Notions and obsessions
“Thus grew up the notion of Tutsis… as pastoralists who had come down from the north, possibly Ethiopia, into the dark and savage lands in the heart of Africa to impose their superior civilisation. The truth is that nobody really knows where the Tutsi clans came from, but it probably wasn't Ethiopia and certainly nowhere remotely close to Europe.
The obsession with physical appearance, aided and abetted by the Tutsi ruling class, led the Europeans to all manner of humiliating folly: measuring of skulls and noses and all the discredited junk of the race theorists who thrived in the heyday of African colonialism. One Belgian doctor wrote: [The Tutsi] ... have a distant, reserved, courteous and elegant manner ... The rest of the population is [Hutu]. They are negroes with all the negroid characteristics ... they are childish in nature both timid and lazy, and as often as not, extremely dirty.”
From Season of Blood. A Rwandan Journey