A Hill among a Thousand: Transformations and Ruptures in Rural Rwanda (review)

The hill is the traditional local community in Rwanda, which until recently had no towns and no villages. People lived in enclosures dispersed across the hillside. In this outstanding book, fieldwork on Murundi hill in the 1980s reveals the ways in which a peripheral region has changed, especially as regards "social representations of space" (46).

The political and economic history of this region was recapitulated on the hill. Murundi—like the north and northwest in general—was independent of the Rwandan state until late in the nineteenth century. It stopped paying taxes to the central court at the death of King Rwabugiri in 1895 and did not resume payment until obliged to do so by the Belgian administration in the 1920s. The principal (Hutu) lineage of those who supposedly had cleared the land remained influential, but so did the lineage of the first Tutsi sent from the center to rule and to distribute land. In the 1980s, de Lame encountered "former Hutu dignitaries... integrated in the modern spheres, both lay and religious, of the government-paid elite, at different levels depending on their abilities" (31). The Murundi population included a majority of Hutu, a minority of Tutsi, and a few Twa. Fifteen percent of the enclosures or compounds were Tutsi. Everyone seems to have been able to classify other families as Tutsi, Hutu, or "more or less Tutsi" (which is interesting in light of the rigid colonial classification perpetuated by the Hutu-dominated first and second republics).

De Lame counted thirty-five enclosures belonging to the land-clearing Dahumbya Hutu lineage. The main rival of the Dahumbya was another Hutu lineage, which had arrived more recently. The Hutu and Tutsi identities were based on family origin in the first instance. The stereotypes of Tutsi pastoralists and Hutu cultivators correspond poorly to socioeconomic realities on Murundi hill. De Lame found not a single exclusively farming or herding family on her hill. Ethnicity was to some extent a language for discussing exploitation. Kabera, a rich Hutu, told de Lame that in the past he would have become a Tutsi. Kabera was an "inveterate accumulator" according to de Lame, and feared vengeance from those less well-to-do. The most daring of the peasants "allow[ed] their goats to graze by mistake in his fields" or allowed a fire to burn his woods (223–24, 296–97). Ethnicity played a part in electoral politics, as did religion and class. A Tutsi connection could be a handicap in the political sphere. However, a young Dahumbya (Hutu) woman, married to a member of a minor lineage of Tutsi land-clearers, was able to win an election by combining traditional and modern appeals.

De Lame was overtaken by events, in that she carried out her fieldwork under the Habyarimana regime but the book was published after the genocide. This makes it much more interesting than most of the books on Rwanda published since the genocide. First, de Lame knows far more about Rwanda than most of those other authors. Second, unlike many of the others, she is not mining the Rwandan past selectively, to "explain" the genocide. After the genocide de Lame visited a camp in eastern DR Congo (then Zaïre) where many Hutu from Murundi had taken up residence. She reports that they did not consider themselves refugees and saw no reason to obey the laws of Zaïre. Kabera, the wealthy Hutu who had said that in earlier days he might have become a Tutsi, was living in comfort on the hilltop, in the camp.