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By Root 2196 0

two groups just differentiated economically and socially within Rwanda and Burundi out of a common stock.) This intergradation gave rise to tens of thousands of personal tragedies during the 1994 killings, as Hutu tried to protect their Tutsi spouses, relatives, friends, colleagues, and patrons, or tried to buy off would-be killers of those loved ones with money. The two groups were so intertwined in Rwandan society that in 1994 doctors ended up killing their patients and vice versa, teachers killed their students and vice versa, and neighbors and office colleagues killed each other. Individual Hutu killed some Tutsi while protecting other Tutsi. We cannot avoid asking ourselves: how, under those circumstances, were so many Rwandans so readily manipulated by extremist leaders into killing each other with the utmost savagery?

Especially puzzling, if one believes that there was nothing more to the genocide than Hutu-versus-Tutsi ethnic hatred fanned by politicians, are events in northwestern Rwanda. There, in a community where virtually everybody was Hutu and there was only a single Tutsi, mass killings still took place—of Hutu by other Hutu. While the proportional death toll there, estimated as “at least 5% of the population,” may have been somewhat lower than that overall in Rwanda (11%), it still takes some explaining why a Hutu community would kill at least 5% of its members in the absence of ethnic motives. Elsewhere in Rwanda, as the 1994 genocide proceeded and as the number of Tutsi declined, Hutu turned to attacking each other.

All these facts illustrate why we need to search for other contributing factors in addition to ethnic hatred.

To begin our search, let’s again consider Rwanda’s high population density that I mentioned previously. Rwanda (and Burundi) was already densely populated in the 19th century before European arrival, because of its twin advantages of moderate rainfall and an altitude too high for malaria and the tsetse fly. Rwanda’s population subsequently grew, albeit with ups and downs, at an average rate of over 3% per year, for essentially the same reasons as in neighboring Kenya and Tanzania (New World crops, public health, medicine, and stable political borders). By 1990, even after the killings and mass exilings of the previous decades, Rwanda’s average population density was 760 people per square mile, higher than that of the United Kingdom (610) and approaching that of Holland (950). But the United Kingdom and Holland have highly efficient mechanized agriculture, such that only a few percent of the population working as farmers can produce much of the food for everyone else, plus some surplus food for export. Rwandan agriculture is much less efficient and unmechanized; farmers depend on handheld hoes, picks, and machetes; and most people have to remain farmers, producing little or no surplus that could support others.

As Rwanda’s population rose after independence, the country carried on with its traditional agricultural methods and failed to modernize, to introduce more productive crop varieties, to expand its agricultural exports, or to institute effective family planning. Instead, the growing population was accommodated just by clearing forests and draining marshes to gain new farmland, shortening fallow periods, and trying to extract two or three consecutive crops from a field within one year. When so many Tutsi fled or were killed in the 1960s and in 1973, the availability of their former lands for redistribution fanned the dream that each Hutu farmer could now, at last, have enough land to feed himself and his family comfortably. By 1985, all arable land outside of national parks was being cultivated. As both population and agricultural production increased, per-capita food production rose from 1966 to 1981 but then dropped back to the level where it had stood in the early 1960s. That, exactly, is the Malthusian dilemma: more food, but also more people, hence no improvement in food per person.

Friends of mine who visited Rwanda in 1984 sensed an ecological disaster in the making.