CHAPTER 3: DURING THE GENOCIDE
3.4. Narratives underlying genocide
3.4.3. Cultural narratives
Taylor suggests that specific forms of violence were used repeatedly during the genocide because certain deeply embedded narratives were written onto the bodies of victims by perpetrators. He suggests that within this cultural narrative, the genocide of Tutsi was a ‘massive ritual of purification’ whose roots lie in pre- colonial sacred kingship practices (2001, 101). These include impaling,
evisceration of pregnant woman, forced incest, forced cannibalism of family members, widespread killing of victims at roadblocks, the severing of Achilles’
tendons, emasculation of men, and breast oblation of women (2001, 105).
These violent practices, Taylor argues, relate to Rwandan cognitive models of illness which he studied in the 1980s which are based on the idea of blockage and flow. “Popular healing aims at restoring bodily flows that have been perturbed by human negligence and malevolence. Bodily fluids such as blood, semen, breast milk, and menstrual blood, are a recurrent concern as is the passage of ailments through the digestive tract” (Taylor, 2001, 112). He recounts a story that illustrates how the flow/blockage symbolism starts at birth: Mother and child are secluded for a period of nine days (today it is shorter), during which time the child is examined for anal malformations. Then the child is presented to the family, and given a name. Children are present at this occasion, are given their favourite food, and bestow a nick-name on the baby. The meal given to the children is called kurya ubunyano which means ‘to eat the baby’s excrement’ ‘for Rwandans say that a tiny quantity of the baby’s faecal matter is mixed with the food’ (2001, 114).
“This appellation celebrates the fact that the baby’s body has been found to be an ‘open conduit’, an adequate vessel for perpetuating the process of
‘flow’. In a sense, that baby’s faeces are its first gift and the members of his
age class are its first recipients. The children at the ceremony incorporate the child into their group by symbolically ingesting one of his bodily
products. Their bestowal of a name upon the infant manifests their acceptance of the child as a social being” (2001, 114).
He goes on to describe how if the baby’s anal passage was blocked, it could receive but not give, and therefore be unable to socially participate in reciprocity.
A moral person would be one who could reciprocate – to receive and to give or pass on; to ingest and to excrete. This makes the mouth and the anus important (2001, 114).
That which prevents flow is seen to be malevolent. According to Hutu extremist ideology, Tutsi were seen as ‘eaters of our sweat’, ‘weight upon our backs’,
‘invaders from Ethiopia’, and so Taylor argues that Tutsi were perceived as
‘blocking beings’, blocking the nation from its pure, unified Hutu-ness (2001, 140).
During the genocide, Taylor describes how these metaphors of blockage and flow characterized the entire genocide, from the way violent torture was focused on the digestive and reproductive system, to the severing of tendons, to the thousands of roadblocks, to the throwing of bodies into rivers.
On this latter point, he makes reference to the aforementioned speech by Mugesera, for the Tutsi to return to Ethiopia through being thrown into the
Nyabarongo river. Taylor describes how the river played an important ‘restorative and purifying role’, where the ‘blocking agents’ could be excreted into and washed away. He uses the term ‘excreted’ in the belief that the ‘blocking’ Tutsi were seen as excrement, supported by the fact that victims were regularly thrown, either dead or alive, into latrines (2001, 130).
Roadblocks formed an integral part of preventing people from escaping. At roadblocks, Hutus were forced to do their civic ‘duty’, of torturing and murdering Tutsi trying to escape. However, Taylor points out that these roadblocks were so closely placed together as to become redundant and argues that their purpose was again rooted in cultural symbolism – blocking the path. This links with the cutting of tendons, which Medicins Sans Frontiers described as the most common wound they encountered. Not only those who would run away, but even those too
young or old to run, were wounded in this way. “As with barriers on paths and roadways, there is a deeper generative scheme that subtends both the killers’
intentionality and the message inscribed on the bodies of their victims … Power, in this instance, in symbolic terms, derives from the capacity to obstruct” (Tayor, 2001, 135).
The effectiveness of ethnic ‘purification’ lay with these roadblocks, which prevented Tutsi, or even Hutu that looked like Tutsi, from escaping the country.
These roadblocks were erected by the interehamwe, police, neighbourhood protection groups, the Rwandan government army (FAR) and even by the RPF, in the areas they controlled (Taylor, 2001, 130). Taylor describes the barriers as
“ritual and liminal spaces where ‘obstructing beings’ were to be obstructed in their turn and cast out of the nation … They were scenes of inordinate cruelty” (2001, 131). He speaks of people paying to be killed quickly, and how many were intentionally mortally wounded but not killed, left to slowly die amongst the corpses. All Hutu civilians were expected to fulfill their civic ‘duty’ at the
roadblock. In her autobiography, Beatrice Umutesi describes how her brother’s lapse in this civic duty almost resulted in the death of the entire family and that he eventually gave in to spending the nights there to save the people under his care.
It was in this way that every Hutu civilian was implicated in the killings, even if they had no desire to participate (2004, 56).
Other forms of violence included impalement, which obstructs the bodily conduit, and emasculation and breast oblation, which were both practiced during earlier periods of Rwandan history and point towards a preoccupation with the
reproductive system and parts of the body that produce fertility fluids (Taylor, 2001, 140). Repeated rape, and forced incest bring about the image of
misdirected flows. “Not only were the victimized brutalised and dehumanized by this treatment – their bodies were transformed into icons of asociality, for incest constitutes the pre-emption of any possible alliance or exchange relation that might have resulted from the union of one’s son or daughter with the son or daughter of another family” (Taylor, 2001, 141).
Thus, Taylor argues, Hutu extremists blocked flows as a sign of power through roadblocks and cutting of tendons, and further inscribed on the bodies of their
victims their identity as ‘blocking agents’ through impalement, emasculation, breast oblation, forced incest and rape. As would have been the case in pre- colonial Rwandan society, obstructers were sacrificed to purify the nation.
“Sacrifice took the form of interdicting the flight of Tutsi, obstructing the conduits of their bodies, impeding their bodies’ capacity for movement, subverting the ability of Tutsi to socially or biologically reproduce, and in many instances, turning their bodies into icons of their imagined moral flaws – obstruction” (Taylor, 2001. 145).
It can thus be seen that much of what happened during the genocide was
grounded in the historical narratives described in chapter two and in this section.
The Hamitic hypothesis brought by the colonials and internalized by Rwandans allowed for the dehumanization of the other. The ‘revolution’ narrative fed both fears of renewed subjugation and a sense of entitlement to hold onto power by whatever means. The cultural narratives described by Taylor shed some light on the way in which genocide was executed, and again draws from hundreds of years of Rwandan history. These deeply embedded narratives were used by politicians to manipulate and destroy people for their own political agendas.