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The Rwandan genocide lasted for approximately three months and can be thought of as an explosion of mass violence across the Hutu population. The number—800,000 to 1,000,000 men, women, and children killed in approximately 100 days—is so staggering as to become almost abstract. To understand the Rwandan genocide, one must move beyond the numbers and into the chronology of the horror, a day-by-day, hour-by-hour descent into a hell meticulously planned and executed with a brutal efficiency that shocked the world. This was not a spontaneous outburst of “ancient tribal hatred”; it was a modern, bureaucratically administered extermination campaign, and its…
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If the colonial period provided the blueprint for ethnic division in Rwanda, the era of decolonization saw that blueprint become a devastating reality. The period between 1959 and 1962, often referred to as the “Hutu Revolution” or the “Social Revolution,” was not a clean transfer of power from colonizer to colonized. It was a violent, chaotic upheaval that inverted the colonial racial hierarchy, institutionalized ethnic majoritarianism, and created a refugee crisis whose consequences would reverberate for decades, ultimately contributing to the genocide of 1994. This was the moment when the theoretical racism of the Hamitic HypothesisHamitic Hypothesis Full Description: A…