The racial purity delusion: From bedfellows to butchers

Do people ever think about the treachery and wickedness of Rwanda's genocide forefathers? Perhaps yes or no. It defies common sense and sears the conscience to contemplate how a man could both share a home and a bed with a Tutsi woman, while simultaneously erecting policies and preaching dogmas that called for the systematic dehumanisation and eventual extermination of her people. However, that is precisely the paradox that undergirds the sinister legacies of Grégoire Kayibanda, Rwanda's first president, and his fellow genocide ideologue Anastase Makuza. These men, idolised by the post-independence regime as architects of a new republic, were in fact the master-planners of Rwanda's descent into genocide against Tutsi. Their public words and private lives expose a dangerous duplicity: cloaking radical, genocidal visions in the garb of nationalism, all while betraying even the most intimate human bonds. Kayibanda's infamous declaration that The Hutu and Tutsi are two nations between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy, who are ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets, is often repeated, yet insufficiently dissected for its full grotesqueness. What makes this declaration even more absurd—and revolting—is its origin. It is a plagiarised paraphrase of Benjamin Disraeli, the 19th-century British Prime Minister, who used it to comment on the economic chasm between England's rich and poor. Kayibanda, a man allegedly devoted to Christianity and to Rwanda and its culture, borrowed a colonial metaphor crafted in the crucible of class warfare and transplanted it into a context of “ethnic” relations in a society where Hutu and Tutsi shared language, land, culture, gods, and ancestors for centuries. It was no innocent misreading. Kayibanda's words were not just historically illiterate; they were historically criminal. He took a metaphor about systemic inequality and twisted it into a blueprint for apartheid. But unlike apartheid in South Africa—which preserved its own moral disfigurement by keeping spouses racially segregated—Kayibanda and his cohorts maintained a bizarre double-life. He was married to a Tutsi woman, Verediana Mukagatare. Anastase Makuza, another ideologue, was likewise married to a Tutsi woman, Veronique Mukandoli. Dominique Mbonyumutwa, Rwanda's first provisional president, also had a Tutsi wife, Sophia Nyirabuhake. These were not isolated contradictions; they were systemic hypocrisies. How could men championing anti-Tutsi policies, laws and hate-filled manifestos go home to Tutsi wives and children? How did they navigate the 1ridiculous irony of declaring policies that criminalized intimacy with Tutsis while enjoying precisely that intimacy in their private lives? When the public asked, the response was worse than hypocrisy—it was dehumanization. Makuza, as an aged Rwandan once testified, responded to some young university graduates who questioned this inconsistency with a metaphor so vile it defies basic decency. He told them that, for his contemporaries having married a Tutsi woman was something of the past that should not continue to be practiced. Adding, during their time, getting married to a Tutsi woman was like what people do when their neighbor owns a good breed of dog: you get a puppy. That he referred to a human being, his own wife, as a dog—and to their mixed children as puppies—is not merely bestial imagery; it is spiritual putrefaction. This was not just misogyny. It was not merely racism. It was a full embrace of genocidal logic that renders the other not even human. This ideology laid the groundwork for what the world witnessed in 1994. The Genocide Against the Tutsi was not born in April 1994. It was codified in speeches and policies decades earlier, wrapped in the oratory of nationalist struggle and intellectual bravado. Kayibanda and other politicians like Makuza and Mbonyumutwa, used a pen like a machete. Their words cleaved Rwanda not into political camps, but into the living and the soon-to-be-dead. When Kayibanda said there was no sympathy between Hutu and Tutsi, he invoked not the memory of colonial oppression, but the language of divine separation—as if he were God deciding the unbridgeable destinies of two kinds of people. His spiritual descendants would take that language and make it policy: identification cards marked with ethnicity, purges of Tutsis from public life, schools, and employment, and the gradual moral preparation of ordinary citizens to see their Tutsi neighbors not as people, but as enemies. It is deplorable that in Rwanda’s tight-knit social structure—where in-laws are part of one’s extended family, where naming ceremonies, funerals, and weddings all transcend tribal identity—such toxic ideologies could be sustained. Yet they were. And the same men who toasted their own marriages to Tutsi women would later endorse policies forbidding Hutus from marrying Tutsi women. They institutionalized a system in which their own kin were symbols of shame, where their own children could be considered illegitimate by the rules they enforced. And that brings us to a chilling truth: Rwanda's first generation of post-independence leaders did not merely fall into ideological extremism. They engineered it. They mentored successors. They embedded their ideology in law, education, religion, and journalism. They passed the virus of ethnic hatred to a nation like a family heirloom. The tragic consequence is that even their progeny have been contaminated. Not the sons and daughters of Kayibanda and Makuza. Mbonyumutwa, who played a pivotal role in the 1959 pogroms that launched the anti-Tutsi project, left behind seven children. At least five of them, by credible reports and judicial convictions, have either supported or participated in the ideology of genocide. That is not mere coincidence. It is the fruit of sustained ideological grooming. The lasting damage of men like Kayibanda, Mbonyumutwa and Makuza is not merely in the mass graves of the 1990s. It is in the architecture of Rwandan society they tried to remake in their own image. A society where trust was replaced by suspicion, where ethnicity overruled merit, where neighbors became betrayers, and family ties became liabilities. These men declared moral bankruptcy and asked the country to follow. Luckily, Rwanda today—stands as a country that has consciously rejected that legacy. The post-genocide leadership has insisted on unity, not tribal division. The current generation of leaders—whatever criticisms they may face on other fronts—refused to revive the language and policies of apartheid. In modern Rwanda, one can no longer ask about ethnicity on official forms. Intermarriage is no longer a political act; it is simply life. Yet it remains deeply disturbing that there are still those, including children and grandchildren of the genocide’s ideologues, who try to rehabilitate the past. Ideologies do not die with their founders. They mutate and find new hosts. Today, descendants of men like Mbonyumutwa continue to disseminate the same propaganda, often repackaged in the language of democracy and human rights. Gustave Mbonyumutwa, Ruhumuza Mbonyumutwa and Patrice Rudatinya Mbonyumutwa are the key players in genocide denial enterprise and Jambo Asbl. The trio, are the grandchildren of Dominique Mbonyumutwa. They present themselves as opposition figures or dissidents while perpetuating the dehumanization of Tutsi and denying the genocide that targeted them. All what they do is to couch the same hate in the language of free speech, opposition politics, or historical revisionism. They simply repackage old poisons in new bottles. They find platforms abroad, publishing houses in Europe, social media forums, academic journals. The same ideology now wears the suit and tie of dissent. And so it is imperative to revisit the words of Kayibanda and Makuza not as historical footnotes but as early warning signs of what hate sounds like before it becomes action. The truth is this: evil does not always come with mythical horns. Sometimes it comes with a wedding ring, a government title, and a clever tongue. But its fruits are unmistakable. Rwanda has walked through the valley of death and emerged with a commitment to life. That miracle must never be taken for granted. It must be defended against all revisionism, all denialism, and all attempts to sanitize the monstrous. To do so requires honesty, vigilance, and sometimes, the courage to laugh at the absurdities of evil so that we never again take them seriously. Kayibanda and Makuza were not tragic figures. They were not misled. They were the front-runners of a slow, deliberate campaign of ethnic hatred that culminated in 1994. Rwanda must never forget, and the world must never pretend it did not begin long before the machetes were raised. It began with speeches. It began with policies. It began with metaphors about dogs. The 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi did not emerge in a vacuum. It was the catastrophic outcome of decades of calculated ideological engineering and state-sponsored indoctrination. Among the most influential architects of this virulent ideology were Grégoire Kayibanda and Anastase Makuza—two men whose political careers were foundational in fostering the divisionism, hatred, and dehumanization that would later explode into genocide. Kayibanda, the first president of Rwanda and the principal author of the Bahutu Manifesto of 1957, institutionalized a racialized worldview that vilified Tutsi as alien, exploitative, and dangerous. The manifesto, co-authored by Kayibanda and signed by several Hutu intellectuals, branded the Tutsi as foreign invaders who had subjugated the Hutu majority. Anastase Makuza, Kayibanda’s minister and later a key figure in Juvénal Habyarimana’s regime, reinforced and propagated this ideology. These men were not simply nationalists; they were ideologues who used ethnicity as a political weapon to consolidate power and justify discrimination, persecution, and, eventually, extermination. The seeds of genocide were sown in the intellectual and political discourse of the 1950s and 1960s. Kayibanda, who studied Catholic theology, shrewdly appropriated Christian language and scripture to frame his political arguments. In his hands and mind, religious language became a tool of exclusion and hatred. He said: “The majority of Rwandans, by divine providence, are Hutu. It is not God's will that they should remain under the minority yoke of the Tutsi forever.” This was not a theological reflection—it was an invocation of divine will to justify structural oppression. Religious motifs were weaponized to depict the Tutsi as not only alien, but as antithetical to God’s plan for Rwanda. In doing so, Kayibanda laid a foundation for moral disengagement: if oppressing or killing Tutsi was aligned with divine justice, then any moral qualms could be neutralized. Anastase Makuza echoed this ideology with dangerous clarity. In a 1965 public speech, he stated: “The Tutsi are like grasshoppers, they leap from one nation to another, never planting roots. Rwanda must be cleansed of their deceit.” The metaphor is instructive. Dehumanization is a key feature in genocidal psychology. By portraying Tutsi as pests or parasites, Makuza and his peers psychologically primed the Hutu majority to see Tutsi lives as expendable. In this light, the Genocide against the Tutsi was not an inevitable eruption of ethnic tension—it was the culmination of deliberate, state-driven identity formation and hatred, perfected over decades. Under both Kayibanda and Habyarimana, the Rwandan state normalized ethnic exclusion through school quotas, employment discrimination, and public indoctrination. By the time Habyarimana’s regime ramped up plans for extermination in the early 1990s, the ideological infrastructure had already been firmly established. The rhetoric of Kayibanda and Makuza—who were all not alive, had been mainstreamed into education, media, and religious teachings. The ideologues of earlier decades may not have orchestrated the killings of 1994 directly, but they created the script. Their texts and speeches were recycled, taught, and cited as truth. They had shaped not just political doctrine but the national imagination. The decalogue of hate Let us descend, not gently, but with full fury, into one of the darkest caverns of human cruelty ever charted in modern history: the genocidal ideology of the “Hutu Ten Commandments,” and specifically, the first three, which reserve a special place in inferno for their absurdity, cruelty, and sheer psychological insanity. These so-called commandments were not carved in stone by a prophet, but vomited into existence by genocidal bureaucrats of hate, printed in Kangura magazine in 1990—just four years before the machetes of their logic turned Rwanda into a slaughterhouse of children, women, and families. And as irony would have it, the man who bankrolled this descent into hell, Félicien Kabuga, was married to a Tutsi woman—Josephine Mukazitoni. Yes, the chief financier of the apocalypse was quite literally sleeping next to the very enemy he encouraged a nation to exterminate. Let that contradiction burn in your brain: Kabuga paid for hate to be broadcast, to be sung, printed, trained, and executed—while dining with a Tutsi wife. But this hypocrisy wasn’t new. Kabuga was merely the crown jewel of an earlier tradition started by the original apostles of racial purity in Rwanda: Grégoire Kayibanda, Anastase Makuza, and Dominique Mbonyumutwa. These men, godfathers of a homegrown apartheid, fancied themselves ethno-nationalist priests, preaching a gospel of racial cleansing while sharing beds and making babies with Tutsi women. This contradiction—public hate, private embrace—isn’t just hypocrisy. It’s pathology. It’s proof of the rot, the twisted schizophrenia at the heart of genocidal ideologies. And nowhere is this clearer than in the first three commandments of Hutu Power. Commandment One: “Every Muhutu should know that a Mututsi woman, wherever she is, works for the interest of the Tutsi ethnic group...” This is not a commandment. It’s a racial surveillance order. It transforms every Tutsi woman—no matter her politics, beliefs, or personality—into a spy, a saboteur, a Mata Hari by birth. A woman’s womb, her thoughts, her smile, her silence—everything becomes suspect. Marriage to her becomes treason; friendship becomes betrayal; hiring her becomes sedition. But while Kabuga was funding this drivel, he was also calling a Tutsi woman “my love.” While Kangura instructed every Muhutu to avoid Tutsi women like they carried leprosy and conspiracy, Kabuga was raising children with one. You see, Tutsi women were not “too dangerous” for the likes of Kabuga or Kayibanda. They were only dangerous when other Hutu men loved them. The real sin, according to these men, wasn’t interracial love—it was letting love break tribal ranks. They made racial segregation a virtue and painted any hint of shared humanity as betrayal. It was apartheid with banana leaves. Commandment Two: “Every Muhutu should know that our Hutu daughters are more suitable and conscientious... Are they not beautiful, good secretaries and more honest?” This isn't a statement; it’s a desperate whimper. A jealous cry of a failing patriarch. “Are they not beautiful?” Who asks such things unless they’re deeply insecure? Who demands such comparisons unless they’re inflamed by toxic envy? These words aren’t defending Hutu women—they’re weaponizing them. The authors of this hate treat women as cattle for ethnic loyalty. They weren’t praising Hutu women for their humanity, intelligence, or individuality. No, they were reducing them to reproductive machines and loyalty tokens. This is not protection; it is ownership disguised as praise. It’s the sort of talk you’d hear from 1930s Germany, where Aryan women were to bear Aryan babies for the Reich. Rwanda’s own Goebbels—the Kayibandas and Kabugas of the world—dreamed of a nation not merely pure in blood, but empty of doubt. Commandment Three: “Bahutu women, be vigilant... bring back your husbands, brothers and sons to reason.” Ah yes, the mobilization of the home front. This commandment enlists every Hutu woman as a commissar of ideology, a private enforcer of loyalty. Not even bedrooms or kitchens were to be spared from the ideology of genocide. A wife wasn’t to love her husband—she was to police him. A sister wasn’t to support her brother—she was to monitor him. The logic is breathtaking in its evil. What kind of ideology tells a woman to destroy her own family to save her ethnicity? What kind of ideology demands that love be sacrificed on the altar of hate? One might imagine Kabuga’s own wife reading these commandments, wondering: Does this mean me? Am I the traitor they speak of? Will my children be next? One wonders what Kabuga told her. Did he wink and say, “Don’t worry, my dear. It’s only politics.” Did he promise her safety while financing the deaths of her cousins, her siblings, her neighbors? Did he reassure her as blood filled the streets and her last name marked others for death? We will never know the full extent of Kabuga’s conscience—if he ever had one. But the facts scream. The facts bleed. Kabuga made the extermination of his wife’s people a business model. And yet, Josephine Mukazitoni survived. Kabuga’s children survived. His in-laws were not necessarily spared, but they were certainly “exceptionalized.” In private, he could make room for exceptions. In public, he paid to remove the exception from the rule. It is of utmost importance to think about the psychology of public hate and private affection. This kind of selective hatred isn’t uncommon in genocidal regimes. The Nazi Heinrich Himmler wept when witnessing the execution of Jews—but not because he opposed the policy. He just found it aesthetically distressing. Many Hutu extremists had Tutsi friends, wives, or colleagues whom they “spared.” But sparing one is not mercy—it is further proof of the madness. It means the ideology wasn’t built on logic or genuine grievance. It was built on resentment, social engineering, and pathological self-deceit. Kayibanda and his ilk institutionalized this hatred long before the machetes swung. In the 1960s, they engineered pogroms and exile. They taught children that a Tutsi was not just different but dangerous. In schools, on radio, in newspapers, the myth was repeated until it ossified into a moral law: Tutsi blood is enemy blood. To imagine some of these preachers of blood impurity had Tutsi wives—the contradiction is so vast it collapses into farce. It is as if the authors of apartheid were secretly subscribing to Nelson Mandela’s newsletter. They weren’t only cowards. They were creators of a world in which public virtue meant hatred and private life meant hypocrisy. By the time Kangura published the commandments in December 1990, the ideology had matured into its most absurd form. It no longer needed to be “defended.” It was now divine. It didn’t just accuse Tutsis of being different. It accused love itself of being criminal. It criminalized the possibility of peace. It turned affection into treason. But what made it all the more sickening was the normalcy—the bureaucratic tone, the false logic, the desperate attempt to make a racist fever sound like moral principle. It wasn’t just hate. It was hate pretending to be wisdom. And this was no fringe movement. The commandments were taught, distributed, and later weaponized. Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM), partly funded by Kabuga, became the church pulpit from which these commandments were preached with bullets and blades. It is the banality of evil in bedclothes. Kabuga has since been captured, aging and frail, wheeled into courtrooms far from the bloodied hills of Rwanda. But the legacy of what he helped fund remains. The commandments—those grotesque invocations of racialized womanhood, of blood loyalty, of family betrayal—are still studied, still echoed in the whispers of genocide denialists today. What kind of man helps ignite the annihilation of families while keeping his own intact? What kind of man sees his wife’s people as pests to be exterminated, but keeps her at his side? The answer: a man like Félicien Kabuga. And a system like Hutu Power. The first three Hutu Commandments weren’t commandments at all. They were confessions—confessions of fear, of insecurity, of a masculinity so fragile it had to destroy women to preserve itself. They are a roadmap of genocide not only against the Tutsi people, but against love, truth, and reason. To study them is to witness how evil dresses itself in morality, how it weaponizes intimacy, how it manufactures paranoia where peace once grew. These commandments didn’t just kill—they desecrated. And they began not with machetes, but with ink. With paper. With politicians who spoke of purity while living in impurity. They began with men who called themselves leaders—but were in fact cowards in suits, preaching genocide by day and hugging their Tutsi wives by night. So let us say it plainly: these commandments are not historical curiosities. They are war crimes in prose form. And Félicien Kabuga, for all his wealth and bravado, will go down in history not as a mastermind—but as a grotesque parody of evil. An evil so cowardly, it couldn’t even obey its own rules. It is here that Hannah Arendt’s concept of the “banality of evil” becomes relevant. The genocide was carried out not just by sadists but by teachers, farmers, priests, and civil servants—people who had absorbed and normalized an ideology that made mass murder appear logical, even virtuous. The Catholic Church’s complicity in Rwanda’s descent into genocide cannot be ignored. Both Kayibanda and Makuza were deeply connected to the Church, which offered ideological cover and social legitimacy to their views. Churches were not merely silent during key pogroms in 1959, 1961, and 1963—they were often complicit. Indifference in the face of evil is itself evil. In Rwanda, for many years, some religious leaders recited love in the morning, hate in the afternoon and killed the following day. The power of religious justification, and the failure of faith leaders to challenge state violence, compounded the psychological desensitization that genocide required. Psychologist Elizabeth Midlarsky, who studied Holocaust survivors and perpetrators, observed that: “The impact of genocidal thinking is not confined to a generation—it transmits trauma, guilt, and hatred across time.” This is evident in how modern Rwandan genocide denialists, often based in the diaspora, cling to the old myths crafted by Kayibanda and Makuza. They invoke “Hutu marginalization” and “Tutsi dominance” using the same rhetoric of inversion and scapegoating. Understanding the contributions of Grégoire Kayibanda and Anastase Makuza is essential not just for historical clarity, but for moral vigilance. These were not accidental leaders. They were deliberate engineers of hatred who fused politics, theology, and ethnic myths into a lethal ideology. Their words turned neighbors into enemies. Their acts and policies institutionalized exclusion. Their legacies paved the road to April 1994. To confront such legacies, we must educate against ideological hate, strengthen critical thinking, and remember that genocide begins not with machetes but with metaphors—spoken first by men in suits and collars, not uniforms. As genocide scholar Gregory Stanton famously warned: “Genocide is a process. It develops in ten stages, and every stage can be prevented.” By identifying and condemning those early stages—classification, symbolization, dehumanisation—we can halt the descent before it begins. Words matter. Dehumanization is not an oratorical game; it is a rehearsal for slaughter. It is also vital that we name these men for what they were: not fathers of the nation, but forefathers of genocide. Kayibanda was not a patriot. He was a plagiarist of colonial racism and an intellectual architect of mass death. Makuza was not a politician or public servant but a prophet of doom wrapped in the cloth of a statesman. They deserve no statues, no roads or schools named after them, no nostalgic eulogies. Contempt is the least they deserve. It is preposterous—if not horrifying—that a man could declare Tutsi and Hutu to be inhabitants of different planets while spooning his Tutsi wife under the same mosquito net. It is beyond parody that Makuza could liken his wife to a dog and still consider himself a leader. If that’s leadership, then every beast of the wild ought to campaign for office. The legacy of Kayibanda and Makuza should not be forgotten, but neither should it be mythologized or excused. They were not visionaries. They were ideologues of death. And history must remember them as such.

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The racial purity delusion: From bedfellows to butchers