The belief in the false hypothesis of the existence of a “Hamitic” people lies at the heart of the reactionary and racist ideologies that have caused so much bloodshed in East Africa. In this exclusive interview, French historian Jean-Pierre Chrétien explains the colonial origins of this myth.
Episode 3/4
He had not given an interview in ten years. Jean-Pierre Chrétien, 88, is a leading historian of the Great Lakes region and an honorary research director at the CNRS (French National Centre for Scientific Research). He is a keen experts on pre-colonial and contemporary Burundi and Rwanda. He agreed to give a series of exclusive interviews to African Facts.
Having told us about the initial spark of interest in Burundi that ignited his research based on oral history in the 1960s, Jean-Pierre Chrétien also went on to discuss the political and social organisation of the pre-colonial kingdoms of Rwanda and Burundi.
In recent years, lynchings and racist crimes have become more frequent and systematic in eastern Congo. In this interview, Jean-Pierre Chrétien explains the origin of one of the central beliefs in the ideology espoused by the perpetrators of these crimes.
African Facts: We would like to revisit the origins of the “Hamitic” idea, which is central to one of your books, Racisme et génocide (“Racism and Genocide”). How can this be explained in a few words? How did this ideology come about?
Jean-Pierre Chrétien: Contrary to what is sometimes said, Europeans do not have a global view of “black people”. In fact, they made distinctions. There were “true Negroes” and “false Negroes”. These terms were used repeatedly in the book by the English anthropologist Seligman [Charles, 1873–1940, Ed.] Races of Africa from the 1930s to the 1950s editions.
This idea suggests that there would be “Negroes” in Africa who bear negritude on their faces, and other populations here and there with lighter skin, more pleasant features and apparent gifts and intelligence. These differences had to be explained, so a migrationist discourse was used with the hypothesis of a great migration from the Near East. Missionaries spoke of the fall of the Tower of Babel, an idea that was also adopted by Ernest Renan [1823-1892, French philosopher and historian of religions Ed.]. Gobineau [Arthur, 1816–1882, a French diplomat and aristocrat who would influence nationalists and racists for the next 150 years, Ed.] called this the “first white influx into Africa” in his An Essay on the Inequality of Human Races. According to this theory, invasions of “white” peoples from the Middle East via Egypt and Ethiopia occurred, and these peoples are said to be the ancestors of the “Hamites”.
The word “Hamite” originally comes from Ham, the son of Noah who, upon seeing his father’s nakedness after he had drunk too much wine, covered himself in shame. However, by the end of the 19th century, this meaning had been completely reversed. Religious authors took note of this: “Ah, the word ‘Hamite’ is now used in a different sense. Before, all Black people were considered to be the sons of Ham. Now, it refers to those among Black people who have white ancestry and who came from the Near East, the Nile Valley and Ethiopia”.
— Is this intellectual construct, which emerged between the mid- and late 19th century, based on anything?
— Well, frankly, this is pure fantasy!
In other words, it’s not based on any specific facts. Arrows are drawn based on the assumption that, since there are different facial features in Africa, there must undoubtedly have been invasions from the north-east, from Ethiopia and Egypt — in other words, from the Near East — as this was the only continental contact with other civilisations.
At the time, this theme was also combined with biblical discourse. Religious texts were written not only by missionaries, but also by authors of biblical encyclopaedias, such as the Sulpician Vigouroux [Fulcran, 1838–1915, French priest and exegete Ed.]. The aim was to recount history in biblical terms. Since the Tower of Babel was supposedly located in the East, perhaps in Mesopotamia, it was thought that waves of settlers headed for the African continent when it fell.
It’s just discourse. It’s the mythology of an era that seeks to account for human diversity in Africa. The problem is that it has “took roots” in reality. In the Great Lakes region we are interested in, it has become the be-all and end-all for explaining the existence of organised states. It was thought that ordinary “negroes” could not have built such states. Therefore, it had to be explained by a “civilising” invasion. Since some had physical features – as is the case throughout Africa – reminiscent of Somalis and Ethiopians, it was generalised that all Tutsi resembled these “ideal types” and would be indeed foreign invaders, the only people supposedly capable of building these kingdoms.
— The reality is different, isn’t it?
The diversity of physical features points to an extremely complex history of settlement. Even linguistically, traces of non-Bantu elements can be found in the region’s Bantu languages: South Sudanic, South Cushitic, and so on. I won’t go into all these elements because it gets too scholarly, right… But it shows that, in the Great Lakes region, more than two thousand years ago, many human groups moved around and languages and physical appearances mixed, as they did everywhere else.
All peoples are the result of mixing anyway (laughs). However, this mixing is much more complicated than the simplistic models of superior and inferior layers and invasions that have been used to explain it.
— How did the “Hamitic” ideology circulate and spread in missionary, administrative and scientific circles in the 19th and 20th centuries?
— In my book, Explorateur et exploré au Burundi (“Explorer and Explored in Burundi”), I created a kind of genealogical tree of these ideas, tracing them from author to author. It’s fascinating to see how people repeat and copy each other.
For example: John Speke, the English explorer who travelled through what is now north-western Tanzania and Uganda, proposed the theory that the Tutsi, the Hima and these other pastoral groups had actually come from Ethiopia during an invasion. Speke wrote: “I am putting forward a hypothesis: I think there was an invasion from north-western Africa”. He did not elaborate on this idea; he was not much of an ideologue. However, his hypothesis was subsequently taken as truth.
For example: von Götzen, the future German governor of East Africa, led an expedition from west to east, becoming the first person to cross Rwanda in 1894. In his book, he wrote something along the lines of: “Here, people say that — we dont’t know exactly wether it was 1,000 or 2,000 years ago — there was an invasion from the north-east”. However, these “people [who] say” are not Rwandan. They are in fact von Götzen’s readings (laughs).
It’s fascinating. And it continues: “I’ve been in the field, so I can pretty much say whatever I want” (laughs). But everything has to be argued. Even fieldwork has to be justified. With surveys, names, and so on.
— How did this idea, hatched in the minds of Westerners, make its way to the Great Lakes region?
It was mainly through Catholic missionaries known as the White Fathers. They are present throughout the region, including in Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Tanzania and eastern Congo, on both the English and German sides. They wrote a lot. They prided themselves on their scientific knowledge and on being clerics, as in the Middle Ages. They would be responsible for writing history. They collected everything they could find. Some of them are highly educated and can read English, German, etc., giving them access to a wealth of references. They can therefore provide sources for their claims. Once again, it’s somewhat complicated, but we can see the intertwining, from one relative to another, of the influences of this discourse, which was definitively structured in Rwanda and Burundi in the 1930s.
To be continued.
