Reading time: 7 minutes
Intellectual fiction: Frantz Fanon's voice summoned to face the Rwandan tragedy.
Frantz Fanon, who disappeared in 1961, obviously did not know the 1994 Rwandan genocide. But he left us a thought deeply rooted in the psychoanalysis of the colonized, in the study of the mechanisms of domination and in the analysis of the psychological effects of violence.
The exercise therefore consists in imagining what his look might be, if he had been able to attend this drama and propose a reading through his concepts.
Frantz Fanon would have asked himself this terrible question: How can a man, one morning, grab a machete and cut off his neighbor with whom he shared water, earth, prayer?
He would have located the answer in structural alienation of the colonized, the manufacture of rigid and opposite identities, and the transformation of this otherness built into justification of the murder.
Fanon wouldn't have looked to assigning responsibilities, but would offer a psychoanalytic grid to understand how a society can be forced to tip into extreme barbarism against itself.
This posthumous and fictional essay does not aim to rewrite history or justify the unjustifiable, but invites us to question how colonization, By dividing peoples and rigidizing identities, has helped shape the psychic conditions of this tragedy.
He also proposes a reflection on memory, forgiveness and reconciliation, in the light of Fanon's teachings.
Violence as a Historical Legacy
The Rwandan genocide is not a barbaric eruption out of nothing: It is the product of a long history of internalised violence, reorganized and instrumentalized by structures of domination.
As analysed in The Damned of the Earthcolonization is violent from its origin. It prints in the flesh and unconscious of the colonized a pathological relationship to oneself and to the other.
In Rwanda, this colonial matrix found a particular land: that of a pre-existing monarchical society, where power was concentrated in the hands of a Tutsi elite.
This domination was not lived in racial fashion, but as a flexible social hierarchy, regulated by customer contracts (ubuhake) and open to mobility (a Hutu could become Tutsi by social ascension, and vice versa).
This system, although marked by inequalities, had not frozen identities.
Colonisation, on the other hand, transformed this structure into a radical fracture. The Germans, then especially the Belgians, set identities, gave them racial value, and introduced identity cards where the ethnic group became a definitive marker.
What was only a historical power relationship became a frozen organic category, and thus a permanent injury in the collective psyche.
The manufacture of the inner enemy
Colonial logic always relies on relays. The colonizer does not exercise his domination alone: he delegates, he erects certain segments of society as mediators, he lowers others.
Thus, the precolonial hierarchy was used as an instrument of government. The Tutsi, associated with colonial authority, were transformed into intermediaries despite them, while the Hutus were identified as the masses to be controlled.
This instrumentalization introduced a lasting poison: the neighbor became the mirror of oppression. Not because he really embodied the colon, but because he had been designated as such by the system.
Hate does not arise spontaneously between peasants living on the same hill; It is inculcated by a political order that needs divisions to rule.
From internalized violence to freed violence
When post-colonial society is weakened by poverty, demographic crisis and war, this accumulated violence explodes.
Extremist ideologies, hate radios and propaganda find a mental field prepared for decades.
Psychoanalysis here reveals a process of division For murder to be possible, the neighbour must stop being perceived as human. The speeches that talk about « cockroaches » or « snakes » are not mere insults: they are the psychic mechanism that makes possible the act of killing.
The subject, in his colonized psyche, believes that he frees himself from his frustrations by massacring the one whom he believes to be the incarnation of his misfortune. But in doing so, He goes on to another trauma: that of killing his fellow man.
Survivors, executioners and descendants: a body memory
The Rwandan tragedy did not stop in July 1994. It continues in bodies and minds.
- The survivors carry the pain of loss, but also a paradoxical guilt of having escaped where so many have fallen.
- The executionersEven when they are tried and condemned, they live with absolute transgression: They abolished the forbidden founder of the murder of the innocent neighbor.
- The descendants, finally, inherit a heavy silence, unspeakable memories that fit in with gestures, angers and nightmares transmitted.
Thus, genocide is not just an event of the past: it is a memory alive and traumatic, from generation to generation.
Forget, pardon, reconciliation
Can we forget? No, forgetfulness would be mutilation, denial of history.
Can we forgive? YesBut forgiveness is not amnesia. It demands that the truth be told, that justice be done, that victims be recognized.
Can we reconcile? Yes, but on one condition: that frozen identity frameworks imposed by colonization be destroyed. As long as one continues to see the other by the prism of an invented racial category, the wound remains open.
True reconciliation requires the deconstruction of these categories, the recognition of shared humanity and the integration of trauma into an assumed collective memory.
Exceed inherited fractures
Rwanda teaches a tragic but universal truth: When a colonizer relies on a local hierarchy to govern, he makes it a deadly fracture. What in the past was a flexible social relationship becomes, under the influence of colonialism, an impassable frontier.
The 1994 genocide is therefore not the result of an immemorial hatred, but the consequence of a political and psychic construction imposed and instrumentalizedthen liberated in its most destructive form.
Decolonizing means not only expelling the colon, but also destroy the divisions he left behind. It's not to let the brother become the enemy. It is to recognize that the machete raised against the other always falls, first and foremost, on the common humanity.
Yet, in the aftermath of the disaster, a fact deserves to be welcomed: under the guidance of Paul Kagamé, Rwanda managed to channel the impulses of revenge that could have extended the cycle of hatred indefinitely.
By refusing to give up logic of resentmentthe country was able to commit a new reconciliation process, where the artificial boundary between « Hutu » and « Tutsi » has been erased in favour of a common national identity.
This undertaking, which aims to restore to every citizen the fullness of his humanity without ethnic assignment, constitutes a major political and psychic performance to be greeted.
History will tell if this healthy work will survive its initiator.
But hope is clear: that Rwanda, born from the ashes of an unprecedented tragedy, becomes an exemplary country, where memory of the past no longer feeds hatred but supports vigilance and shared dignity.
