Word: hutu
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Europeans who stumbled into Rwanda a century ago found a country ruled by tall, willowy Tutsi cattle lords under a magical Tutsi king, while darker- skinned, stockier Hutu farmers tended the land, grew the food, kept the Tutsi clothed and fed. They lived in symbiotic harmony. "They were a reasonably contented rural society," says Basil Davidson, a leading British historian of Africa. "There was no hatred between the two groups. That came only with the colonial system...
First the Germans and then, after World War I, the Belgians ruled their African colony indirectly. Based on their notions of racial hierarchy, the Belgians upheld the dominance of the Tutsi, with their lighter skin and aquiline, almost European features, as their agents governing the majority Hutu population. Sometimes they gave the Tutsi privileged access to education; a minimum height was set for the sons of chiefs who wanted to go to school, which effectively disqualified many of the shorter Hutu. The Tutsi received the best jobs in the bureaucracy, even as the colonists drained the wealth from the country...
...years of colonialism essentially destroyed the social and political structures that had kept tribal peace for centuries. By 1959 the aggrieved Hutu majority rose up in rebellion; in some villages, machete-wielding gangs set upon the Tutsi and hacked off their feet, cutting them down to size. The Belgians, pushed by the wave of independence sweeping the continent, abruptly abandoned their Tutsi agents and sided with the Hutu majority. Having inflamed the Hutu's resentment of the Tutsi elite, the retreating colonizers left the minority to the mercies of the mob. Thousands of Tutsi fled into exile in Uganda, where...
...hold on power was challenged by better-educated Tutsi rivals, the Hutu government increased ethnic tensions by creating a sense of tribal solidarity -- a useful distraction from the internal power struggles among northern and southern Hutu. All Rwandans were required to carry racial- identity cards; there was talk of herding Tutsi into certain regions, an apartheid imposed by blacks on fellow blacks. Any effort by Tutsi to reassert themselves met with a vicious and murderous response. "There was bludgeoning of public opinion," argues Philip Reyntjens, professor of law and politics at the University of Antwerp in Belgium. "Ethnicity does...
...exiled Tutsi of the Rwandan Patriotic Front invaded from Uganda and launched a civil war that came to a halt only last August with the Arusha accords, which mandated that power be shared. Tutsi would finally be allowed into a national-unity government, and a new army of both Hutu and Tutsi soldiers would enforce the peace...