On 1 October 1990, four hundred combatants of the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA), the armed wing of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), invaded Rwanda from Uganda to allow the return of the hundreds of thousands of Tutsi refugees scattered in the neighbouring countries and create an alternative to the pro-Hutu government of Juvénal Habyarimana. The Rwandan army soon repelled the invaders with the support of Zairian, Belgian and French troops. The RPA commander, Fred Rwigema, was killed on the second day. On 30 October, the Rwandan government announced that the war was over.

Under the leadership of Paul Kagame, however, the RPA restructured itself sufficiently to occupy a stretch of territory in the north of Rwanda and launch an attack on Ruhengeri in January 1991 and on Ruhengeri and Byumba in February 1993. Massive population displacements occurred as a result, and many people died during the military engagements. During the same period, using the RPF attack as a pretext, soldiers and armed groups close to the Habyarimana government and enjoying its support massacred an estimated two thousand Tutsi civilians in the north-west of the country and in the Bugesera. Many of them were Bagogwe, an essentially rural ethnic group that had been isolated from mainstream Rwandan politics for more than a century but was nevertheless considered Tutsi. Philip Verwimp has argued that these massacres, which human rights activists described as early as 1993 as a genocide, were part of a strategy aiming to turn land that was used for pasture into agricultural land through the paysannat settlement scheme.

The periodisation of Rwandan history is contested. The current Rwandan government and an important body of researchers consider that, given its amplitude, the particular nature of mass violence it deployed and the profoundly destabilising effect it had on the country itself and the neighbouring areas, the genocide is a central event in Rwandan history. Intellectuals linked to the opposition and a certain number of academics claim, on the contrary, that the turning point was the October 1990 RPF invasion, which ended a virtuous cycle of economic development and social harmony and initiated a series of violent episodes that led to the genocide and further destabilisation in the region. As we shall see in chapters 4, 5 and 6, several Rwandan clerics and missionaries adopted this position.