cultural features, such as language or religion, used to define boundaries in opposition to other collective identities (Eller 1999; Tambiah 1989; Weber 1968:389). While occupation varied, what cultural differences existed were minimal—for example, preferences in diet—and the groups had intermarried for centuries.
Further, the colonial period dramatically increased the political salience of ethnicity, while undermining the political autonomy of lineage groups and their role as a form of belonging, and changing the relations between the groups Hutu and Tutsi for the worse (Lemarchand 1970; Longman 2010a; C. Newbury 1988; Reyntjens 1985). Both the Germans and the Belgians, accompanied by the Catholic Church, ruled indirectly through the Tutsi kings and chiefs and discriminated against Hutu. Tutsi elites had preferential access to education and to administrative and church positions, because colonial leaders believed Tutsi were superior and excluded Hutu. Further, Rwandan political leaders used these outside ideas in their own efforts to articulate agendas and mobilize followers, with divisive consequences. The growing power of the colonial state privileged Tutsi’s access to power while incorporating Rwanda into the world economy, which dramatically increased the advantages and disadvantages of being Tutsi versus being Hutu. While Tutsi chiefs had political power and were in a position to accumulate wealth through taxes, rural dwellers, who were predominantly Hutu, faced new demands, particularly under the Belgians, including increased taxes, compulsory cultivation of certain crops, and forced labor. Clientship institutions, particularly ubuhake, became less reciprocal and voluntary—in conditions of growing economic insecurity, people’s “choice” to enter into clientship was a form of indirect or direct coercion—and more rigid and exploitative, as they extended to less powerful people and became aligned with administrative demands (C. Newbury 1988:137–140). Overall, the condition of rural Hutu worsened, as they bore the brunt of the increasingly onerous forms of exploitation and discrimination (C. Newbury 1988:178–179; Reyntjens 1985:135–142). Yet not all the Tutsi were elites, even during the colonial period when virtually all elites were Tutsi (Codere 1973:70; D. Newbury and C. Newbury 2000:839).
The transition from colonial rule to independence is another period of Rwandan history that has been highly contested, described either as a democratic revolution framed around legitimate grievances where the majority took power from the minority or as precursor to genocide. By the 1950s, when Tutsi elites began calls for independence, Hutu activists became increasingly vocal, arguing that the elite Tutsi ruled in an oppressive and dominating manner, both under the precolonial feudal system and under Belgian rule, and benefited unfairly from the colonial administration. Hutu activists sought to address poverty, inequality, insecure access to land, inadequate access to education, and youth issues, and they argued for democracy and majority rule (Lemarchand 1970; C. Newbury 1988; Reyntjens 1985). They were successful in large part because they responded to and channeled widespread legitimate rural discontent generated by Hutu’s shared structural position of oppression (C. Newbury 1978, 1980, 1988).
The United Nations set a date for independence, which Lemarchand (1970) argues propelled revolution and violence, because Hutu parties wanted to ensure they, not the Tutsi monarchy, held power before the deadline. The Belgian authorities and the Catholic Church switched their support to these newly established Hutu revolutionaries. The ensuing revolution was “powerfully assisted if not engineered by the Belgian authorities” (Lemarchand 2009:31). In 1959, the reigning king (Umwami Rudahigwa) died. In September 1959, Hutu parties won an overwhelming majority in legislative elections and decisively rejected the monarchy via referendum. On July 1, 1962, Rwanda regained formal independence from European rule.
The Hutu Revolution (1959–1962) was directed not against the Belgian colonial administration but against Tutsi, who faced intimidation and communal violence (Codere 1962; Lemarchand 1970; C. Newbury 1988:195; Reyntjens 1985:267–269). In November 1959, in response to a nonfatal Tutsi attack on a Hutu subchief, a group of Hutu attacked and killed four Tutsi notables. Widespread violent incidents against Tutsi spread across the country in a matter of days, sparing only three districts, though the attacks were initially limited mainly to burning and looting (C. Newbury 1988:194–195). Anti-Tutsi violence flared periodically and became more deliberate and marked with more bloodshed between November 1959 and the September 1961 elections (Lemarchand 1970).
The First Republic, from 1962 to 1973, was led by President Gregoire Kayibanda and his coalition of Hutu from the south. In 1963, exiled Tutsis invaded unsuccessfully from Burundi. In 1973, Juvénal Habyarimana seized the presidency in a popularly backed military coup, and he led the Second Republic from 1973 to 1994, with a northern Hutu power base. Scholars agree that after the transition in power at independence, Hutu leaders in the First and Second Republics did not reverse the oppressive leadership style of Rwabugiri and colonial authorities but continued to rule authoritatively, to centralize power in a small ethnic and regionally determined elite, to be intolerant of opposition, and to discriminate on the basis of ethnicity, now against Tutsi (Jefremovas 2002:124–125; Lemarchand 1970, 2009; Reyntjens 1985:521). Hutu revolutionaries in 1959–1962 and the Hutu-power government in the 1990s operated by similar logics, especially in terms of the marginalization of moderates, dynamics of fear, and winner-take-all politics (C. Newbury 1998).
The First and Second Republics created a political situation that excluded Tutsi from power and periodically victimized innocent Tutsi. In addition to the attacks between 1959 and 1961, after the failed Tutsi armed incursion in 1963 from Burundi, Tutsi political leaders were eliminated and between ten thousand and fourteen thousand Tutsi were killed, while thousands more were forced into exile (De Lame 2005:59; Reyntjens 1985:460–467). Beginning in 1973, there was another wave of violence when Habyarimana targeted Tutsi students and school staff in pogroms. Over time, this discrimination and violence created an extensive Tutsi diaspora community who became stateless but had legitimate claims to live in Rwanda. Between 1959 and 1963, two hundred thousand Tutsi were forced into exile: seventy thousand to Uganda, twenty-five thousand to the DRC (formerly Zaire), and fifty thousand to Burundi (Lemarchand 2009:31). By the 1980s, between four hundred thousand and six hundred thousand refugees were estimated to be living in neighboring countries, many the children of Tutsi who had fled earlier waves of violence (C. Newbury 1995:13). These refugees suffered as second-class citizens, unable to integrate into their host country, while the Habyarimana government claimed that due to demographic pressures, they could not return to Rwanda (C. Newbury 1995:13; Prunier 2009:13–16). For example, in 1982, thousands of Rwandan refugees in Uganda were forced to leave by President Milton Obote, but upon their arrival in Rwanda, they were refused the right to repatriate and were kept again in refugee camps until they were eventually returned to Uganda.
In 1990, a group of armed exiles, mostly Tutsi, successfully organized and invaded Rwanda as the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), fighting to overthrow Habyarimana’s government. Civil war ensued for the next three years. Anti-Tutsi violence intensified after the RPF invasion in 1990, when there were frequent retaliatory killings against Tutsi, as the Hutu government identified all Tutsi as RPF accomplices, who they feared were attempting to reestablish Tutsi hegemony. These massacres have been seen as “practice” for genocide (Lemarchand 2009:84; D. Newbury 1998:78).
Within Rwanda during the Second Republic, while elites consolidated power and there were advancements in public works, urban development, public health, and enrichment of a middle class, at the same time, poverty and inequality grew for rural Rwandans, both Hutu and Tutsi, often in relation to land access (Ansoms and Marysse 2005; De Lame 2005:63–64, 246; C. Newbury 1995; D. Newbury 1998; Reyntjens 1985:523). By the late 1980s, in the lead-up to genocide, tensions were exacerbated by the dynamics of the global political economy. Global coffee prices collapsed in 1989, and the International Monetary Fund implemented structural adjustment programs, including devaluing Rwanda’s currency in 1990 and requiring Rwandans to “cost-share,” which included paying higher fees for public services such as primary school, health care, and water. These factors both resulted in sharply deteriorating economic conditions and increased poverty for the vast majority of Rwandans (C. Newbury 1995; D. Newbury 1998:89). These economic constraints, combined with the disconnect between rural people and elites, which meant rural people were not meaningfully connected to the changing political situation,
