RWANDA'S majestic and spectacular beauty is, indeed, a sight to behold. Like its neighbour Burundi, Rwanda has steep mountains and deep valleys. In the east is a series of hilly plateaus and lakes.
It is also a land of luxuriant vegetation whose fertile, green landscape sparkles with streams of spring water and rivers which water the valleys below.
Like the nearby Ruwenzori mountain range on the Uganda-Congolese border with snow-capped summits, Rwanda's majestic peaks and hilly plateaus are now and then shrouded in mist, presenting an eerie yet captivating sight.
This is also the land of the world-famous mountain gorillas, serene and secure in the dense vegetation of what is one of the most inaccessible parts of the African continent.
If there is any part of the continent which can rightly be called the green hills of Africa, this is it, Rwanda, and its twin, Burundi.
But it is a beauty – the scenic beauty of the landscape and vegetation and the pleasant climate – that sharply contrasts with the history of the country and of the region whose ugly past no one would envy. For, it is here in Rwanda, not in Burundi, where the Tutsi, a tall people who had migrated from the north, first encountered the Hutu about 400 years ago. It was a fateful encounter which was to change the course of history for the entire region. The Tutsi went on to subjugate the Hutu and virtually enslave them for the next four centuries.
Tragically, little has changed in this master-servant relationship despite years of protest and uprising by the Hutu.
It is also here, in Rwanda, where the worst massacre in modern history took place when about one million Tutsis were slaughtered by Hutu extremists in 1994.
The holocaust was unprecedented in one fundamental respect. Never before in recorded history had so many people been brutally murdered in so short a time. The Hutu accomplished their mission in a stunningly short three-month period and almost succeeded in exterminating the Tutsi in this small densely populated East African country.
Rwanda is still reeling from the devastating blows of the genocide, a horrendous tragedy deeply rooted in history whose course has been inextricably shaped by an asymmetrical relationship between the two ethnic groups on terms dictated by the dominant Tutsi minority.
Burundi has fared no better. The history of Rwanda is the history of Burundi, differing only in some respects.
Rwanda has now entered our vocabulary as a synonym for holocaust – “We don't want another Rwanda” – at least in the African context, as much as Biafra symbolised war and famine during the sixties; and as much as Cambodia became synonymous with “killing fields” under the brutal Khmer Rouge regime of Pol Pot in the seventies when more than one million people were executed and starved to death.
Yet Rwanda was one of the least known countries in the world until it exploded on the international scene in 1994 with volcanic fury. Before then, it was virtually unknown even among some educated Africans as I found out in the 1970s. They were students in the United States but born and brought up in Africa. Yet they had never even heard of Rwanda and Burundi, let alone known that the two were African countries. Now almost everybody knows about them, especially Rwanda.
But Rwanda's unspeakable horror is not unique in history. In modern times, the Jewish holocaust in Nazi Germany surpassed it in terms of sheer numbers of the victims who perished; so did Stalin's purges, and Cambodia's “agrarian revolution” which turned plowshares into swords, and farms into killing fields, as did other horrors including the Chinese cultural revolution and even catastrophes in Africa itself where at least 3 million people – mostly blacks – died in Sudan at the hands of the Arabs between 1955 and 1999. And they are still dying today in this racial war.
Also, up to 2 million people, mostly Igbos, died in the Nigerian civil war from 1967 to 1970, mainly from starvation which was effectively used as a weapon by the Nigerian federal military government to starve them into submission. And more than one million people perished in Mozambique's 16-year civil war which ended in 1992.
However, Rwanda's tragedy is unique in Africa in one respect. No other tribe has slaughtered members of another tribe on such a large scale as the Hutu did to the Tutsi in 1994, except, perhaps, the Tutsi in neighbouring Burundi where they killed no fewer than one million Hutus through the years between 1962 and 1996. Between 1993 and 1996 alone, in a period of less than three years, about 500,000 Hutus were killed by the Tutsi in Burundi, according to some sources, as we learned earlier. And the massacres have not stopped, as members of the two tribes continue to kill each other in both countries.
The Colonial Imprint
The imposition of a Tutsi aristocracy – which evolved into a Tutsi ethnocracy – on the Hutu majority preceded the advent of colonial rule by the Germans and the Belgians. Therefore, it would have taken place even if Europeans had never colonised Africa.
But colonialism did accentuate ethnic differences and cleavages. It also exacerbated conflict between the two groups. The Germans, and later the Belgians, invested the Tutsi with authority as the “natural” rulers of the Hutu by virtue of their status as members of a “superior” stock, thus legitimising the conquest and oppression of the Hutu majority which began hundreds of years earlier with the arrival of their conquerors in what is now Rwanda and Burundi.
The Tutsi, who are of Nilotic stock, migrated to the region in the 1400s probably from the southern part of what is Sudan today, a region which is inhabited by Nilotic people. The Maasai, usually called the Masai, are another Nilotic group who also migrated from the same region about 300 years ago and settled in the area that came to be known as Kenya and Tanzania.
However, both have had their origin erroneously placed in Ethiopia whose population and culture is mainly Semitic – linguistic affinity with other Semitic languages, Arabic and Hebrew, being just one such evidence – and not Nilotic. But it is a mistake which has been sanctioned by folk role as a “historical fact.” And some scholars such as Gérard Prunier speculate that the Tutsi may have migrated from the Horn of Africa, thus placing their origin even farther east.
Whatever the case, after the Tutsi conquered the Hutu majority, they went on to consolidate their power through the years and, by the late 1700s, a single Tutsi-ruled kingdom had evolved, occupying most of what is now Rwanda. The kingdom was named Ruanda, only slightly different from the country's current name.
Like its sister state of Urundi to the south, the Ruanda kingdom was ruled by a mwami, which means king. He controlled regional vassals who were also Tutsi and subjugated the Hutu on behalf of the king and the entire Tutsi ethnocracy. Thus, both kingdoms had two layers, with the Tutsi on top and the Hutu at the bottom.
Ruanda reached the height of its power and influence under the leadership of Mwami Mutara II who ruled the kingdom in the early 1800s, and under Mwami Kigeri IV who was king from 1853 – 1895. That was the golden era of the Tutsi. Mwami Kigeri established a standing army armed with guns bought from Arab and Swahili traders who travelled to the interior of the Great Lakes region from the coast of what is Tanzania today, selling a variety of merchandise including cloth, beads, and household items, besides guns. He also barred most foreigners from entering his kingdom.
Although the Tutsi kingdoms were independent, their status changed when Europeans went to colonise Africa. In 1890, Ruanda became a German-ruled territory after some resistance which sorely tested the Germans in skirmishes of guerrilla warfare; even today, the Tutsi still have a reputation as formidable fighters.
In 1897, Ruanda became a part of Deutsch Ostafrika, or German East Africa, which was the territory of Tanganyika. Therefore during German rule, the three territories of Ruanda, Urundi and Tanganyika constituted one country.
But the Germans did not take over Ruanda as an administrative unit until 1899 and assigned a German administrative officer to the colony only in 1907. Urundi was also incorporated late into German East Africa in 1898.
However, the Germans did not have much influence in Ruanda and Urundi as they did in the other part of German East Africa, Tanganyika, which was also the most prized possession. They did not start any major development projects in Ruanda and Urundi as they did in Tanganyika where they established tea and sisal plantations; vigorously encouraged the cultivation of coffee on individual and family farms; built roads and railways, and initiated other projects including the cultivation of cotton.
They wanted to start the same schemes in Ruanda and Urundi, especially the cultivation of coffee and tea, but the outbreak of World War I interfered with their plans. And they had no better land. It is some of the most fertile on the entire continent, endowed with abundant rainfall and an excellent climate, and soil of volcanic origin capable of nourishing a wide variety of crops including export commodities.
In fact, that is one of the main reasons why Rwanda and Burundi are the most densely populated countries in Africa. Their fertile soil and ideal climate at elevations of about 5,000 feet are capable of sustaining hundreds of people per square mile. And most of the land is arable, although not enough for the population. As John Reader states in his book, Africa: A biography of the Continent:
“In 1993,...Burundi had a greater proportion of its land surface under permanent cultivation and pasture than any other country in Africa: 87 per cent. Rwanda had less, 59 per cent, but even that was equal to the proportion of arable and pasture land in the Netherlands, Europe's most densely populated nation (with 448 persons per square kilometre).”1
When the Germans arrived in Ruanda and Urundi as the first colonial masters, they automatically chose the Tutsi to help them facilitate the colonisation of the territory, thus reinforcing their own prejudices about different groups of Africans. Because the Tutsi were already in control, ruling the Hutu, the Germans – and later the Belgians – concluded that they were more intelligent than their subjects who also happened to belong to a different “racial” stock.
Their assessment was based on ethnographic studies by the Germans in the early 1900s which were tainted by racial prejudice. And the German colonial administrators in Ruanda and Urundi accepted this pseudoscience as genuine scholarship and used it to justify their preconceived notions about the Hutu majority as a despicable lot simply because they were generally short and dark, and had been conquered by the tall, “handsome and intelligent” light-skinned Tutsis hundreds of years before.
The stereotypes were reinforced by other differences, real and perceived, between the Hutu and the Tutsi. The Hutu were primarily agriculturalists; the Tutsi, pastoralists. In most African societies, cattle symbolise wealth. Therefore livestock ownership is identified with wealth, or accumulation of wealth, hence upward mobility. It is an attribute that was perfectly in accord with the status of the Tutsi as the rulers of members of “the lesser breed”: the Hutu.
Political and economic power was exclusively in Tutsi hands, a monopoly which led the Tutsi aristocracy to conclude that such hegemonic control was a result of divine intent as part of the grand design of the Creator. And racism among the German colonial masters found a perfect ally in this kind of superstition which was invoked as an article of faith by the Tutsi rulers and not without reason.
Throughout history, aristocrats have “justified” their status as a heavenly mandate even when committing some of the most despicable acts known to man. The Tutsi in Ruanda-Urundi were no exception.
Therefore when the Germans began to consolidate their rule, they filled all native positions in the colonial administration with Tutsi employees, to the total exclusion of the “dull, ugly” Hutus. But by doing so, they only helped to “justify” and solidify inequalities between the Hutu and Tutsi. They also helped to stoke the fires which had been smoldering for centuries and which went on to explode into flames with unconstrained fury a few decades later.
German dreams of a tropical paradise in the misty blue mountains of the Great Lakes regions of East Africa were shattered when World War I exploded in 1914 and the Belgians invaded Ruanda and Urundi from the Belgian Congo in April 1916. They remained in control of Ruanda-Urundi throughout the reminder of the war and were given mandate over it by the League of Nations after Germany lost the war. The rest of German East Africa – the biggest part of the colony – which came to to be known as Tanganyika went to Britain after the United States refused to take it during that nation's period of isolationism under President Woodrow Wilson.
After the Belgians took control of Ruanda and Urundi and consolidated them as one colony of Ruanda-Urundi, they went even further to widen the ethnic divide between the Hutu and the Tutsi. In 1926, they introduced an identity card to distinguish the Hutu from the Tutsi, and vice versa, similar to what blacks were required to carry under apartheid in South Africa.
The difference was that in Ruanda-Urundi, the card gave legal sanction to the superior status of the Tutsi, who are black people, while in South Africa, it legitimised the inferior status of blacks.
It also gave them even more advantages over the Hutu in education and employment. And it legalised discrimination against the Hutu in a country where the colonial authorities – German and Belgian – had always favoured the Tutsi.
Like their predecessors, the Germans, the Belgian colonial rulers also simply added to the stockpile of fuel for an inferno which almost consumed both countries – Rwanda and Burundi – several years later beginning in the sixties. The fires were still burning when the twentieth-first century began. And history is still fanning the flames. The colonial legacy is not the only culprit but is a major one, a point also underscored by The Economist:
“The colonial administrators allowed only Tutsis – albeit few even of them – to attain higher education and hold positions of authority. Christian missionaries undermined the system a little by educating the Hutus.
In the run-up to independence in 1962, the spectre of majority rule began to threaten Tutsi supremacy. In Burundi the Tutsis struck first, slaughtered the Hutu political leaders and kept their hold.
Rwanda's Hutus rose up before independence, and in 1959 murdered thousands of Tutsis, while hundreds of thousands were driven or fled into nearby countries.
The result in Burundi was rule by Tutsi soldiers who massacred Hutus whenever they showed signs of rebellion; in Rwanda, a Hutu regime that discriminated against Tutsis.”2
The Hutu regime in Rwanda lasted for 32 years, from July 1962 to July 1994, which was a brief shining moment for the Hutu in a nightmare of 400 years of domination by the Tutsi.
Even legitimate protest by the Hutu against such oppression was interpreted by the Tutsi as a rebellion against divine authority from which the Nilotic aristocratic rulers derived their mandate to rule.
Yet, it was not even legitimately constituted authority which derived its mandate from the consent of the people who were being ruled – the Hutu majority. Still, the Tutsi saw themselves as the perfect creation of God, hence the embodiment of all that is best in man, to the exclusion of the God-forsaken Hutus and others. This haughty conceit among the Tutsi was clearly noticed by a number of travellers and missionaries in the region. One such traveller was Hans Meyer who observed the Tutsi phenomenon when he was in Ruanda and Urundi while the two Tutsi kingdoms were still a part of German East Africa (Deutsch Ostafrika):
“One is impressed with the proud reserve of the Tutsi....The tall fellows stand still and relaxed, leaning on their spears while watching the Europeans pass or approach, as if this unusual sight did not impress them in the least....
The Tutsi consider themselves as the top of the creation from the standpoint of intelligence and political genius, (and) to be rich and powerful and to enjoy life by doing nothing is the symbol of all wisdom for the Tutsi, the ideal for which he strives with utmost shrewdness and unscrupulousness.”3
Thus, when the colonial rulers favoured them in employment and education, the Tutsi automatically assumed that it was their “natural right” to get preferential treatment at the expense of the “inferior” Hutus. In fact, one of the reasons the Tutsi submitted to imperial authority, although not without resistance, was to secure such advantages in order to perpetuate a Tutsi ethnocracy which they felt was threatened by hordes of “backward and primitive” Hutus who vastly outnumbered them.
Such arrogance still rankles the Hutu who now and then through the years have tried to settle scores with the Tutsi by violent means, only to end up losing in most cases, as much as they lost during the colonial era when the Germans and the Belgians simply ignored them while they favoured the Tutsi.
Even when the missionaries tried to help the Hutu a little, the colonial authorities still regarded them as members of an inferior stock unworthy of being educated like the Tutsi. Both colonial authorities, German and Belgian, built some government schools in Ruanda-Urundi almost exclusively for the Tutsi. But it was the missionaries, mostly Catholic, who played a leading role in educating Africans – that is why the majority of Rwandans and Burundians are Catholic, a denomination which played the biggest role in spreading Christianity in the two countries.
However, the primary objective of providing education was not just to educate Africans; the missionaries saw provision of education as the most effective means of winning converts and spreading Christianity.
The white missionaries believed that Africans would be more effective in proselytising among their own people than white foreigners would be.
The Tutsi, on the other hand, defined education almost strictly in secular terms; not as a means of helping spread Christianity but as a way of consolidating their position as the dominant ethnic group. Therefore, they did everything they could to forge close links with the dominant Catholic church and other denominations and strengthened ties with the colonial administrators who were already favouring them.
In the early 1930s, the Belgian colonial rulers reached an agreement with the Catholic church which enabled the missionaries to take over the entire educational system, thus effectively ending the existence of government schools in Ruanda-Urundi. They became mission schools.
But the role of the government in the area of education did not end completely. The government provided money to the Catholic church for all pupils and for all teachers at the mission schools. As a condition for getting the money, the church agreed to enlarge its educational programmes which would include educating Africans who would work for the colonial government mainly as clerks and in other areas, instead of training only missionary workers and teachers for the schools run by the church.
The arrangement was very encouraging. But its implementation was dictated by ethnicity as the answer to this question: Who was to receive such secular education at the mission schools, preparing Africans to work for the colonial government – the Hutu, the Tutsi, or both?
The colonial government and the Catholic church provided the same answer even if it was for pragmatic reasons on the part of the church. As the Catholic bishop, Leon Classe, who negotiated with the colonial authorities on behalf of the church in order to reach an agreement under which the Catholic church would assume control of the schools in Rwanda-Urundi, told his fellow missionaries:
“You must choose the Batutsi because the government will probably refuse Bahutu teachers....In the government the positions in every branch of the administration, even the unimportant ones, will be reserved henceforth for young Batutsi.”4
It was a typical divide-and-rule tactic by the colonial rulers. And it was blatantly anti-Hutu.
From the early 1930s until after the Second World War, there was no question among the Belgian colonial administrators that the only Africans who should get secular education and missionary training should be Tutsi.5 They did not care or foresee the devastating impact this kind of discrimination would have on the future of Ruanda-Urundi, as the bloody conflicts between the Hutu and the Tutsi in Rwanda in 1959 and in both Rwanda and Burundi between the two ethnic groups since the 1960s tragically demonstrated.
It was the colonial authorities, not the missionaries, who had the final say on how education should be provided. The Belgian colonial rulers wanted Tutsi employees in the government. If they wanted Hutus, it would have been the same way. The Catholic church simply provided the training, although there were missionaries who were racist just like the colonial rulers were.
The educational arrangement that was agreed upon by the colonial authorities and the Catholic church played a critical role in widening and solidifying the ethnic divide between the Hutu and the Tutsi, compounded by class inequalities. The Tutsi were on top because of their ethnic identity that was also preferred by the colonial rulers, not because they were more intellectually endowed than the Hutu; they also had superior status on the basis of class as the richer and more educated group.
The difference between the two groups was also viewed in a racial context. Bishop Classe foresaw the emergence of a Christian ruling class, a “racial aristocracy,” as he put it, meaning Tutsi, supposedly the superior race.
It was the Tutsi who were given the best education, although it was substandard by European standards because Europeans in Ruanda-Urundi – as well as in other parts of Africa – did not really want Africans to get good education lest they start demanding equality with whites in employment and other areas.
It was also the Tutsi, members of a “superior” race, who were entitled to preferential treatment from whites. This was the policy of divide and rule, pitting one tribe against another, which wreaked so much havoc across Africa during and after the colonial era. And it is still doing so today – Rwanda and Burundi being some of the worst cases – demonstrated by gross inequalities in terms of educational achievements and economic development among different regions or provinces in many Africans countries; inequalities which are also partly fuelled by ethno-regional rivalries.
In the case of Rwanda and Burundi, the Hutu were not completely ignored by the missionaries, although it was obvious that the colonial authorities and the missionaries (not always grudgingly) favoured the Tutsi.
Even the missionaries themselves did not expect much of the Hutu. They saw even educated Hutus – should there be any in the future – playing only a subordinate role, with the Tutsi as the “natural” leaders being entitled to the best jobs. Bishop Classe made a clear distinction between the two ethnic groups and what kind of jobs each should expect to get when he told the Catholic missionary teachers at the schools in Rwanda:
“We must not...neglect the classes of Bahutu young people and children. They also need to be schooled and educated, and they will take up places in mine workings and industry.”6
The Tutsi were not expected to work in the mines or in factories as labourers, but the Hutu were. It was one of the most blatant cases of discrimination against the Hutu not only during that period but also years later. They were destined for a peripheral role in society. They were not equal to the Tutsi, their inferior status even acknowledged by the missionaries. The “dark and dull, ugly” Hutus – as whites and Tutsis saw them – were supposed to do “dirty” work, demanding physical labour, while the “pretty,” “handsome,” “intelligent” light-skinned Tutsis – endowed with “superior” intelligence – stayed on top, “fit” only for clean, intellectually demanding office work.
Therefore, educational opportunities for the Hutu were very limited. They were severely limited even by the church itself in compliance with the decree issued by Bishop Leon Classe.
There were a few Hutus who qualified for training as priests to enable them to spread the faith among their own people. And they knew that seminary training was the only way Hutus could acquire higher education. Other routes to high education for them were closed, except for the Tutsi although even they did not go far enough; they were still colonial subjects like the Hutu, and they were black and African like the Hutu, whose opportunities were limited under colonial rule as was the case everywhere else across the continent.
The Tutsi may have been called “black Caucasians” by Europeans – just like Ethiopians and Somalis have been called 'black Caucasians” – but they definitely were not accepted by Europeans as fellow Caucasians. To Europeans, they were just Africans even if different from other Africans – still Africans.
The Hutu used the only means that was available to them to get higher education, seminary training, and some of them did graduate from the seminaries and became priests. And there were those who left the seminaries and went to find jobs in other areas. But there was not much opportunity for them in the secular fields.
There was not even a single African university graduate during that period. The first Rwandan to acquire what was roughly equivalent or close to a university education was Anastase Makuza, a Hutu and former seminary student, who graduated from Centre Universitaire of Kisantu in the Belgian Congo in 1955 with a degree in administration and political science.
But in spite of his distinguished academic credentials, he could not get a job in Rwanda commensurate with his qualifications simply because he was a Hutu:
“His application for a post in the government administration was turned down; a position as research assistant at the Institut pour la Recherche Scientifique en Afrique Centrale was not open to him because, Makuza has said, 'the IRSAC was 150 per cent Tutsi.'
He even looked for a job in Burundi before ending up as a typist in a government office in Kibuye, Rwanda.
In 1957 Makuza was promoted to the rank of administrative assistant and subsequently transferred to Kigali, the Rwandan capital. By then, however, Makuza was already a potential revolutionary.”7
Instead of silencing him and shunting him into oblivion as they had hoped to, the colonial rulers achieved exactly the opposite as was the case with many other oppressed Hutus.
But to achieve their goals, Makuza's revolutionary potential together with that of his kinsmen would have to be harnessed into a potent force capable of dislodging the Tutsi who were firmly entrenched as the dominant ethnic group favoured by the Belgian colonial authorities and by the missionaries. And that is exactly what the Hutu attempted to do.
From 1956, an increasing number of educated Hutus tried to look for jobs commensurate with their experience and training. But they were virtually locked out of all positions other than menial work and a few posts – as lowly clerks and so on – working under Tutsis who did not even have the necessary qualifications or as much education and training as some of the Hutu who were denied jobs had.
That was the Rwanda of the 1950s which, tragically, was not much different from the Rwanda of the 1990s and thereafter in terms of opportunities for the Hutu following their ouster from power by the predominantly Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) in July 1994.
During that period, in the fifties, there was only a small Hutu elite. But it had the potential for cataclysmic change hardly anyone – let alone the Tutsi and their Belgian colonial and missionary supporters – foresaw then. Frustrated by the refusal of the colonial authorities to bring about fundamental change in the system, the highly articulate Hutu elite resolved to end Tutsi domination one way or another. The struggle had to do with the future of Rwanda after the departure of the Belgian colonial rulers.
The Tutsis were already well-positioned. They dominated all sectors of the administration and the economy. They also had advantages in terms of education and training and were well-positioned to assume control of the first African government on attainment of independence from Belgium within five years or so.
The Hutu elite used simple but powerful logic to explain their plight. They attributed the injustices to racial discrimination. The implication was clear. And it resonated well among their people.
Redress the racial imbalance – their plight would end, enabling them to regain the rights they had been denied for so long. And they had an obvious target, the Tutsi, their nemesis for the past 400 years, reinforced by the colonial rulers, both German and Belgian, who left the traditional social structure intact, with the Tutsi on top as aristocrats and the Hutu at the bottom as servants in feudal servitude. The day of reckoning had come.
The end of the Tutsi Aristocracy
In March 1957, the Hutu elite in Rwanda published the Hutu Manifesto which called for radical change in the country's power structure and challenged all the premises underlying the asymmetrical relationship between the two ethnic groups.
The Hutu demanded power which would reflect their numerical preponderance and guarantee their rights as the largest racial group in the country. They formed two political parties to articulate their demands and aspirations and achieve their goals. One was the Association for the Social Improvement of the Masses led by Joseph Gitera. The other one was the Party of the Hutu Emancipation Movement (PARMEHUTU) led by Gregoire Kayibanda. The latter became the dominant party and went on to pursue the agenda of the Hutu Manifesto.
The Manifesto challenged every facet of Rwanda's socio-political-economic system which thrived on the exploitation of the Hutu majority, not as an attempt to reform the system but as a concerted effort to bring about radical change. The Hutu leaders demanded a complete overhaul of the system. They wanted to replace it with an entirely new power arrangement.
The Hutu Manifesto identified the fundamental problem which, it said, was “the political monopoly of one race, the Tutsi race, which, given the present structural framework, becomes a social and economic monopoly.”8
It went on to cite instances of injustice across the political, economic and social spectrum and proposed radical measures to achieve “the integral and collective promotion of the Hutu.”
They included an end to class and racial prejudice; the recognition of individual ownership of land, most of which was in Hutu hands but virtually owned by the Tutsi aristocracy, with Hutus working merely as servants under vassals answerable to the mwami (Tutsi king); the advancement of the Hutu in the bureaucracy and other areas of the public sector; and the provision of education at all levels to Hutu children.9
It was a revolutionary document with echoes of the Communist Manifesto in the document's name and in terms of revolutionary language although not in terms of goals – the Hutu Manifesto was not communist. But the changes proposed were clearly radical and revolutionary considering the feudalistic nature of Rwanda's traditional system dominated by the Tutsi. And as Professor René Lemarchand states in his work Rwanda and Burundi:
“Never before had such a devastating critique of the ancien régime been publicly set forth by its opponents.”10
Yet few people paid much attention to it, in spite of its potential for revolutionary change with far-reaching consequences. The Hutu Manifesto strongly urged the Belgian colonial rulers to take “more positive and unambiguous measures to achieve the political and economic emancipation of the Hutu”; a demand which was also an implicit warning of the consequences which would follow if the measures were not implemented. It was also an urgent appeal to the colonial authorities to avert a catastrophe of genocidal proportions. Still, hardly anyone listened.
The Manifesto drew only a tepid response from the Belgian colonial authorities. It was not until December 1958, more than a year-and-a-half after the manifesto was issued, that Rwanda's Vice-Governor-General, Jean-Paul Harroy, finally admitted that “the Hutu-Tutsi question posed an undeniable problem.”
To help diffuse the potentially explosive situation, he proposed that the terms “Hutu” and “Tutsi” should no longer be officially used by the colonial government.11 It is a “solution” the government of Paul Kagame has also tried, claiming there are no Hutus and no Tutsis in Rwanda – there are only Rwandans, while ethnic hostilities continue to fester and bubble underneath, with Rwandans who use ethnic labels being accused of promoting “genocidal ideology.”
The Hutu rejected the proposal by Jean-Paul Harroy, contending that it was mere “Tutsi obfuscation,”12 an argument that resonates well among many Hutus in Rwanda even today today who contend that the Tutsi-dominated government of Paul Kagame has made it illegal to use ethnic labels – “Hutu” and “Tutsi” – only to perpetuate Tutsi hegemonic control of the country and cover up inequalities between the two ethnic groups. Under this law, it is reasonable to assume that an entire ministry or department can be filled with Tutsi or Hutu employees, yet no one can complain about discrimination because the employees are just Rwandans and not Hutus or Tutsis. Anyone who complains risks imprisonment for promoting “genocidal ideology.”
The Hutu rejected the elimination of ethnic labels in the 1950s, proposed by Vice-Governor-General Jean-Paul Harroy, for understandable reasons. It was also a way for the colonial government to conveniently ignore the demands articulated in the Hutu Manifesto – there are no Hutus and Tutsis, only Rwandans.
By remarkable contrast, the Tutsi, already on top and favoured by the colonialists, automatically interpreted government silence and inaction on the Hutu Manifesto as an endorsement of their claim to superiority over the Hutu. And that was recipe for catastrophe.
During that period, the traditional power structure was dominated by Mutara III who, as mwami, was the effective ruler of Rwanda. The Belgian colonial masters did not want to disturb the traditional equilibrium which was, in effect, a disequilibrium to the detriment of the oppressed Hutu majority.
Mutara III died in July 1958. He was succeeded by Kigeri V.
However, there was a dispute over the succession. And it had far-reaching consequences.
The Hutu complained that Kigeri Vhad not been properly selected and therefore was not entitled to the throne as the new mwami.
Fighting between the Hutu and Tutsi broke out. The Twa (Pygmies) helped the Tutsi fight the Hutu. They had their own grievances against the Hutu who conquered them long before the Tutsi arrived and became the new masters.
After being virtually enslaved for hundreds of years, the Hutu turned the tables in the mass uprising of November 1959 against the Tutsi aristocracy. This was the first time in the country's history that the Hutu had emerged victorious over the Tutsi.
More than 100,000 Tutsis were killed. Hundreds of thousands of them, including Mwami Kigeri V, fled the country. Among those who fled was Paul Kagame, with his parents, when he was about two years old. They fled to Uganda where he grew up as did many other Tutsis.
The majority of the Tutsi including Kigeri V sought refuge in Urundi (as Burundi was then still known before independence) which was still dominated by fellow Tutsis. Others fled to Belgian Congo, and to Tanganyika which became Tanzania in 1964 after uniting with Zanzibar. It was officially named Tanzania on October 29th the same year. Before then, it was known as the United Republic of Tanganyika and Zanzibar.
The 1959 Hutu uprising effectively ended Tutsi domination of the Hutu in Rwanda. It was a humiliating defeat the Tutsi who had ruled the country for hundreds of years never forgot, as they continued to make many attempts during the next several decades to regain power in their homeland.
In place of a Tutsi aristocracy emerged a Hutu ethnocracy which was no more restrained in exploiting ethnic sentiments than its predecessor, and went on to invoke a perverted form of nationalism to justify its incendiary rhetoric against the powerless Tutsi minority.13 The oppressed had become the oppressor.