Rwanda

From the kingdom of the mwami to genocide, reckoning and rebuilding.

Rwanda is a small, densely populated country of the central African highlands whose people — Hutu, Tutsi and Twa — share a single language, Kinyarwanda, a common religion and a centuries-old monarchy. From at least the fifteenth century a kingdom centred on a Tutsi mwami (king) and his clans gradually extended its authority over the hills, reaching its greatest power in the late nineteenth century under Mwami Kigeri IV Rwabugiri. German and then Belgian colonial rule hardened the once-fluid distinction between Hutu and Tutsi into a fixed racial hierarchy, complete with ethnic identity cards, that the colonisers first used to govern through a Tutsi elite and then abandoned. The 1959 Hutu 'Social Revolution' toppled the monarchy and drove tens of thousands of Tutsi into exile; Rwanda became independent of Belgium on 1 July 1962 under Grégoire Kayibanda. Cycles of anti-Tutsi violence, the long rule of Juvénal Habyarimana, and the civil war launched by the exiles' Rwandan Patriotic Front in 1990 culminated, after Habyarimana's plane was shot down on 6 April 1994, in the genocide against the Tutsi: in roughly 100 days an estimated 800,000 to one million people, overwhelmingly Tutsi, were murdered. The genocide ended only with the RPF's military victory in July 1994, and Rwanda has since pursued justice through the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and the gacaca community courts, reconstruction, and the long, tightly controlled leadership of Paul Kagame.