Africa has spent considerable time recovering what was taken, neglected or rewritten. We speak about protecting languages, restoring heritage, documenting traditions and teaching younger generations where they come from. But there is another question we ask far less often: What have we inherited that was never entirely ours?
Not every classification that survives from the past deserves to be carried forward without examination. Some distinctions hold knowledge. They tell us about lineage, place, language, belief, occupation and belonging. Others were altered, hardened or assigned new value by systems of power. The difficulty is knowing which is which.
Rwanda makes this question impossible to avoid. Hutu, Tutsi and Twa identities existed before colonial rule. They were not invented by Europeans. But colonial administration interpreted these distinctions through racial theories and gave them an institutional rigidity and political significance they had not previously held. Identity was recorded, ranked and administered. Difference acquired bureaucracy.
Since the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi, Rwanda has placed Rwandan nationhood above ethnic classification. That approach has generated debate, as any serious attempt to reconstruct identity after such violence inevitably will. My interest is not in prescribing how Rwanda should define itself. It is in the question Rwanda presents to the rest of Africa: How much of what we now defend as identity have we examined?
The question is not whether difference should disappear. It should not. The question is whether we know which differences belong to our histories and which were classified, hardened or given new meaning by somebody else’s system.
When classification obscures knowledge
Consider something as ordinary as a basket. We may identify it immediately through an ethnic group. But before repeating that classification, perhaps we should ask what it actually tells us. Who made it? Where did the technique originate? Who else practiced it? What plant was used? Who harvested and prepared the material? How did the knowledge travel? Was the distinction understood by the maker in the same way that it appears in the description today?
Sometimes the ethnic attribution is essential. Remove it and we remove knowledge. Sometimes it tells us more about the person who classified the object than the person who made it. Those are not the same thing.
For me, this question is not confined to Rwanda. Somalia makes it personal. Somalis share a language, religion and a substantial cultural inheritance, yet clan and subclan identities have repeatedly become political organizing principles. Somalia’s fragmentation cannot simply be attributed to clan. Colonial partition, dictatorship, political exclusion, violence and state collapse all belong to that history. But I still find myself asking what exactly we transmit to the next generation each time we place the clan before the Somali.
There is another inherited hierarchy, and this one we carry on our bodies. Colonialism did not introduce human difference to Africa. African societies had their own hierarchies, prejudices and systems of belonging long before Europeans arrived. We should not manufacture an innocent precolonial Africa to make a contemporary argument.
European racial thought turned physical characteristics into a purported measure of human value, then embedded those judgments within systems of government, education, scholarship and social advancement. Complexions, facial features and supposed racial origins could become evidence of who was considered more civilized, more intelligent or closer to the colonizer.
The administration that enforced this hierarchy has disappeared. The hierarchy has proved harder to dislodge because a scale of value can survive the government that installed it, carried forward instead by habit, by institutions and by the private judgments people make about one another. We can see traces of it in colorism and in the enormous market for skin lightening across parts of Africa. A darker complexion can still carry different social assumptions from a lighter one. We alter the body, sometimes without asking where the standard against which we are altering it came from.
That, to me, is where heritage becomes much more serious than preservation.
Heritage is transmission
Every generation decides, consciously or otherwise, what the next one receives. We transmit languages, techniques, recipes, ceremonies, objects and stories. But we can also transmit classifications, prejudices and hierarchies whose origins we have stopped examining.
This is central to the thinking behind The Continuum Africa. I am interested in reconnecting objects with the knowledge and practice around them because an object without that knowledge can tell only part of its own story. A basket may survive for 200 years while the knowledge of the plant, the maker, the technique, its use and the relationships around its production disappear within one generation.
The same principle applies to identity. Knowing where we come from should make our understanding of ourselves more precise, not more divided. That requires us to distinguish between remembering difference and continually organizing ourselves around it.
Africa does not need less identity. If anything, we need a much deeper knowledge of it. But depth requires scrutiny. Who named us? When? What did the name mean before? Did its meaning change? Who benefited from that change? What knowledge does the distinction preserve today? And what happens each time we repeat it?
Some inherited distinctions carry knowledge that must not be lost. Others may preserve classifications whose origins and purpose we have simply stopped questioning.
Our responsibility is to know the difference.
