Discuss the concept of “othering” through the concrete example of your own choosing or the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Colonizing powers use language to fix the meaning of the colonized “Other.” how do colonizing powers use texts—the written word—to simplify complex civilizations, to erase the existence of a rich cultural heritage, and to deny the humanity of a population as part of the effort to legitimate the subjugation of those nations they seek to control? Such efforts demand that a population be torn from its history in order to create a new future—a future literally written by the West. Colonization is premised on the notion that the colonized Other is inherently inferior, weak, and evil. For colonized groups, or those who have won political independence from colonial rule, the question remains as to how they can shed their identity as an inferior Other. However, we turn here to an example of the structural consequences of this “othering” by considering the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, in which hundreds of thousands of Tutsis were slaughtered by Hutus with the encouragement and assistance of the Rwandan government. The intense hatred for the Tutsis has its roots in Belgium’s colonization of the country. The different ethnicities of these two groups were politicized by the Belgians, who established a caste system in which the Hutus were defined as an inferior, lower-class people and the lighterskinned Tutsis as an upper-class people worthy of colonial privileges such as an education, good jobs, and access to political positions. While the two groups had coexisted relatively peacefully for centuries prior to the colonization of the region, Hutu resentment and hatred toward the Tutsi mounted under Belgium’s colonial rule and the system of discrimination it created. When Rwanda was granted its independence from Belgium in the early 1960s, the stage was set for a massive civil war. The Hutus gained control of the government, and decades of ensuing violence culminatedin the atrocities committed during the early months of 1994. The ethnic genocide was the tragic consequence of a racially informed caste system installed by a colonial power whose own definitions of the relative worth of the two groups became the reality through which the groups came to define themselves.