control in Gisaka to the southeast and Bugoyi in the northwest.
In 1907, Germany’s military protection changed to civil administration by indirect rule from a residency at Kigali. But in 1916, Belgian forces from the Congo pushed the Germans south out of Rwanda and beyond the rail center of Tabora. Belgium held its conquered territory provisionally until the Milner-Orts Agreement of May 30, 1919, ceded to Belgium the two German provinces of Ruanda and Urundi as the mandate territory of Ruanda-Urundi. At the Paris peace talks, the Mandates Commission approved the Belgian mandate and the Great Power Council of Five accepted the Milner-Orts Agreement on August 7, 1919.15 In 1947, this mandate evolved into a trusteeship under the United Nations.
The Belgians, like the Germans, faced the dilemma of how to assert authority over a polity already endowed with a sovereign, an administration, and a society knit together by clientage relations. Under ideals of the League of Nations mandate, Belgium was to assure the uplift of the local population as well as the development of natural resources.16 Belgium intended to meet these goals while administering the territory efficiently, with minimum investment and maximum gain from the territory’s dense population and fertile lands. Tying into the Congo’s physical and administrative infrastructure seemed the appropriate approach.17
Whereas in Congo, Belgian administrators ruled directly over respective provinces, in Rwanda, Belgium would follow the German approach of indirect rule. The goal, according to Colonial Minister Louis Frank, was to “associate the native princes with our plans and bring the indigenous ruling class into our service.”18 In 1919, the administration established schools for chiefs’ sons to train the necessary cadre. Then in 1926, the administration began to rationalize and decentralize the tripartite chiefs system while setting contiguous boundaries for chieftaincies and subchieftaincies.
This streamlined structure was to uniformly administer the provinces throughout Rwanda, with chiefs trained first at Nyanza and other local schools and then at Butare. The new structure was also intended to relieve the “Hutu masses” of burdensome obligations to three different chiefs. However, the traditional system of clientage, both in land and cattle obligations, remained, now legally and efficiently enforced. Ignoring common social identities found in lineage and clan, as well as regional variances in social structure, the mandate administration saw Hutu and Tutsi as the overarching social constructs of personal identification and, in 1931, established identity cards classifying each person accordingly.19
In the name of progress, colonial policy discounted regional differences, reinforced clientage obligations, and crystallized identities along ethnic lines. Moreover, the colonial regime, through the local chiefs, assessed a head tax, required labor on public works, and enforced agricultural plantings in food crops and coffee. The burden of obligation to political elites weighed heavily on the poor, whether Tutsi or Hutu.
The Mandates Commission of the League of Nations might never have approved a policy of “indirect rule” that coercive and controlling were it not for the Rwakayihura famine of 1929–30 in which thousands of Rwandans died in inaccessible parts of the country. Only draconian measures could build roads, increase harvests, and raise the taxes to keep the country together.20 With the exile of the recalcitrant King Musinga and the investiture of the more educated and compliant Rudahigwa in 1931, the Belgian mandate took root.21
TRANSITION TO TRUSTEESHIP
The League of Nations had been content to let Belgium administer the territory and send reports on social and economic progress to the Mandate Commission in Geneva, there to debate the merits of Belgian policy. Following World War II, however, the newly created UN Trusteeship Council actively pushed for political change, as well as for economic and social development. Regular missions began in 1947, reviewing progress on site. Although traditional autocracy had been legally grounded and administratively rationalized under indirect rule, the council’s first visiting mission to East Africa was convinced that “political evolution has reached a stage when an acceleration of the movement would be justified without running any great risk of grave social upheaval.”22
Grave social upheaval was precisely what occurred as Rwanda moved quickly toward independence in the late 1950s. By 1959, rural violence had broken out in northwest and central Rwanda, with massacres and hut burnings perpetrated by both Hutu and Tutsi partisans, while threats and intimidations harried Tutsi nobles into exile. In 1960, elected communal burgomasters and counselors replaced chieftaincies. As Reyntjens sums it up, “In less than two years [1959–1961], Rwanda had passed from a ‘feudal’ monarchy to a Hutu ‘democratic’ republic. . . . In 1952, the monarchist, fundamentally Tutsi regime was still solidly established, legally reinforced by 35 years of indirect administration. In 1962, Rwanda became independent under a republican, fundamentally Hutu regime.”23
A SOCIAL REVOLUTION
Chrétien contends that “the 1959–1961 ‘social revolution’ is the key event in Rwanda, one that shaped the country’s politics for the next three decades.”24 Radical changes brought about by that event found root in several factors:
• The UN Trusteeship Council’s interventions, which sought a rapid pace toward representative government and national autonomy25
• The monopolization of power, position, and privilege by the ruling Tutsi elite26
• The abolition in 1954 of ubuhake cattle-clientage without a concomitant reform of the land-tenure system27
• The emergence of Hutu intelligentsia, who challenged the legitimacy of traditional institutions and symbols and called for democratic governance28
• The death of Mwami Rudahigwa and the hardening of neo-traditionalist attitudes claiming right of conquest and superiority29
• The creation of political parties mobilized by individual leaders and ideologically centered on presumed Hutu and Tutsi identities30
Tensions built by these factors came to a crescendo on November 1, 1959, with the outbreak of violence around Kabgayi, center of the Hutu renaissance, and in the northwest, where clan leaders still opposed rule from the central court. By the time the violence abated, some three hundred Hutu and Tutsi were killed and twelve hundred were arrested, while the population of displaced burgeoned.31
To calm the storm, the Belgian administration installed Hutu chiefs and subchiefs in vacated chieftainships. They then implemented a previously planned administrative reform of replacing subchiefs with burgomasters and elected communal councils. A multiparty Provisional Council took over the legislative role of the High Council of State. After the failure of a reconciliation conference in early January 1961 at Ostend, Belgium, the Provisional Council called a national convention of burgomasters and municipal counselors. On January 28, these counselors deposed the “monarchy and all its symbols” and proclaimed a democratic republic.
Nine months later, under UN supervision but in an atmosphere of preelectoral violence and intimidation, legislative elections and a referendum on the monarchy confirmed the establishment of the republic and the parliamentary dominance of the Parmehutu Party. The elected legislators then set up the structures of the new republic, chose a government, and designated Grégoire Kayibanda as president. The “social revolution” thus gave birth to the government that took Rwanda to independence on July 1, 1962.32
FIRST REPUBLIC
Around the edges of this new, landlocked republic, monarchists in refugee camps plotted a return to power. Host country control and internal divisions within refugee leadership kept the attacks from being more effective; but with each attack, Hutu took reprisals against Tutsi still living in Rwanda.33
