11-24-2006, 07:17 PM
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>RACIST THEORY BEHIND GENOCIDE IN AFRICA</b>
<i>An African version of the infamous Aryan invasion theory propagated by missionaries and colonial rulers triggered the Hutu-Tutsi massacres </i>
Pankaj Saksena
(Edited with comments by N.S. Rajaram)
<b>Editor's introduction</b>: Most Indians are familiar with the Aryan invasion theory and its political misuse. Some are familiar also with its demolition by science, especially genetics, and the recent British admission that it was a political ploy used by them in their policy of divide and rule. While the theory has been fully discredited, some Western academics and their Indian followers are clinging to it out of concern for their academic survival. This was what was really behind the recent controversy over the California school curriculum. What most Indians, however, don't know is that the Aryan-Dravidian racial divide was only one instance of the colonial-missionary tactic of divide and rule combined with divide and convert.
A similar artificial division created in Africa was to have horrific consequences. The recent Hutu-Tutsi conflicts in which millions of lives were lost was a direct result of such a tactic applied by academics, colonial bureaucrats and missionaries as Pankaj Saksena's following account describes. (N.S.R.)
The concept of the Aryan invasion theory being the handiwork of British colonialists for the sake of proving the superiority of the European Caucasian races is not an isolated case. There exist similar theories in other parts of the world involving other nations and other (imaginary) ethnic groups as the following shows. One has to wonder why it has received so little attention from scholars. (Perhaps they are worried that their dubious record would be further damaged by the exposure of more such skeletons in their already rotten closet.)
When we look at the map of middle Africa, we see two little countries named Rwanda and Burundi, bordering on Zaire (or the Democratic Republic of Congo). The name Rwanda brings to mind in a flash the image of ethnic violence, civil war, military juntas and genocide on a horrific scale. Few Indians know the recent history of these unfortunate countries or the cause of their tragic history. As reported in the Western media, these countries are inhabited by two supposedly different ethnic groups, the so-called Hutus and Tutsis. The ethnic composition of these two countries is as follows.
Rwanda:Â Â Â Â Â Hutu 84%, Tutsi 15%, Twa (Pygmies) 1%
Burundi:Â Â Â Â Â Â Hutu 85%, Tutsi 14%, Twa 1%
In other words, their compositions hardly differ at all. But according to Western anthropologists, mainly colonial bureaucrats and missionaries, the Tutsies are supposed to be a Hamitic people, a race that was often intermixed with the whiter races of the North, notably from Ethiopia and Egypt, which in their turn were intermixed with some West Asiatic people, mainly the Hittites, by repeated invasions from the North. These people, the Tutsis, are supposed to have arrived from the North and not native to Rwanda.
<i>(The analogy to the invading Aryans is immediate and striking, but it doesn't stop here. Read on. N.S.R.) </i>
The majority of Hutus are said to be Bantu, of original African race, which spilled out from the middle of the West African coast of Nigeria, Cameroon, Ghana, Togo, Benin, Cote d'Ivorie (Ivory Coast) and the inland countries of Burkina Faso and its neighbors.
In this scenario, which incidentally is contradicted by genetic analysis, Tutsis are foreign invaders or migrants (like the Aryans) in the Rwanda-Burundi region. The Hutus, like the Indian Dravidians, are said to be much older people, but not the original inhabitants. The original inhabitants are supposed to be the Pygmies (or Twa), who constitute barely 1 percent of the people. The really interesting part of the theory is the role of the Tutsi minority. They are made into a superior race of invaders, just like the Aryan invaders, and supposedly constitute the aristocratic elite and the oppressors of the Hutu majority.
According to this theory, the minority Tutsi have subjugated the indigenous, but not too indigenous (compared to the Pygmies) Hutus for centuries and forced them into inferior position of agriculture. Now the key notion: Hutus and Tutsis are really two completely separate races, with the 'black' Hutus forming the oppressed majority, and their relatively fairer invaders, the Tutsi, forming the oppressors.
This in essence is the Tutsi invasion theory, the African version of the Aryan invasion theory. The similarities are startling, even to the extent of the Dravidians in India being preceded by earlier inhabitants, the aborigines (so-called adi-vasis), who have their African counterpart in the Pygmies. So we have the African Pygmy-Hutu-Tutsi sequence corresponding to the Indian aborigines-Dravidian-Aryan scheme.
It is highly illustrative to look at the political evolution of this grotesque theory and its monstrous consequences. Until the coming of the Europeans, the Tutsis and the Hutus never saw themselves as different and were not engaged in any racial wars. With the European scramble for Africa, Rwanda-Burundi became part of the short-lived German East Africa. After Germany's defeat in the First World War, it became part of the Belgian colonies in Africa. This notion of the Tutsi-Hutu racial difference began to be drilled into the natives by colonial administrators, some academics (Witzel-types) and missionaries known as the Pere Blancs (White Fathers). They invented the Tutsi invasion theory and labeled the Hutus as the victims of Tutsi invasion and oppression.
It is worth noting that this period, between the two world wars, was the heyday of race theories in Europe. It seems the notion of superiority due to skin colorâreal or imagined as in this caseâis so deeply ingrained in the European psyche that they cannot get out of it. Its politics has collapsed, not due to any dawn of enlightenment on its proponents but the defeat of Nazi Germany. It has continued however in Western academia as Indo-European Studies and other guises.
As with the Aryan theories and their various offshoots, this Tutsi-Hutu division has no factual basis. They speak the same language, have a long history of intermarriage and have many cultural characteristics in common. Most differences are regional rather than racial, which they were not aware of until the Europeans made it part of their politics and propaganda.
The division if any was occupational. Agriculturists were called Hutu while the cattle owning elite were referred to as Tutsi. The Tutsi, like the Indian Aryans, were supposed to be tall, thin and fair, while the Hutu were described as short, black and squatâ just as the Indian Dravidians are said to be. Since the Tutsi today don't fit this description, scholars claimed that their invading ancestors did. They offered no proof but, being based on no evidence, cannot be disproved either. In fact, it is impossible today to tell the two people apart. They are separate because government records carried over from the colonial days say so. (More of this below.)
This imaginary racial difference was emphasized by colonial officials during Belgian rule. The Belgian Government forced everyone to carry an identity card showing tribal ethnicity as Hutu or Tutsi. This was used in administration, in providing lands, positions, and otherwise for playing power politics based on race. This divisive politics combined with the racial hatred sowed by the invasion theory turned Rwanda-Burundi into a powder keg ready to explode.
The explosion occurred, following independence form colonial rule. Repeated violence after independence fueled this hatred based on this supposed ethnic difference and the concocted history of the Tutsi invasion and oppression. Some 2.5 million people were massacred in this fratricidal horror of wars and genocides. Unscrupulous African leaders, like the so-called Dravidian leaders of India, have exploited this divisive colonial legacy to gain power at the cost of the people. Hutu leaders described the Tutsis as cockroaches, telecasting their tirades against the Tutsis on the radio during the 1994 genocide of the Tutsis. This led ordinary Hutus to massacre the Tutsis en masse in a bid to annihilate them completely.
So a peaceful, placid nation with a common populace, with a common language, culture and history was destroyed by colonialist, racist concoction called the Tutsi Invasion Theoryâ entirely the handiwork of colonial bureaucrats, missionaries and Witzel-like pseudo-scholars.
It is of course no coincidence that ideas that led to the Holocaust in Europe should have led to genocide in Africa. The disgrace is that they have found a home in Western academia in various guises, ready to come out of the closet at an opportune moment, as for instance during the recent California school curriculum controversy.
Why should we learn all this? Because the Tutsi Invasion Theory has ominous parallels to the Aryan Invasion Theory which Witzelite pseudo-scholars are trying desperately to save in the name of linguistics, Indo-European Studies or some such fig-leaf. Also, ethnic tension and violence, thankfully not on the same horrific scale, was incited between North- and South Indians by self-styled Dravidian parties like the DMK, AIDMK and their many offshoots and incarnations. These are the poisonous legacy of the colonial-missionary racist offspring.
Why did India not go the way of Rwanda-Burundi? Not for lack of trying but because the cultural legacy of Hinduism proved too strong. It defeated the designs of politicians and propagandists masquerading as scholars. It is no coincidence that Rwanda and Burundi had been converted to Christianity, carrying with it the message of intolerance. But there is no room for complacency. The anti-Hindu politicians of India and the Marxist-missionary academia have come together to defend the Aryan-Dravidian divide. They have been joined by the Witzelites, concerned for their academic survival.
Their failure in Hindu India is also what is behind the visceral anti-Hinduism of the Witzelites. This is enhanced by the fact that Hindu scholars have been at the forefront of exposing their designs and scholarly pretensions.
The Witzelite brand of pseudo-scholarship cannot survive once the Aryan theories end up in the dustbin where they belong. They have found useful stooges in Indian politics and academia. They no longer engage in debate but in name calling. Any opposition to the Aryan invasion is denounced as emotional, chauvinistic, and the handiwork of Hindu nationalists and fundamentalists. Like the artificial Aryan-Dravidian divide, the Tutsi-Hutu divide is also denied by respectableânon-Witzeliteâscholarship, including Western scholarship. Are we to denounce theseâand a million Tutsi victims of the genocidesâas the handiwork of these nationalistic chauvinistic Tutsis who deserved their fate?Â
The answer lies in the correct reading of the indigenous history through the various new tools available today, from science, genetics and archaeology. It calls for the deconstruction of the colonial edifice that has promoted this racist, hate filled theories to appeal to the vanity of a few and help the careers of some pseudo-scholars. Above all, it calls for exposing the charlatans who fatten on the misery of victims of colonial horrors carrying pompous names like anthropology, Indo-European Studies and the like. These are the parasites of colonialism.
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<i>An African version of the infamous Aryan invasion theory propagated by missionaries and colonial rulers triggered the Hutu-Tutsi massacres </i>
Pankaj Saksena
(Edited with comments by N.S. Rajaram)
<b>Editor's introduction</b>: Most Indians are familiar with the Aryan invasion theory and its political misuse. Some are familiar also with its demolition by science, especially genetics, and the recent British admission that it was a political ploy used by them in their policy of divide and rule. While the theory has been fully discredited, some Western academics and their Indian followers are clinging to it out of concern for their academic survival. This was what was really behind the recent controversy over the California school curriculum. What most Indians, however, don't know is that the Aryan-Dravidian racial divide was only one instance of the colonial-missionary tactic of divide and rule combined with divide and convert.
A similar artificial division created in Africa was to have horrific consequences. The recent Hutu-Tutsi conflicts in which millions of lives were lost was a direct result of such a tactic applied by academics, colonial bureaucrats and missionaries as Pankaj Saksena's following account describes. (N.S.R.)
The concept of the Aryan invasion theory being the handiwork of British colonialists for the sake of proving the superiority of the European Caucasian races is not an isolated case. There exist similar theories in other parts of the world involving other nations and other (imaginary) ethnic groups as the following shows. One has to wonder why it has received so little attention from scholars. (Perhaps they are worried that their dubious record would be further damaged by the exposure of more such skeletons in their already rotten closet.)
When we look at the map of middle Africa, we see two little countries named Rwanda and Burundi, bordering on Zaire (or the Democratic Republic of Congo). The name Rwanda brings to mind in a flash the image of ethnic violence, civil war, military juntas and genocide on a horrific scale. Few Indians know the recent history of these unfortunate countries or the cause of their tragic history. As reported in the Western media, these countries are inhabited by two supposedly different ethnic groups, the so-called Hutus and Tutsis. The ethnic composition of these two countries is as follows.
Rwanda:Â Â Â Â Â Hutu 84%, Tutsi 15%, Twa (Pygmies) 1%
Burundi:Â Â Â Â Â Â Hutu 85%, Tutsi 14%, Twa 1%
In other words, their compositions hardly differ at all. But according to Western anthropologists, mainly colonial bureaucrats and missionaries, the Tutsies are supposed to be a Hamitic people, a race that was often intermixed with the whiter races of the North, notably from Ethiopia and Egypt, which in their turn were intermixed with some West Asiatic people, mainly the Hittites, by repeated invasions from the North. These people, the Tutsis, are supposed to have arrived from the North and not native to Rwanda.
<i>(The analogy to the invading Aryans is immediate and striking, but it doesn't stop here. Read on. N.S.R.) </i>
The majority of Hutus are said to be Bantu, of original African race, which spilled out from the middle of the West African coast of Nigeria, Cameroon, Ghana, Togo, Benin, Cote d'Ivorie (Ivory Coast) and the inland countries of Burkina Faso and its neighbors.
In this scenario, which incidentally is contradicted by genetic analysis, Tutsis are foreign invaders or migrants (like the Aryans) in the Rwanda-Burundi region. The Hutus, like the Indian Dravidians, are said to be much older people, but not the original inhabitants. The original inhabitants are supposed to be the Pygmies (or Twa), who constitute barely 1 percent of the people. The really interesting part of the theory is the role of the Tutsi minority. They are made into a superior race of invaders, just like the Aryan invaders, and supposedly constitute the aristocratic elite and the oppressors of the Hutu majority.
According to this theory, the minority Tutsi have subjugated the indigenous, but not too indigenous (compared to the Pygmies) Hutus for centuries and forced them into inferior position of agriculture. Now the key notion: Hutus and Tutsis are really two completely separate races, with the 'black' Hutus forming the oppressed majority, and their relatively fairer invaders, the Tutsi, forming the oppressors.
This in essence is the Tutsi invasion theory, the African version of the Aryan invasion theory. The similarities are startling, even to the extent of the Dravidians in India being preceded by earlier inhabitants, the aborigines (so-called adi-vasis), who have their African counterpart in the Pygmies. So we have the African Pygmy-Hutu-Tutsi sequence corresponding to the Indian aborigines-Dravidian-Aryan scheme.
It is highly illustrative to look at the political evolution of this grotesque theory and its monstrous consequences. Until the coming of the Europeans, the Tutsis and the Hutus never saw themselves as different and were not engaged in any racial wars. With the European scramble for Africa, Rwanda-Burundi became part of the short-lived German East Africa. After Germany's defeat in the First World War, it became part of the Belgian colonies in Africa. This notion of the Tutsi-Hutu racial difference began to be drilled into the natives by colonial administrators, some academics (Witzel-types) and missionaries known as the Pere Blancs (White Fathers). They invented the Tutsi invasion theory and labeled the Hutus as the victims of Tutsi invasion and oppression.
It is worth noting that this period, between the two world wars, was the heyday of race theories in Europe. It seems the notion of superiority due to skin colorâreal or imagined as in this caseâis so deeply ingrained in the European psyche that they cannot get out of it. Its politics has collapsed, not due to any dawn of enlightenment on its proponents but the defeat of Nazi Germany. It has continued however in Western academia as Indo-European Studies and other guises.
As with the Aryan theories and their various offshoots, this Tutsi-Hutu division has no factual basis. They speak the same language, have a long history of intermarriage and have many cultural characteristics in common. Most differences are regional rather than racial, which they were not aware of until the Europeans made it part of their politics and propaganda.
The division if any was occupational. Agriculturists were called Hutu while the cattle owning elite were referred to as Tutsi. The Tutsi, like the Indian Aryans, were supposed to be tall, thin and fair, while the Hutu were described as short, black and squatâ just as the Indian Dravidians are said to be. Since the Tutsi today don't fit this description, scholars claimed that their invading ancestors did. They offered no proof but, being based on no evidence, cannot be disproved either. In fact, it is impossible today to tell the two people apart. They are separate because government records carried over from the colonial days say so. (More of this below.)
This imaginary racial difference was emphasized by colonial officials during Belgian rule. The Belgian Government forced everyone to carry an identity card showing tribal ethnicity as Hutu or Tutsi. This was used in administration, in providing lands, positions, and otherwise for playing power politics based on race. This divisive politics combined with the racial hatred sowed by the invasion theory turned Rwanda-Burundi into a powder keg ready to explode.
The explosion occurred, following independence form colonial rule. Repeated violence after independence fueled this hatred based on this supposed ethnic difference and the concocted history of the Tutsi invasion and oppression. Some 2.5 million people were massacred in this fratricidal horror of wars and genocides. Unscrupulous African leaders, like the so-called Dravidian leaders of India, have exploited this divisive colonial legacy to gain power at the cost of the people. Hutu leaders described the Tutsis as cockroaches, telecasting their tirades against the Tutsis on the radio during the 1994 genocide of the Tutsis. This led ordinary Hutus to massacre the Tutsis en masse in a bid to annihilate them completely.
So a peaceful, placid nation with a common populace, with a common language, culture and history was destroyed by colonialist, racist concoction called the Tutsi Invasion Theoryâ entirely the handiwork of colonial bureaucrats, missionaries and Witzel-like pseudo-scholars.
It is of course no coincidence that ideas that led to the Holocaust in Europe should have led to genocide in Africa. The disgrace is that they have found a home in Western academia in various guises, ready to come out of the closet at an opportune moment, as for instance during the recent California school curriculum controversy.
Why should we learn all this? Because the Tutsi Invasion Theory has ominous parallels to the Aryan Invasion Theory which Witzelite pseudo-scholars are trying desperately to save in the name of linguistics, Indo-European Studies or some such fig-leaf. Also, ethnic tension and violence, thankfully not on the same horrific scale, was incited between North- and South Indians by self-styled Dravidian parties like the DMK, AIDMK and their many offshoots and incarnations. These are the poisonous legacy of the colonial-missionary racist offspring.
Why did India not go the way of Rwanda-Burundi? Not for lack of trying but because the cultural legacy of Hinduism proved too strong. It defeated the designs of politicians and propagandists masquerading as scholars. It is no coincidence that Rwanda and Burundi had been converted to Christianity, carrying with it the message of intolerance. But there is no room for complacency. The anti-Hindu politicians of India and the Marxist-missionary academia have come together to defend the Aryan-Dravidian divide. They have been joined by the Witzelites, concerned for their academic survival.
Their failure in Hindu India is also what is behind the visceral anti-Hinduism of the Witzelites. This is enhanced by the fact that Hindu scholars have been at the forefront of exposing their designs and scholarly pretensions.
The Witzelite brand of pseudo-scholarship cannot survive once the Aryan theories end up in the dustbin where they belong. They have found useful stooges in Indian politics and academia. They no longer engage in debate but in name calling. Any opposition to the Aryan invasion is denounced as emotional, chauvinistic, and the handiwork of Hindu nationalists and fundamentalists. Like the artificial Aryan-Dravidian divide, the Tutsi-Hutu divide is also denied by respectableânon-Witzeliteâscholarship, including Western scholarship. Are we to denounce theseâand a million Tutsi victims of the genocidesâas the handiwork of these nationalistic chauvinistic Tutsis who deserved their fate?Â
The answer lies in the correct reading of the indigenous history through the various new tools available today, from science, genetics and archaeology. It calls for the deconstruction of the colonial edifice that has promoted this racist, hate filled theories to appeal to the vanity of a few and help the careers of some pseudo-scholars. Above all, it calls for exposing the charlatans who fatten on the misery of victims of colonial horrors carrying pompous names like anthropology, Indo-European Studies and the like. These are the parasites of colonialism.
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