Nigel Eltringham

‘Invaders who have stolen the country’: The Hamitic Hypothesis, Race and the Rwandan Genocide

The use in genocidal propaganda of a modified ‘Hamitic Hypothesis’ (the assertion that African ‘civilisation’ was due to racially distinct Caucasoid invaders from the north/north-east of Africa) has become a key feature of commentary on the 1994 Rwandan genocide. In order to historicise the Hypothesis, the article first traces the transformation by European anthropology of the ‘Hamite’ in to a racial object and how the extraneous provenance of ‘the Tutsi’ was articulated in colonial Rwanda. The article then critically assesses the centrality of the Hypothesis in constructing the Tutsi population as a target of genocide. Finally, the article explores both the inadvertent and explicit ways in which contemporary commentary reiterates aspects of the ‘Hamitic assemblage’.

“We are not a Truth Commission”: fragmented narratives and the historical record at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda

Legal practitioners at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) are exercised by the question of whether their endeavour should seek to intentionally create an “historical record.” Their views are framed by a supposed distinction between Truth Commissions and Trials and by the assumption that the practice and method of law and historiography are distinct. Such distinctions are, however, unsustainable given that both trials and Truth Commissions require coercive, enticed remembering and that both the lawyer and historian vicariously re-enact the past in the search for meaning. Similarly, the methodology of the oral historian is not distinct from that employed in a trial. And yet, the apparent celebration of orality at the ICTR is matched by a desire to instantaneously convert mutable speech into immutable text. While the ultimate mutable text, the judgement, declares a legal finality, it intentionally directs the reader to the process of fact discovery preserved in a globally accessible, digital database. While there remains a tension between the digital archive and its physical shadow, an historical record awaits consumption. The question, however, remains who will the consumers be and to what purpose will this record be put?

‘Nordics' and 'Hamites': Joseph Deniker and the rise (and fall) of scientific racism

The “Hamite” as “Caucasian” civilizers of Central Africa was central to colonial discourse in Rwanda-Urundi in the first half of the twentieth century and the notion of Rwandan Tutsi as “Hamitic invaders” was to return as a component in the 1994 Rwandan genocide. The idea of an exogenous, Hamitic aristocracy in East and Central Africa is pronounced in the writings (from 1913) of Charles Seligman (1873–1940) in which “race” infers biogenetic superiority. Seligman drew on the work of the Italian anthropologist Guisseppe Sergi (1841–1936) who, in turn, drew on the work of the French anthropologist Joseph Deniker (1852–1918). Another key racial theory of the early twentieth century implicated in genocide can also be traced to Deniker. In The Myth of the Twentieth Century (1930), the Nazi race theorist Alfred Rosenberg adopted “Nordic” (as Aryan) from Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race (1916), who had, in turn adopted “Nordic Race” from William Z. Ripley’s The Races of Europe (1899). Ripley had adopted “Nordic” from Deniker. In other words, fantasies of both the “Hamite” and the “Aryan” as biogenetically superior races can both be traced to Deniker. And yet, notions of racial (biogenetic) superiority are entirely absent from Deniker who did not associate any intellectual or “cultural” superiority with any of his “races.” Contrary to the idea of a progression from early twentieth-century writings espousing “biogenetic” racial superiority to our contemporary rejection of racial determinism, there was, in reality, a regression from Deniker’s late nineteenth-century position.

Spectators to the Spectacle of Law: The Formation of a ‘Validating Public’ at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda

While the ethnography of contemporary courtrooms has been dominated by a concern with speech, this article considers how a silent, validating public is constructed within court complexes. Drawing on fieldwork at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (Arusha, Tanzania), I explore how the courts threshold practices form validating witnesses whose embodied deference contributes to the constitution of the courtroom as a space of privileged speech. I suggest, therefore, that court spectators are not incidental, but are integral to juridical spectacle and the authority of law.