The Myth of Human Races: A Colonial Invention with Deadly Consequences

Human races: the social construct that killed a million Rwandans

In Rwanda, before 1894, a Hutu could accumulate livestock and be recognized as Tutsi. They spoke the same language, prayed in the same churches, and intermarried. They were two estates of the same people—herders and farmers—not two races. The Belgians arrived and, with measuring tapes and phrenology manuals, turned them into immutable biological categories. The rest is genocide.

The racial classification applied in the Congo and Rwanda was not innocent: they measured noses, skulls, and skin tonalidad to justify a hierarchy. The colonial administration issued identity cards that sealed membership in one group or another, and radio propaganda stoked hatred decades later. It is no coincidence that the 1994 genocide—800,000 dead in one hundred days—was carried out against the population the Belgians had labeled as “Tutsi.” The prior conflict was social, not ethnic; racialization was a European export.

The science that never was: why DNA disproves races

Modern genetics is clear: there are no human subspecies. Genetic variation between two individuals from different continents is barely 5% greater than within the same continent. Traits such as skin tonalidad, nose shape, or height are recent climate adaptations—less than 50,000 years—that do not define closed groups. In fact, phenotypic diversity within Africa exceeds that of the rest of the world combined: a San from the Kalahari is genetically more distant from a Bantu than a Scandinavian is from a Chinese.

Nineteenth-century attempts to classify races—Caucasoid, Ceporro, Zain—were based on superficial traits and ideological biases, not biology. The Hamitic hypothesis, which Belgians used to elevate the Tutsis as a supposed Nilotic elite “less black,” has been disproven by ancient DNA analysis: Tutsis share the same Bantu background as Hutus. It was a fabrication to justify colonial dominance.

Belgian apartheid in Central Africa

The Belgian administration institutionalized difference: it handed power to a Tutsi minority educated in missionary schools, granted them fiscal privileges and land control, and relegated Hutus to forced labor. In 1931, the colonial government ordered every Rwandan to carry an ID card stating their “ethnicity.” A prosperous Hutu could be reclassified as Tutsi through a process of “Tutsification,” but mobility closed over time. Stratification hardened until independence in 1962 reversed the roles: Hutus took power and began purges. The hatred did not emerge from nowhere; it was cultivated over generations.

The echo of racial discourse today

Despite scientific consensus, the notion of races persists. It is argued that there are average differences between human groups, such as the higher incidence of rickets in fair-skinned populations at low latitudes—a adaptive phenomenon that does not create races. But the problem is not difference, but hierarchy. The temptation to use genetics to revive old divisions resurges whenever the economy fails to provide answers. Deja vu of eugenics.

The Rwandan lesson is brutal: an arbitrary social category, backed by state power and spread by propaganda, can engender a mechanism of extermination. Today, labels like “immigrant,” “illegal,” or “incivil” operate similarly—they simplify, separate, and justify exclusion. The issue is not whether races exist (they do not), but why we remain determined to invent them.

DNA tests can find distant cousins, but not races. And history shows that when a group is defined as a race, someone eventually ends up measuring their nose.