Rwanda today is a nation fiercely grappling with its own identity. The official narrative, championed by the government, is one of unity: Rwandanness over ethnicity. The words “Hutu” and “Tutsi” are absent from identity cards, their public discussion often discouraged in an effort to forge a single, cohesive national community out of the ashes of the 1994 genocide. This project of national reconciliation is a direct and understandable response to an atrocity that was justified through a rigid, Manichean ethnic ideology. Yet, to understand the genocide, one must first understand the deep, poisonous roots of that ideology. And those roots lead us inexorably back to the highland kingdoms of the late 19th century and the arrival of European colonial powers.
The prevailing, simplistic explanation for the Rwandan genocide—that it was the result of “ancient tribal hatreds”—is not just inaccurate; it is a profound abdication of historical responsibility. It naturalises the violence, presenting it as an inevitable, cyclical feature of Rwandan society. This narrative is seductive in its simplicity, but it is a colonial construct itself, one that obscures the active, deliberate, and ruthless process of social engineering undertaken by German and, most significantly, Belgian administrators. They did not simply find a divided society and take sides; they took a complex, fluid social structure and manufactured a rigid racial hierarchy. The story of how they did so is the story of how a nation was set on a path to destruction.
The Land of a Thousand Hills: Pre-Colonial Social Fabric
Before the first European explorer laid eyes on the lush, terraced hills of Rwanda, the region was home to a sophisticated and centralised kingdom. The Kingdom of Rwanda, ruled by a king (the mwami), was a complex society with a shared language (Kinyarwanda), a common culture, and a collective spiritual belief system centred on Imana (a supreme god).
Within this society, the categories of Hutu, Tutsi, and Twa existed. However, their nature was radically different from the fixed, biological identities imposed later. The Twa, a forest-dwelling people who made up around 1% of the population, were often potters and hunters and occupied a somewhat distinct, marginalised social position.
The distinction between Hutu and Tutsi, however, was far more fluid. Historically, these were primarily socio-economic classifications, not ethnic or racial ones. The term “Tutsi” generally referred to those who owned large herds of cattle, the primary form of wealth and social status in the kingdom. “Hutu” referred to those who were primarily agriculturalists, farming the land. Crucially, this was not a closed caste system. A Hutu family that, through skill, luck, or marriage, acquired a significant number of cattle could over time become considered Tutsi. Conversely, a Tutsi family that lost its herds could slide into Hutu status. Intermarriage was common, and lineage was not the sole determinant.
The king and his court (abiru) were predominantly Tutsi, and a form of clientage known as ubuhake existed, whereby a patron (often Tutsi) would grant cattle to a client (often Hutu) in exchange for loyalty, tribute, and military service. This system created hierarchies and inequalities, but it was a political and economic hierarchy, not a rigid racial one. Identity was relational and performative. One was Tutsi or Hutu not by blood, but by one’s wealth, social standing, and proximity to power. This fluidity is the single most important fact to grasp, for it was this fluidity that the colonial powers would systematically dismantle.
The First Intruders: German Indirect Rule and the Seeds of Theory
The Berlin Conference of 1884-85, which carved the African continent into European spheres of influence, assigned Rwanda to Germany. The first Germans to arrive, like Count Gustav Adolf von Götzen in 1894, encountered a powerful, centralised monarchy. The German colonial administration, sparse and resource-limited, favoured a policy of indirect rule. They saw in the Tutsi-dominated royal court a natural aristocratic class through which they could govern efficiently.
This perception was filtered through a pre-existing racist ideological lens prevalent in 19th-century Europe: the “Hamitic HypothesisHamitic Hypothesis Full Description: A colonial racial theory introduced by European colonizers (Germans and Belgians) to Rwanda. It falsely claimed that the Tutsi were a separate, “Caucasoid” race from North Africa (Hamites) who were naturally superior to the indigenous “Negroid” Hutu. The Hamitic Hypothesis was the intellectual foundation of the division in Rwandan society. Colonial administrators used physical measurements (like nose width and height) to rigidly classify the population. They issued ethnic identity cards and granted Tutsis privileged access to education and administration, while subjecting Hutus to forced labor. Critical Perspective:This theory demonstrates how colonialism manufactured ethnicity. Before European arrival, the distinction between Hutu and Tutsi was largely a fluid class distinction based on wealth (cattle ownership). The colonizers calcified these classes into rigid racial categories. The genocide was, in a tragic irony, a violent acceptance of these colonial lies: Hutu extremists accepted the colonial idea that Tutsis were alien invaders, but sought to destroy them rather than serve them..” This pseudo-scientific theory, which gained traction in anthropological circles, posited that any signs of advanced civilisation in Africa must be the work of a migratory, superior “Hamitic” race, often linked to ancient Caucasoid peoples from the Nile region. The Tutsi, with their taller stature, narrower facial features, and their dominance in the political structure of a “civilised” kingdom, were immediately cast in this role by European observers.
John Hanning Speke, the British explorer who visited the neighbouring region, had famously articulated this in his 1863 book, Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile, writing of the Tutsi, “in these countries… government is in the hands of foreigners… who are probably of Abyssinian origin.” He dubbed this the “Cattle-Hamites.” The Germans adopted this view wholesale. They saw the Tutsi as natural-born rulers, a “noble race” who had subjugated the “inferior,” “Bantu” Hutu masses. This was not merely an observation; it became the foundational principle of colonial policy. The Germans began to favour the Tutsi chiefs, reinforcing their authority and beginning the process of hardening the previously fluid social categories.
The Belgian Takeover: Bureaucratising Racism
The most profound and damaging transformation of Rwandan society occurred under Belgian colonial rule. Following Germany’s defeat in the First World War, the League of NationsLeague of Nations
Full Description:The first worldwide intergovernmental organisation whose principal mission was to maintain world peace. Its spectacular failure to prevent the aggression of the Axis powers provided the negative blueprint for the United Nations, influencing the decision to prioritize enforcement power over pure idealism. The League of Nations was the precursor to the UN, established after the First World War. Founded on the principle of collective security, it relied on moral persuasion and unanimous voting. It ultimately collapsed because it lacked an armed force and, crucially, the United States never joined, rendering it toothless in the face of expansionist empires.
Critical Perspective:The shadow of the League looms over the UN. The founders of the UN viewed the League as “too democratic” and ineffective because it treated all nations as relatively equal. Consequently, the UN was designed specifically to correct this “error” by empowering the Great Powers (via the Security Council) to police the world, effectively sacrificing sovereign equality for the sake of stability.
Read more granted Rwanda (along with Burundi) to Belgium as a mandate territory, which they administered as part of the Belgian Congo.
The Belgians took the German Hamitic fantasy and transformed it into a brutal, bureaucratic reality. They were obsessed with order, classification, and control. To govern effectively, they believed, they needed to understand and categorise the population. They inherited the idea of the Tutsi as a superior ruling race and set about making this theory the bedrock of their administration. The Tutsi elite were to be the sole intermediaries through which the Belgians would exercise power.
The single most consequential act in this process was the introduction of identity cards in 1933. A massive census was undertaken, and every single Rwandan man, woman, and child was classified as either Hutu, Tutsi, or Twa. The criteria for this classification were a grotesque application of the Hamitic myth. Colonial administrators would often use a system of anthropometric measurements—the width of the nose, the shape of the eyes, the height of the individual—to determine “race.” The number of cattle one owned, a previously fluid economic indicator, was now codified into a fixed, hereditary ethnic identity. If your father was classified as Tutsi, so were you, forever.
This act of bureaucratic fiat froze a dynamic social system in its tracks. The possibility of moving from Hutu to Tutsi vanished overnight. Ethnic identity was no longer about what you owned or achieved; it was now about who you were in a biological, immutable sense. The identity card became a passport to opportunity or a sentence to marginalisation. Access to education, administrative jobs, and positions of authority within the colonial structure were almost exclusively reserved for those bearing the “Tutsi” classification. The Belgians created a de jure racial state, institutionalising a privilege for Tutsis that was far more rigid and exclusionary than the de facto political hierarchy of the pre-colonial era.
The Catholic Church: Blessing the Divide
The colonial project was not solely a secular one. The Catholic Church, specifically the White Fathers mission, played an indispensable role in legitimising and reinforcing the racial hierarchy. Initially, the Church had been somewhat ambivalent, seeing the mwami and his court as potential obstacles to conversion. However, they too fell under the spell of the Hamitic Hypothesis.
Missionaries began to see the Tutsi as more “intelligent,” “noble,” and receptive to Western civilisation and Christianity. They portrayed the Hutu as simple, backward peasants. Consequently, the Church threw its considerable weight behind the Tutsi elite. Seminary education, the gateway to literacy and influence, was disproportionately offered to Tutsi children. The Church became a key partner of the Belgian administration, running the schools that produced the next generation of chiefs and clerks, almost all of whom were Tutsi.
This alliance between the cross, the crown, and the “Tutsi race” created a powerful ideological apparatus. It sacralised the colonial order, presenting the Tutsi dominance not just as a political convenience for the Belgians, but as a natural, God-given state of affairs. The Church’s teachings provided a moral and intellectual justification for a system that was, in reality, built on brute force and racism.
The Great Reversal: Cynicism at Independence
The post-World War II period saw the wind of change blowing across Africa. The language of democracy, self-determinationSelf-Determination Full Description:Self-Determination became the rallying cry for anti-colonial movements worldwide. While enshrined in the UN Charter, its application was initially fiercely contested. Colonial powers argued it did not apply to their imperial possessions, while independence movements used the UN’s own language to demand the end of empire. Critical Perspective:There is a fundamental tension in the UN’s history regarding this term. While the organization theoretically supported freedom, its most powerful members were often actively fighting brutal wars to suppress self-determination movements in their colonies. The realization of this right was not granted by the UN, but seized by colonized peoples through struggle., and human rights began to challenge the logic of empire. In Rwanda, this new global atmosphere found a receptive audience among the educated Hutu elite, who had been systematically excluded from power for decades. They began to articulate a political discourse that flipped the Hamitic Hypothesis on its head.
In the 1950s, a Hutu intellectual named Grégoire Kayibanda, who would later become Rwanda’s first president, published the “Hutu Manifesto” in 1957. This document did not challenge the colonial racial categories; it accepted them completely. It argued that Rwanda was a nation dominated by a “Hamitic” (Tutsi) minority over a “Bantu” (Hutu) majority. The struggle was framed as one of majority rule against a “foreign” oligarchy. The manifesto demanded political emancipation for the Hutu “common man.”
Faced with this rising tide of Hutu nationalism and a changing international climate, the Belgians executed a breathtakingly cynical political volte-face. Having built up and supported the Tutsi aristocracy for over forty years, they now abandoned them. Seeing the Hutu majority as the future of the country—and a way to maintain Belgian influence in a post-colonial era—the administration shifted its support to the Hutu political movements.
This reversal was catastrophic. The Belgians provided tacit and sometimes active support for the “Hutu Revolution” that began in 1959. As violence erupted, Tutsi chiefs were massacred, and tens of thousands of Tutsis fled into exile. The Belgians oversaw a “democratic” transition that installed a Hutu-led republic in 1962 at independence. The first post-colonial government was born not from a rejection of colonial racism, but from its violent inversion. The racial hierarchy was intact; only the positions of the oppressor and the oppressed had been swapped.
The Long Shadow: From Revolution to Genocide
The independent Rwandan state inherited a colonial masterpiece of division. The identity cards remained. The political discourse was now firmly entrenched in the zero-sum logic of ethnic competition. The exiled Tutsi refugees in neighbouring Uganda and Burundi formed the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), whose 1990 invasion to claim the right of returnRight of Return
Full Description:The political and legal principle asserting that Palestinian refugees and their descendants have an inalienable right to return to the homes and properties they were displaced from in 1948. It is anchored in UN Resolution 194 but remains the most intractable issue in peace negotiations. The Right of Return is central to Palestinian national identity. It argues that the refugee status is temporary and that justice requires restitution. For Israel, this demand is viewed as an existential threat; allowing millions of Palestinians to return would end Israel’s status as a Jewish-majority state.
Critical Perspective:This issue highlights the clash between individual rights and ethno-nationalism. International law generally supports the return of refugees to their country of origin. However, the conflict is trapped in a zero-sum game where the restoration of Palestinian rights is interpreted as the destruction of Israeli sovereignty.
Read more was portrayed by the Hutu PowerHutu Power Full Description:
A supremacist political ideology that asserted the inherent entitlement of the Hutu majority to rule over the Tutsi minority. It framed the Tutsi population not as fellow citizens, but as a foreign, feudal race of oppressors that needed to be eliminated for the “majority” to be free. Hutu Power was the ideological engine of the genocide. It appropriated the language of democracy (“majority rule”) and twisted it into a justification for totalitarianism. Propagated through media outlets like Kangura magazine and radio stations, it published the “Hutu Ten Commandments,” which criminalized social or economic interaction with Tutsis.
Critical Perspective:Critically, this ideology was not an expression of “ancient tribal hatred,” but a modern political phenomenon mirroring European fascism. It was cultivated by the political elite to maintain power in the face of democratization. By framing the conflict as a struggle for survival against a “Hamitic invader,” the state manipulated the population into viewing mass murder as an act of civic duty and self-defense. government not as a political challenge, but as an attempt by a “foreign” race to re-enslave the Hutu majority.
The propaganda of the 1990s, disseminated through infamous newspapers like Kangura and the radio station RTLM, was pure, unadulterated Hamitic ideology. The “Ten Hutu Commandments,” published in Kangura in 1990, explicitly stated that Tutsis were “dishonest in business” and that Hutus should “stop having mercy on the Tutsi.” It warned Hutu men against Tutsi women, whom it portrayed as agents of the enemy. The language was modern, but the core idea—that Tutsis were a distinct, cunning, and alien race—was a direct import from the colonial laboratory.
When the genocide was launched in April 1994, the identity cards were the first tool the génocidaires used. At roadblocks, they did not ask for political opinions; they asked for the little card that the Belgian administration had introduced sixty-one years earlier. Your life or death depended on the ethnic classification a colonial bureaucrat had assigned to your grandfather.
Conclusion: The Unforgivable Legacy
The road to the Rwandan genocide was not paved with ancient stones. It was constructed, brick by bureaucratic brick, by European colonial powers. The Germans provided the initial racist theory. The Belgians, with their mania for order and classification, codified that theory into law, creating a rigid, biological caste system where none had existed before. The Catholic Church blessed this new order, giving it a moral veneer. And when it suited their interests, the Belgians cynically abandoned their own creations, unleashing a violent political dynamic they could no longer control.
To argue that colonialism caused the genocide is not to absolve the Rwandan génocidaires of their responsibility. The killers made their choices. But those choices were made within a political, social, and ideological framework that was a European invention. The “tribal hatred” was not ancient; it was a meticulously crafted and institutionally enforced product of the colonial encounter.
The tragedy of modern Rwanda is that it is forced to build a unified national identity on top of a fissure that was deliberately and violently carved by outsiders. The silence around the words “Hutu” and “Tutsi” today is a testament to the enduring power of that colonial poison. To understand the genocide, one must therefore look beyond the hundred days of killing in 1994 and into the archives and administrative decrees of the early 20th century. For in those documents lies the blueprint for a nation’s destruction, a chilling reminder of how the pseudoscience of race, when combined with absolute power, can forge a divide that leads to hell on earth.
Further Reading:
· Mamdani, Mahmood. When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda. Princeton University Press, 2001. (A seminal work that thoroughly explores the colonial construction of racial identity).
· Prunier, Gérard. The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide. Columbia University Press, 1995. (A comprehensive history with detailed analysis of the colonial period).
· Vansina, Jan. Antecedents to Modern Rwanda: The Nyiginya Kingdom. University of Wisconsin Press, 2004. (An essential work on the pre-colonial kingdom, challenging simplistic ethnic narratives).
· Newbury, Catharine. The Cohesion of Oppression: Clientship and Ethnicity in Rwanda, 1860-1960. Columbia University Press, 1988. (A detailed study of the ubuhake clientage system and its transformation under colonialism).
· Des Forges, Alison. Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda. Human Rights Watch, 1999. (The definitive human rights report, with a crucial historical chapter on the colonial era).
· Chrétien, Jean-Pierre. The Great Lakes of Africa: Two Thousand Years of History. Zone Books, 2003. (Provides a broader regional context for the social structures manipulated by colonists).
· Gourevitch, Philip. We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998. (A classic of literary journalism that touches on the colonial history while focusing on the genocide itself).
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