Colonialisme et Révolution: Histoire du Rwanda sous la Tutelle by François Lagarde (review)

In Colonialisme et Révolution: Histoire du Rwanda sous la Tutelle, François Lagarde, a professor emeritus of French studies in the Department of French and Italian at The University of Texas at Austin, offers a historical reading of Rwanda's colonial experience under Belgium's protectorate until its independence in 1962. The argument for Belgian colonialism and the idea of colonial progress pervades the book: through a detailed summary of the events that led to independence and the first locally organized elections, Lagarde attempts to prove that Belgian colonialism was necessary and reasonable—that invading and dominating Rwanda was inherently beneficial. He makes a sustained effort to debrutalize Belgian rule and to frame the causes of the Hutu–Tutsi conflict within the ancient-hatreds thesis. The problem is not that his work is offensive: it is that it also suffers from serious methodological inaccuracies and controversies.

In the first volume, entitled Colonialisme, which includes chapters 1 to 19, the author presents a detailed summary of social, cultural, religious, and ethnological conditions in Rwanda between the end of the Second World War and the 1959 revolution and the creation of political parties. The second volume, entitled Révolution, begins with the Mwima coup in 1959 and ends with the violent events of 1963–64. Lagarde bases his analysis on secondary literature, anecdotal evidence, and Belgian and UN archives to write "a new general history of Rwanda" (9).¹

Lagarde states that the purpose of his book is to uncover that "the truth is in the details" (7) and to confront "the generalizations, the quick overviews and its resulting omissions, the amalgamations and summaries which are almost always wrong." He justifies such an objective first by accusing previous and current historians and scholars of being "publicists" and "propagandists" (9), who have wrongly attributed the genocide to the ideological and social processes initiated by Belgian colonial rule, and second, by claiming that "little research has been done on the last year of the Belgian Rwanda."

Lagarde opens the book by presenting Belgian colonialism as a "modernizing, transformative, and progressive" experience for a primitive and chaotic land. A central claim of his book—that "colonialism was a progressive revolution" (11)—allows him to dismiss the need to reexamine the final years of Belgian Rwanda in the light of superficial accounts by journalists and propagandists who have reduced the causes of Rwandan genocide to European colonialism. Lagarde actually places the word European between inverted commas to highlight his refusal to think of the genocide within the logic of colonialism. By these lights, the violent events of 1963–64 were caused by the failure of the new ruling party to preserve the "democratic ideal imported by the Belgians." Lagarde explicitly celebrates Belgian colonialism when he states, "The rapid occupation and transformation of an indigenous culture by a foreign culture are extraordinary" (52).

That Belgian direct rule caused deliberate economic exploitation, forced labor, and racial violence is, according to Lagarde, a "falsehood spread by anticolonialists" and a "negative opinion" that needs to be "nuanced" (15). For him, enlightened colonialism brought necessary reforms to Ruanda-Urundi and "largely succeeded in the political dimension of its mission civilisatrice by contributing to the emancipation of the Hutu" (38). He downplays the importance of identity cards that manipulated ethnic and racial identities—which is widely seen a main cause of Tutsi-Hutu divisions and the genocide. As Mahmood Mamdani (2001) explains in his book When Victims Become Killers, the change was crucial and disastrous. Lagarde notes the involvement of Belgian colonial rule in reinforcing the ethnic divide, only to insist that the colonizers had little responsibility in establishing these categories (67).

Lagarde's argument mobilizes a serious attempt to debrutalize the Belgian regime. He repeatedly praises the colonists' achievements of political reform and effective governance, reforms that saved Rwandans from violence and plagues, and...