The Genocide Against the Tutsi: A Mirror to Humanity’s Deepest Fears
The Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda is more than a historical event; it is a profound reflection of what can happen when humanity's moral compass is shattered. This tragedy, which unfolded in 1994, serves as a stark reminder that hatred, propaganda, and fear can transform even the most intimate relationships into instruments of destruction. It is not merely an African story but a universal one, one that challenges the very essence of human conscience.
A Global Threat
The kind of hatred that erupted in Rwanda has no nationality. It is a global threat that demands the attention of historians, lawmakers, philosophers, psychologists, theologians, educators, media houses, activists, and ordinary citizens alike. The world must confront this reality with both ears and open hearts. What happened in Rwanda is not just a matter of continental proximity or cultural familiarity—it is a lesson for all of humanity.
The Fragility of Human Conscience
This genocide is still unknown in its deepest wounds. It has not been studied enough, mourned enough, or understood enough. More dangerously, it has not been feared enough. The Genocide Against the Tutsi challenges our moral vocabulary and our capacity to imagine the breakdown of human boundaries in ways previously unrecorded. Unlike most genocides, this one weaponized intimacy itself, turning families against each other in a grotesque internal logic.
A Philosophical, Psychological, and Sociological Mutilation
What occurred was not only a physical extermination of over a million people in a hundred days—it was a philosophical, psychological, sociological, and moral mutilation of humanity’s deepest bonds: kinship, motherhood, love, and shared belonging. There were cases of auto-genocide in its truest form—killing of one’s own, not merely in social or national terms, but genetically, spiritually.
A Mirror Held Up to Civilization
Rwanda under Hutu-power must be studied—not only as a humanitarian failure—but as a mirror held up to a civilization too confident in its moral evolution. This genocide tore through families not as collateral damage but as its primary goal. The classroom became a site of indoctrination, where children memorized hatred that would one day be used against their own cousins. The genocide did not unfold solely through state orders or military strategies—it was born in soft voices, glances, church homilies, bedtime stories, and neighborhood gossip that evolved into declarations of death.
The Unimaginable Betrayal
How does one process the fact that the final farewell to life, for tens of thousands of Tutsi children, came from the hands of people who once fed them porridge? That is why Rwanda’s story is not merely an African tragedy—it is the human soul’s most damning confession. And still, the world refuses to read it.
A Question That Reverberates in Infinity
Sometime in 2024, a close relative asked me what I had learned in my years of studying the Genocide Against the Tutsi. My answer was simple: I have come to realize that what happened in Rwanda in 1994 is a special case of genocide, one the world must study more closely. She asked, “Uncle, why?” And my answer, I must admit, was foggy. How do you put into words what defies comprehension?
The Horror of Maternal Betrayal
I told her about a Hutu woman who, along with her brothers and uncles, killed her Tutsi husband and all eight of her children. Her own children. Not enemies on a battlefield. Not strangers. Her children. She carried them in her womb, fed them, sang to them, perhaps once kissed their bruises and soothed their fears. And then she killed them. Or worse: watched them be killed and gave the killers her blessing.
A Societal Collapse of Moral Architecture
This is not enough to call this “incitement.” It is the erasure of nature by culture—a triumph of manufactured hate over maternal instinct. The Genocide Against the Tutsi took the tools of propaganda, persuasion, theology, anthropology, and turned them all into tools of death. It was the culmination of everything gone wrong with modernity: the corruption of education, the betrayal of religion, the abuse of science, the manipulation of psychology, and the silence of diplomacy.
The Death of Conscience
To understand how this horror was made possible, we must go back to the architects of modern persuasion. Edward Bernays, a nephew of Sigmund Freud, was the pioneer of mass manipulation. He famously said: “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society.” In the hands of Hutu Power ideologues, Bernays’ principles became implements of extermination.
The Sanctified Despoiled
I say to theologians and moral philosophers: if Rwanda does not force a revision of your doctrines, then your doctrines are not rooted in reality. How does Christianity, with its emphasis on love, allow nuns to lock men, women, and children in burning churches? Where was the dignity when bishops and priests sided with militias?
A Global Case Study Ignored
We have to accept there is a global case study which has been ignored. The Holocaust became a foundation for countless human rights conventions, memorials, museums, films, and educational curricula. And rightly so. But what of the Genocide Against the Tutsi? It remains neglected, often mislabeled, or confused.
Humanity’s Duty to Respond
This is why I say to the world: Rwanda’s genocide is your case study. Not for Africans. For everyone. To the United Nations: You failed in 1994. But will you now fund multidisciplinary research into the psychology of genocidal families? To the African Union: Will you protect truth across Africa, or let revisionism become the new liberation ideology?
A Word for a Napping World
To every think tank, university, pulpit, parliament, and boardroom that has yet to consider Rwanda as a case study of modern evil—shame on you. Shame on your comfortable ignorance. Shame on your selective memory. Shame on your curriculum that ends with Auschwitz but starts nowhere else. Shame on your silence in the face of voices that deny this genocide today, in broad daylight.