Introduction

In 1994, some 800,000 people were killed in a matter of days in a conflict between Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda. Tutsis and Hutus were brutalised and killed by other Hutus, in an outbreak of government-sanctioned ethnic hatred based – it seemed – on ancient hatreds. In was an event that shocked the world. ‘Stereotypes identify the Tutsi as “pastoralists” and the Hutu as “agriculturalists”, the Tutsi as “patrons” and the Hutu as “clients”, or the Tutsi as “rulers” and the Hutu as “ruled”.’ Those stereotypes came from a foundational myth, created by German and Belgian imperialists, who had not actually found culturally and geographically distinct Hutu and Tutsi polities in their reading of the relations, but rather had found a great deal of interaction between all the peoples. When there had been conflict, it was mostly between Tutsi groups. The Hutu/Tutsi distinction varied according to the kingdom in which the people lived, but all families could move from one designation to another over time. This complexity and fluidity was formalised and racialised under colonial occupation with the production of ethnic identity cards and the privileging of one group over another on the grounds that they were ‘more white’. The principle of the identity card continued into the independence era, and so it was easy for the Tutsis to be identified in the early 1990s.