Word: feudality
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Genocide, then, is not an inappropriate description of what is happening in Rwanda. Violence between Tutsi and Hutu has long been imminent. For centuries, the Tutsi held the Hutu in a type of feudal boundage. The Belgians allowed Tutsi domination to continue when they took over Ruanda-Urundi (now divided into Rwanda and the Kingdom of Burundi) after World War I. Only in 1959 did the Hutu overthrow the Tutsi's jealously guarded hegemony...
...Feudal Chaos. The feudal chaos of special privileges is compounded by the fact that once most priests are installed in their parishes, they possess them for life as "parson's freeholds," and they cannot be budged except for heresy, grave crime or the promise of richer livings. As a result, about one-fifth of England's clergy gloom about in ghost parishes with a handful of communicants and faintly Trollopean titles. Another fifth can barely keep up with the man-killing spiritual work of fast-growing suburban parishes...
...centuries the giant (average height: 6 ft. 6 in.), Watutsi ruled the more primitive native Bahutu as their slaves. The tables were turned in 1960 when the Belgians staged an election in which the 1,500,000 Bahutu wrenched control from their longtime feudal masters, who numbered only about 250,000. The Bahutu wreaked a savage reprisal; after Rwanda won its independence in July 1962, some 86,000 Watutsi streamed into neighboring Tanganyika, Uganda, Burundi and the Congo's Kivu Province...
...took a leading role in the U.S. analysis of what was going wrong in Latin America. There was no doubt in Mann's mind; economically, Latin America was still a continent of a few thousand haves and millions of have-nots living under the remnants of a feudal system inherited from Spain and Portugal. After World War II, however, Latin America's masses had started waking up to the fact that there was a better life to be had than hunger, disease, poverty and ignorance...
Both Lechin and Paz are members of Bolivia's ruling M.N.R. Party, and together they plotted the 1952 revolution that toppled the country's feudal tin-mining aristocracy. But once in power, Paz and Lechin swiftly became bitter rivals. As Minister of Mines, Lechin, who is part Arab and part Indian, styled himself a "Trotskyite Communist," turned the 40,000-man miners' union into his private militia, and proceeded to featherbed the nationalized mines with 6,000 unneeded workers. The miners called him "El Maestro"-but the once profitable mines became a shambles, losing money...