The Belgian Mandate and the Manufactured Revolution

Belgium ruled Rwanda for forty-six years. In that time it did two things that made everything afterwards possible, and it did them in the opposite order from the one people expect.

First, between 1926 and 1933, it took the fluid social categories of chapter 22, hardened them into a single racial hierarchy, and printed them on a card that every Rwandan had to carry. Second, in the 1950s, faced with decolonisation and a Tutsi elite that had begun asking for independence, it kept the racial hierarchy exactly as it was and simply changed which race it supported, with the active collaboration of the Catholic church, whose senior figure in Rwanda supplied the theological framing.

Neither move was hidden. Both are documented in the administration's own files, the church's own pastoral letters, and the memoirs of the officer who carried out the second one.

The legal form

Belgium held Rwanda under the League of Nations Class B mandate confirmed in 1922, and after 1946 as a United Nations trust territory. The legal theory, from Article 22 of the League Covenant, was that the peoples concerned were "not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world" and that their tutelage was a "sacred trust of civilisation", the formula chapter 14 traced back to the Requerimiento of 1513.

In practice the mandate meant that Belgium ruled a densely populated country of great agricultural potential with very few Belgians, and needed the same thing Germany had needed: local administrators who would collect, conscript and enforce.

Simplifying the state until it could be used

The reforms associated with the resident Georges Mortehan, from 1926 through the early 1930s, are the least famous and among the most destructive things done to Rwanda.

Chapter 22 described the precolonial arrangement: three separate chieftainships in each district (of the land, of the pastures, and of men) usually held by different people, so that no single notable held all forms of authority in a place. It was a deliberate check on power.

Belgium abolished it. The three offices were merged into one chief per district, appointed by and answerable to the colonial administration, and the holders were selected overwhelmingly from the Tutsi chiefly class on the explicit advice of Bishop Classe and the missionary ethnography of chapter 23. Hutu chiefs and the semi-autonomous northern lineages were eliminated. By the eve of the 1959 upheaval, the great majority of chiefs and sub-chiefs in the country were Tutsi, a concentration with no precolonial precedent.¹

The effect on ordinary life was direct: a single official now controlled land access, cattle, labour requisition, tax and justice in each hill, and he was accountable upwards to Europeans rather than sideways to rivals or downwards to clients. Uburetwa, the labour obligation on Hutu cultivators, was retained and extended; forced cultivation of coffee for export and forced labour on roads and anti-erosion terracing were added on top. When the Ruzagayura famine struck in 1943–44, killing on the order of a quarter to a third of a million people, it fell on a population already stripped of reserves by requisition and export cultivation.

1933: the card

In 1933–34 the Belgian administration carried out a census and issued identity cards recording each person as Hutu, Tutsi, Twa or Naturalised. From that point on, every Rwandan carried their category in their pocket, inherited it patrilineally, and could not change it.

How were people classified? Existing local knowledge and self-identification did much of the work, but where it was ambiguous the administration used wealth in cattle (the widely cited rule of thumb being a threshold of around ten head), and, in a manner entirely typical of the period, physical measurement. Belgian scientific missions measured heights, nose lengths and widths, and skull dimensions, and published the results. The measuring was not a metaphor. There are photographs of it.²

Three consequences deserve to be stated separately, because each was decisive.

1. It abolished mobility. The processes chapter 22 described (kwihutura, becoming Tutsi through wealth over a generation, and its reverse) became impossible. A category that had been partly a description of status became a permanent inherited attribute.
2. It made the category administratively real. School admission, employment in the colonial service, and appointment as a chief were all rationed by it. A Rwandan's life chances now ran through a line on a card.
3. It made the genocide operationally possible sixty-one years later. In 1994 the men at the roadblocks asked for papers. The killing of hundreds of thousands of people in a hundred days required knowing, quickly, who was who. Belgium had supplied that.

The switch

By the mid-1950s two things had changed.

The Tutsi elite had become nationalists. Educated in mission schools, watching Ghana and Guinea move to independence, and pressed by UN trusteeship visiting missions, the mwami's High Council began pressing for a timetable for independence. From the Belgian standpoint the elite it had cultivated for thirty years had turned into an anti-colonial party.

The church's personnel had changed. The interwar White Fathers had been largely conservative aristocratic Europeans, congenial to a Tutsi court. The post-war generation included many Flemish and Swiss priests from modest backgrounds, formed in Christian-democratic and social-Catholic politics, who looked at Rwanda and saw a peasantry oppressed by a feudal aristocracy. That reading was not simply invented (uburetwa was real and brutal), but it mapped the class analysis directly onto the racial categories the church itself had spent decades hardening.

The decisive figure is André Perraudin, a Swiss White Father, Vicar Apostolic of Kabgayi from 1956 and effectively the head of the Rwandan church. His protégé and one-time secretary was Grégoire Kayibanda, editor of the Catholic newspaper Kinyamateka and later the first president of Rwanda.

In March 1957, nine Hutu intellectuals published the Bahutu Manifesto,"Note on the social aspect of the racial native problem in Rwanda." Its grievances about exclusion from education, office and land were real and substantially justified. Its framework was the colonial one: it treated Hutu and Tutsi as races, described the Tutsi as foreign Hamitic conquerors, and demanded that the identity cards be kept so that the statistics of domination could be documented.³

Two years later Perraudin's Lenten letter gave that framework episcopal authority. The most Catholic institution in one of the most Catholic countries in Africa told its faithful, from every pulpit in the country, that their society's inequality was a matter of race.

November 1959: the wind of destruction

In July 1959 Mwami Mutara III Rudahigwa died suddenly in Bujumbura after an injection administered by a Belgian doctor. Rumours of poisoning were immediate and have never been resolved.

On 1 November 1959 a Hutu sub-chief and PARMEHUTU activist, Dominique Mbonyumutwa, was attacked by young Tutsi men near Byimana. The rumour that he had been killed (he had not) set off what Rwandans call the muyaga, the wind: attacks on Tutsi homes across the country, burning, killing, and flight.

What happened next is what makes this a manufactured revolution rather than a spontaneous one. Belgium declared a military emergency and appointed Colonel Guy Logiest as special resident with effectively unlimited authority. Logiest did not restore the status quo. He used the emergency to replace the chiefs, installing Hutu appointees in place of Tutsi ones across the country within months. He was entirely candid about it afterwards, writing in his memoirs of a determination to give the Hutu back their dignity and acknowledging that he had taken sides.⁴

Then came the elections. The communal elections of mid-1960 were held under the new Hutu-appointed local administration, with Tutsi political leaders in exile, in flight, or boycotting. PARMEHUTU won overwhelmingly. In January 1961, at Gitarama, an assembly of the new burgomasters (convened with the knowledge and presence of the Belgian administration) abolished the monarchy and proclaimed a republic. The United Nations commission on the spot described the proceedings as an unlawful seizure and warned that Rwanda was moving towards a one-party dictatorship built on a racial ideology. Independence followed on 1 July 1962, with Kayibanda as president.

The exile, and the massacres nobody remembers

Between 1959 and 1964, something between 120,000 and 300,000 Tutsi fled to Burundi, Uganda, Tanganyika and the Congo. They were not permitted to return. Successive Rwandan governments held that the country was too small and too full, a position the international community accepted for thirty years, effectively ratifying a permanent stateless population. That decision produced the generation that appears in chapter 26.

Exile groups launched raids from across the borders; the government called them inyenzi, cockroaches, the word that would still be in use on the radio in 1994. After a raid from Burundi into Bugesera in December 1963, the government organised reprisals against Tutsi civilians. Something in the range of ten to fourteen thousand people were killed, concentrated in Gikongoro. Bertrand Russell described it publicly as the most horrible and systematic massacre he had witnessed since the extermination of the Jews. It received a few days of international attention and then nothing.⁵

The two republics, briefly

Kayibanda's First Republic institutionalised what 1959 had produced: identity cards retained, a quota system limiting Tutsi to a nominal share of school places and public employment, and periodic waves of violence, notably in 1973, when campaigns of expulsion from schools and workplaces drove another wave of refugees out.

In July 1973 the army chief of staff, Juvénal Habyarimana, took power in a coup and founded the Second Republic. He was, for a time, considered a stabilising figure by donors: violence against Tutsi declined from its earlier peaks, and Rwanda in the late 1970s and early 80s was a favourite of European aid agencies: orderly, hard-working, Catholic. The structures were untouched. The cards stayed. The quota stayed. The refugees stayed out. And regional favouritism now ran to the president's northwestern home region, alienating southern Hutu as well.

Chapter 25 takes the story from Habyarimana's stable, aid-funded, deeply Catholic Rwanda to April 1994, and asks what the church and France were doing while it happened.

Footnotes

1. Catharine Newbury, The Cohesion of Oppression: Clientship and Ethnicity in Rwanda, 1860–1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), chs. 6–7; Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers (Princeton, 2001), pp. 88–102. ↩
2. Jean-Pierre Chrétien, The Great Lakes of Africa (New York: Zone, 2003), pp. 282–297; Gérard Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), pp. 26–40. ↩
3. "Note sur l'aspect social du problème racial indigène au Rwanda" (the Bahutu Manifesto), 24 March 1957; discussed in Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis, pp. 45–48, and in Linden, Church and Revolution in Rwanda, ch. 9. ↩
4. Guy Logiest, Mission au Rwanda: un Blanc dans la bagarre Tutsi-Hutu (Brussels: Didier Hatier, 1988); Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis, pp. 48–54, quotes and analyses Logiest's own account. ↩
5. René Lemarchand, Rwanda and Burundi (London: Pall Mall, 1970), on the 1963–64 killings; Russell's statement appeared in the British press in early 1964. ↩