But none of these factors, many of them present elsewhere where no mass murder has occurred or is likely, explains the Rwandan genocide: a clear case in which a carefully packaged and widely disseminated doctrine of ethnic hatred played the major role.

The background to the Rwandan genocide is not hard to describe. In 1959, rural Hutus mounted a revolution, overthrowing the Belgian-backed, colonial-era Tutsi monarchy, forcing many Tutsi monarchists and loyalists into exile in neighboring Uganda and Zaire. Local elections in 1960 cemented a Hutu majority in the National Assembly, and a 1961 referendum formally abolished the Tutsi monarchy. Then, in 1973, a coup d'etat installed Juvenal Habyarimana as president, leading to rule by a predominantly Hutu ethnocracy.

Hutu rule was first threatened in 1990, when the offspring of the Tutsis exiled to Uganda in the 1959 revolution organized an insurgency in the north. The corrupt and demoralized Rwandan National Army was no match for the growing Tutsi guerrilla forces - the Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) - as they drew closer to the capital, Kigali, and briefly occupied the second largest city of Ruhengeri in January 1991. Reluctantly, the government was forced to the conference table with the rebels. Negotiations might have ended in a compromise in October 1993 but for the determination of a group of Hutu intellectuals and extremists to keep the Tutsis out of power at all costs.

The catechism of the madness that soon overtook Rwanda was authored not by some African magician extolling the supremacy of the Hutu race in ancient "tribal" wars, but by accomplished Rwandan professional historians, journalists, and sociologists at the service of a quasi-traditionalist and genocidally inclined cabal. Composed of the Akazu faction of the Hutu ruling class, from President Habyarimana's Gisenyi region, this elite group was hell-bent on resisting the liberalizing effects of a nascent democratic pluralism that had raised the level of individual liberties and free enterprise in recent years - but that had in so doing threatened Akazu power.

The Akazu's resistance to that threat was sufficiently persuasive and sophisticated to mobilize for murder otherwise genial Hutu peasants, with shrill calls for Tutsi extermination disseminated via the print and electronic media.(4) Under the editorship of one Hassan Ngeze, the newspaper Kangura listed the "Hutu ten commandments" that decreed social isolation of the "evil" Tutsis, and abominated cross-ethnic marriage for polluting "pure Hutu." "By the way", mused the Hutu-edited La Medaille magazine in February 1994, "the Tutsi race could be extinguished."

The most virulent and effective incitement to hatred and violence, however, was repeatedly broadcast by Radio/Television Libre des Mille Collines, and was commissioned by Hutu extremists with official connivance in July 1993. By early 1994 the Hutu propaganda mill was requesting that its sympathizers "reach for the...