Since I resurrected the analysis of Tutsi genotypes last year I’ve been getting a fair number of emails and messages from people. The issue is that periodically someone, usually, but not always, a white male, will explain that “actually, Tutsis and Hutus aren’t real ethnic groups, and were invented by the Belgian colonialists….” Many people from this region of the world are privately very skeptical of this viewpoint (they tell me so, but don’t want to get into a huge public spat with all-knowing-white-gods). After all, they are from this region, and Hutus are Tutsis are physically often quite distinctively different. They simply do not buy the social constructionist narrative as explaining everything that they see with their own eyes.
But we’ve seen this before, haven’t we? “Well actually, the Lombards weren’t ethnically different from the Romans, they were a Germanized group of mercenaries who created an identity de novo.” Also, “well actually, ‘caste’ is an ancient Indian concept but modern caste-jati groups were reified by the British in the 19th-century….” (genetics tells us both assertions were wrong).
Historiography of the early 21st-century will observe that many white semi-intellectuals took on the metaphorical role of Hamlet in world history, tortured and self-hating souls who put themselves at the center of every dramatic event. All roads lead back to Hamlet.
As it happens, I now have a single Hutu to compare the dozen or so Tutsis to.
On the PCA plot above you see the Hutu is near the Luhya and Bantu agriculturalists from Kenya. The Tutsis are shifted toward various Near Eastern populations. Nothing surprising.
