Belgium’s share of the blame for the 1994 Tutsi genocide in Rwanda is often overlooked today because of the debate over France’s role. But Belgium’s responsibility can be traced back to the aftermath of the first world war when a League of Nations mandate gave it administrative control of the two former German colonies of Rwanda and Burundi.
The Belgians knew nothing about these two small countries and decided to administer them indirectly, using existing local structures— in this case, a feudal system headed by a mwami (sovereign) who ruled by divine right. The Belgian government was unwilling to spend time and effort on running territories far poorer than neighbouring Congo — present-day Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), which King Leopold II had owned and ruled directly between 1885 and 1908 — and enlisted the help of the (Roman Catholic) Missionaries of Africa or White Fathers, hoping that evangelisation would become a tool for both colonial domination and development.
The Belgians were influenced by anthropometry, then a fashionable science, and obsessed with the classification and differentiation of ‘races’. They decided that the Tutsis’ facial traits showed they were of Hamitic or Nilotic origin, and were descended from a cattle-herding people who had come to central Africa in search of pasture and imposed themselves on the local Hutus (Bantu farmers) and Twa (a pygmy people who were the original occupants of the land).
In Rwanda, as in neighbouring Burundi, the legitimacy of the monarchy was based on religion rather than ethnicity, and the Belgian colonists and missionaries were able to undermine the authority of the mwami, Yuhi Musinga, eventually deposing him in 1931 on the grounds that he refused to convert to Christianity. The local monotheistic cult of Imana, which had been a unifying force, was replaced by Catholicism, and Rwanda’s ‘aristocracy’ — the Tutsis — became the focus of the missionaries’ (...)
