Explorer’s myth of `lost tribe of Israel’ helped feed Hutu-Tutsi woes

c. 1996 Religion News Service BUJUMBURA, Burundi _ Inside the small cottage on the mission grounds that he shares with his wife Eleanor, Carl Johnson regales a visitor with tales of anything from African colonial history to his boyhood days growing up in Jacksonville, Fla. His conversation rambles from a detailed explanation of Livingstone’s search […]

c. 1996 Religion News Service

BUJUMBURA, Burundi _ Inside the small cottage on the mission grounds that he shares with his wife Eleanor, Carl Johnson regales a visitor with tales of anything from African colonial history to his boyhood days growing up in Jacksonville, Fla.

His conversation rambles from a detailed explanation of Livingstone’s search for the source of the Nile to memorable college football games:”Boy, Alabama sure made us Florida Crackers proud when they went out to California and beat Stanford in the 1935 Rose Bowl,”he says. He even remembers the score (Alabama 29 Stanford 13).


And though age leads him to sometimes mingle past and present, Carl Johnson has no problem explaining Burundi’s problems. His book-lined study has as many volumes on African history as it does Bibles and theological tomes. Johnson, who has lived here for 46 years, knows his African history and knows well the dangers of ethnicity.

Ethnicity is at the heart of Burundi’s conflict and everything in life here. The Tutsi ethnic group, which makes up about 15 percent of the population and controls the country’s armed forces, and Hutus, who make up 85 percent of the population and comprise the rebel groups that control most of the countryside, have been locked in conflict for years.

But since 1993, when the country’s first democratically elected president, a Hutu, was assassinated in 1993 by Tutsi military extremists, the war has intensified, costing some 150,000 lives and displacing hundreds of thousands, including nearly all the Hutu residents.

How did it get that way?

Johnson recounts the tired history of how Tutsis have long ruled Burundi through the military and were favored first by German, then Belgian colonizers, who saw them as natural leaders. He explains how the European practices of designating Tutsis as administrators and issuing identity cards on the basis of ethnicity helped create the deep divisions and racial hatreds that prevail today.

Though tensions existed between the two groups long before the colonial era, Johnson holds Europeans responsible for making the ethnic situation worse in Burundi. But he holds 19th-century British explorer John Speke responsible for the destructive”Hamitic hypothesis,”which hailed the Tutsi people as the lost tribe of Ham, the Biblical character who was the son of Noah. The hypothesis paints the Tutsi people as a tall, beautiful master race and the Hutus as a stocky, subservient subspecies.”Well, this Hamitic stuff is just as destructive as can be,”said Johnson.”The myth of Ham is a dangerous thing. Yes, it is there in Genesis, chapter 8. But shoot, you can prove anything you want to from the Bible. I can twist those words around in any way I want to get it to say what I want it to say. That kind of thing, the story of Ham, has to be put into context. John Speke did a lot of damage by spouting that nonsense.” Since Speke’s theory first gained credence in the mid-1800’s, the hypothesis has helped reinforce ethnic divisions _ not only in Burundi, but also in its northern neighbor Rwanda, which suffered ethnic slaughter in 1994 that led to the death of up to a million people.

Although the Hamitic hypothesis is no longer seriously considered by scholars, it is not uncommon to hear Burundians refer to Tutsis as Hamitic peoples.

MJP END FLEMING

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