(Source : Rwanda, racisme et l’idéologie hamitique – J.P Chrétien, M Kabanda)
As early as the end of the Middle Ages, European texts evoked the existence of an earthly paradise in central Africa. Light-skinned men would live there, in a “great Ethiopia” that would extend to the sources of the Nile, the Congo and the Zambezi. These populations, identified as “light-skinned”, were perceived in advance as “non-blacks”. This was the beginning of the “Hamite” racist interpretation of the “Bantu”.
The Table of Nations. Genealogy of the sons of Noah and their geographical scattering after the flood. Elisée. Palestine. In Man and Earth.
Africa, Science and the Bible
August Knobel, professor at the University of Giessen, explains in a summary published in 1850 that the “Hamites” (he’s thinking of populations in Ethiopia, Nubia or southern Arabia), despite their “dark color”, belong, like the “Japhetites and Semites” (in reference to Japheth and Shem, brothers of Ham according to Genesis, the first book of the Bible), to the great “Caucasian branch”. “Negroes” (the term is quoted here from its original source and it was used to refer to what was suggested as “negroid” physical characteristics of Sub-Saharan Africans), he insists, are an “entirely different human race”. The benchmark of this thinking in France is Ernest Renan, who proposes that languages that are neither “Semitic” nor “Negro” should be called “Chamitic”.
Theorizing “races in Africa”: the “true” and “false blacks”
As Europeans “explored” the continent south of the Sahara, we also witnessed a growing interest in the physical diversity of the African people. This immediately led to the classification and hierarchization of what was seen as “African races”. Dr. Virey provides us with a key to this idea of “hierarchy”. According to him, there existed “proud” and “good looking” blacks who were “naturally” pastoral and “conquerors”.
The commentary accompanying these dubious generalizations is significant: “These people are less well known than the negroes, because the trade is not conducted among them as it is on the west coast of Africa, and the Cafre is mutinous and impatient with slavery”. The link between the image of the “negro” and that of the slave is clear. When Europeans were confronted with societies untouched by the Atlantic slave trade, they felt they were in the presence of superior races, as if West Africans had a natural vocation for servitude.
In his Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines (Essay on the inequality of human races), Gobineau also put forward the hypothesis of an ancient “white flow”, 5,000 years B.C., which would be at the origin of all civilizing features in Africa. Gobineau calls this “civilizing” migration “Chamite”.
East Africa at the Gates of Asia: The Hamite-Semitic Fantasy
In 1904, German lieutenant Moritz Merker published a monograph on the Masai. Contrasting these “slim, fine-featured and sympathetic” people with the “rugged Negroes with the physiognomy of a lump”. He saw them as “a lost tribe of Israel”, a subtitle he had initially thought of. For him, they were Semites who had been living in the region for millennia.
C.G. Seligman’s Races of Africa was regularly reprinted from 1930 to 1966 and, translated into French by Georges Montandon, himself a racialist anthropologist (and future expert on the “identification” of Jews for the Vichy regime), and was published in a well-known scientific collection by Payot from 1935 to 1957. The most famous sentence in this reference work on Africanism is unambiguous: “The civilizations of Africa are the civilizations of the Hamites […] [who] were pastoral Caucasoids who arrived wave after wave, better armed and quicker-witted than the dark-skinned Negro farmers”.
From Somatic Comparisons to Racial Hypotheses
The “Batutsi” and “Bahima” are credited with superior intelligence, to the point of being described as the “Japanese of Africa”. A Protestant missionary described them as “very advanced in everything compared to Africans in general”. But their morality is questioned, insofar as they combine intelligence and pride with “cunning”. The belief that colonized people are cunning is a popular cliché.
John Speke presents the idea of a Galla origin for the Bahima and Batutsi as a “personal theory”. According to him, Galla pastoralists from Saudi Arabia would have dominated the Abyssinian farmers and founded the Ethiopian Empire before repeating the operation to the sources of the White Nile. The history of the Great Lakes region becomes that of a second Ethiopia, where these nomads would have once again subjugated masses of farmers, forgetting their Christianity in order to adapt to the local trends. This thesis was adopted by all the explorers: Speke, Baker, Stanley, Baumann, Von Götzen, Johnston.
Henry Morton Stanley and his slave/adopted child “Kalulu” (Source: Wikipedia)
The explorer Stanley writes that the inhabitants of Rwanda, are “greedy, wicked, deceitful and treacherous”. They are “bad people” because “they have never allowed an Arab to trade in their country”. In other words, the natives who resist have a noncompliant mentality, not conforming to the pre-established portrait of the submissive African. Paradoxically, these groups, who were soon to be labelled “Hamitic”, were thus included in the first wave of civilizers who had come to awaken the indolent black people, prefiguring, as it were, legitimate European domination. At the same time, the Hima and Tutsi groups were essentially identified with a ruling social stratum: “an upper class among the Negroes”, as Stanley summed up in an 1889 letter to the Royal Geographical Society of London.
The “Hima-Tutsi” as part of a Biblical Plan: Former Christians gone astray of African Jews?
In 1920, Father Gorju, a French missionary who had been present in south-western Uganda since 1895 and would later become the first Vicar Apostolic of Burundi, from 1922 to 1937, developed similar considerations. The Muhima, he writes, is the product of a “Semitic-Hamite crossbreeding”, which took place in particular on the Abyssinian plateau, “a veritable hodgepodge of peoples” through the “encounter of Khush with the Semite”. He emphasizes the Jewish influence.
What archeological and linguistic sources have to say
The formation of the settlement, from multiple human groups from the north, east and west, is an extremely ancient story, about which oral traditions are by definition silent. This situation has nothing to do with the migrations of the Masai from the north to the south of the Rift Valley between the 16th and 18th centuries, or with the expansion of the Mossi of Burkina Faso in the 14th and 15th centuries. This did not prevent early European “observers” from interpreting the social divide between herders and farmers in racial terms, referring to the former as “Hamites” and reserving the term “Bantu” for the latter, despite the fact that they all spoke the same Bantu language. This ideology would lead directly to the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, as well as to the widespread racism and ethnicism in the wider region and its diasporas.