Nigel Watt is not an academic so his book on Burundi is free of the usual theoretical straitjackets of established paradigms. The subtitle is Biography of a Small Country, a clue that the text treats the nation as a living entity, a collective of people in acts of profound enmity and rapacity, but also of great courage and generosity. Throughout the book are interviews and biographical sketches of people involved in acts of heroism, but also of bestiality.

Burundi and Rwanda are twin countries, identical in many ways, including poverty, ethnic composition, language, culture, religion, geography, and instinct to massacre. But while Rwanda has acquired a reputation for genocide, the massacre of hundreds of thousands of people, proportionately in less time than it took the Nazis to slaughter their racial enemies, Burundi appears more considered in its spurts of killing, taking recesses before resumption of its vocation for murder.

The irony of this odyssey of ethnic massacre is that technically speaking there are no ethnic divisions in these two countries, except in the minds of those who organise the killings. Insofar as consciousness features in the definition of “tribe” or “ethnic” group there is some justification for this, but since this consciousness is based on belief in common ancestry, language, culture, myths, religion and homeland, the people of Burundi and Rwanda are in fact one ethnic group or “tribe”.

Old-fashioned European and American textbooks wrote that these countries were made up of Tutsi, Hutu and Twa. The Tutsi were tall and slim and reared cattle; Hutu were medium height, heftier and farmed the land; the Twa were really short, “pygmies”, and made pots. The facts are that people of these two countries cannot tell the ethnic identities of each other, because they look alike, speak the same language, live in the same areas, and do the same work.

Perpetrators of the genocide in Rwanda needed to check IDs before killing their Tutsi enemies. Hutu killed fellow Hutu through error, or because they were considered “moderate”, that is unwilling to kill all Tutsi, including their spouses, parents or children. Because they looked alike, did the same work, and spoke the same language, Hutu and Tutsi married each other, and children had to be told by their parents what their “ethnic” identity was.

The myths of origin stated that Tutsi cattle herders invaded the country and established hegemony over the settled Hutu and Twa who farmed or made pots. But whatever the historical merits of the case, the social structure was not a caste system such as obtained in India, where Caucasians from the north conquered dark-skinned indigenes, and used the Law of Manu to organise segregated, hermetically sealed social castes.

The social groups were fluid, intermarriages occurred, farmers and herds people intermingled, and all sub-groups participated in the exercise of political power. When the country was conquered by Europeans, they assumed that the two countries were made up of tribes as in other African countries. When they could find no evidence to justify their assumptions, they arbitrarily defined possessors of a certain number of cattle as Tutsi, and those with less as Hutu. And gave them ID cards to prove it. The Twa were on the margins, looked down upon by all the others.

When Belgium was ruled by the aristocracy, they favoured the minority of cattle herders, whom they considered as fellow aristocrats with “European” features, much as the British regarded the Fulani cattle herders of northern Nigeria. When the country moved to a democratic system of government, the rulers favoured the majority Hutu, through whom they hoped to maintain neo-colonial privileges. With this colonial distortion of their history, Tutsi and Hutu elites were primed to murder each other to remain the blue-eyed boys of their European masters.

With this background, Watt, who worked in the country for Christian Aid, tried to sort out the messy relations between people who murdered each other in the name of Tutsi or Hutu, while they were children of both. He interviewed those who refused the role of killers to which their history had conditioned them, and tried to create a Burundi where all its people could live in peace and create a future for their children. While some remained on edge, waiting for a chance to assassinate, others taught people that they were one.

Religious groups, NGOs and individuals created institutions which strove to ameliorate the situation, and allow Hutu, Tutsi and Twa to get the education, and be given equal opportunity to share in the destiny of their country. But always in the background were those who thought they should have it all because they were the majority, and those who thought that since they were the minority they needed to have it all to protect themselves against the majority. On such beliefs are massacres and genocide erected.

Currently, Burundi seems to have achieved temporary stability through the agency of outside forces who emphasise that mass murder cannot be the centrepiece of civic and political culture. The late Julius Nyerere who conquered the ethnic demons of his own country, and Nelson Mandela who united his own ethnically divided nation against apartheid, were mediators who tried to purge this ethnically homogenous country of self-created and self-perpetuating myths of ethnic differentiation.

If Burundi helps to inform international public opinion to intervene to prevent a second Rwanda, it would have done its job.

Patrick Wilmot, who is based in London, is a writer and commentator on African affairs for the BBC, Sky News, Al-Jazeera and CNN. He’s a visiting professor at Ahmadu Bello and Jos universities in Nigeria.