In an interview on Rwanda

Your third book is about the issue of justice.

Yes, there’s a terrific book by, again, a French writer, named Thierry Cruvellier, and it’s called Le Tribunal des Vaincus – The Court of the Defeated. And it is the only serious, and by far the best, account of the workings of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, in Arusha, Tanzania – which followed the model of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague. And, while Rwanda has grappled with hundreds or thousands of genocide cases internally (and been criticised for failing to be up to the highest standards of international justice, when it never even pretended that it could meet those standards – nobody could), this was set up with tremendous international support. Something like a billion dollars was spent – about $150 million per year and it has existed for 15 years. And it has tried fewer than 50 cases and achieved maybe 40 convictions. The court has been important, because in a conflicted international community it established that this was genocide, that rape was a crime of genocide, etc. But it’s been really problematic and the trials themselves have barely been noticed by the outside world. Which is fascinating, because you can’t imagine a Milosevic trial having been ignored, had he lived. But nobody knows the names of the Rwandans. It’s part of the story of Rwanda, that nobody’s ever paid much attention. Ask anybody if they know about the Rwandan genocide and they’ll say yes. But ask them if they know who the Pol Pot figure was, or what was the name of the party, it strangely draws a blank. And Cruvellier wrote a really interesting, thoughtful, analytic, deep book about how tangled, messed up, and compromised this pioneering international court for Rwanda has been. Happily, it is just now being translated into English – and will come out in America next year.

So, who is the big name in the genocide?

Well probably the biggest name has been Bagosora, who was convicted last December by the tribunal. Théoneste Bagosora. But there’s a bunch of them, part of the point is that there are multiple names.

So, on to Speake, your fourth book.

One of the books that I find most interesting – although only partly about Rwanda – is a book by John Hanning Speke, called The Discovery of the Source of the Nile. He was a 19th-century, Royal Geographical Society-sponsored explorer of Central Africa. Largely in direct competition with Richard Burton, he was vying for the big European explorer prize of discovering the source of the Nile. And that source is now understood to be a little trickle somewhere in the hills of Rwanda. Among Rwanda’s many fascinations is that it’s the only country in Africa, with the exception of Burundi perhaps, that exists entirely in its pre-colonial borders. There was this pre-colonial kingdom called Rwanda that had real cohesion as a proto-nation state that didn’t get all carved up in colonialism. And Rwandans are very proud of the fact that they avoided the slave trade, they kept the traders out. The country is surrounded by Swahili but it doesn’t speak Swahili. And it was known as a very insular, impenetrable place. Speke tried to get in and so at some point did Stanley. But Speke basically parked on the border of what would now be Tanzania and he cooked up a Victorian racial theory about the people of the place. That these two groups – the Bantu Hutus and the Nilotic Tutsis were two distinct tribes and the group that became known to us as the Tutsis or the Nilotics were, in fact, descended from the lost tribes of Israel. This was Speke’s terrible contribution. It was known as the Hamitic hypothesis, because it’s named after Ham, Noah’s son, which is something that you also find in the American South – the slave-owning racist theory there also involved all sorts of ideas about Ham as the original black man. Because how are you supposed to account for what was really a human sub-species as far as they were concerned?

It’s just incredible to read Speke’s book because he talks about the flat-nosed, flat-lipped negro, on the one hand, and then waxes euphoric about the kind of superior, Aryan-looking Ethiopic types. It’s almost like a zoology about human beings – and it became incredibly influential. It became, in many ways, the underpinning of all the theories that were used by the Belgians to divide Rwanda, when they ruled it as a colony in the 20th century. And it came to influence these Rwandan peasants in the hills as they killed their neighbours in 1994. Even if they’d never heard of John Hanning Speke, they had internalised a huge amount of what is at the core of it. The book also has the virtue of being a pretty good read.