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Who colonized Rwanda?

East Africa — the powers that ruled Rwanda, the dates, and what independence did and did not change.

In short

Who colonized Rwanda?

Germany, then Belgium. Germany claimed Rwanda in 1885 and Belgium took it as a mandate in 1916, hardening Hutu and Tutsi into fixed racial categories with identity cards before independence on 1 July 1962.

Belgian administration did not invent the words Hutu and Tutsi, but it converted flexible social categories into a legal race classification recorded on identity documents.

Reference

Who ruled Rwanda, and when

before 1897
Kingdom of Rwanda
1897–1916
German East Africa
1916–1962
Belgian mandate (Ruanda-Urundi)

At a glance

Key facts

Colonising powers
Germany, Belgium
Independence
1 July 1962
Identity cards
Ethnicity written on state documents from 1933 to 1994
Race science
Belgian administrators applied the 'Hamitic hypothesis' to justify Tutsi rule
Church schools
Taught the racial hierarchy for a generation

Chronology

Key dates

  1. 1897

    German presence established through the royal court.

  2. 1916

    Belgium occupies the territory.

  3. 1933

    Belgian census fixes Hutu, Tutsi and Twa as identity-card categories.

  4. 1959–62

    Revolution and violence at the end of colonial rule.

  5. 1994

    Genocide against the Tutsi.

Context

What the record shows

Those documents were used to identify victims during the 1994 genocide — the clearest example anywhere of colonial administrative categories becoming a killing instrument.

Questions

Frequently asked

Who colonised Rwanda?
Germany from 1897 and Belgium from 1916 until independence in 1962.
Did colonialism cause the Rwandan genocide?
Colonial rule did not cause the 1994 genocide directly, but Belgian administration fixed Hutu and Tutsi as legal racial categories on identity cards and built a hierarchy that later politics weaponised.
When did Rwanda become independent?
1 July 1962.

Read on

Related in the archive

References

Sources — colonial Rwanda

  1. [1]Bartolomé de las Casas, Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias (Seville, 1552).
  2. [2]Noble David Cook, Born to Die: Disease and New World Conquest, 1492–1650 (Cambridge University Press, 1998).
  3. [3]Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America (Monthly Review Press, 1971; English 1973).
  4. [4]Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost (Houghton Mifflin, 1998).
  5. [5]Thomas Pakenham, The Scramble for Africa (Random House, 1991).
  6. [6]Shashi Tharoor, Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India (Hurst, 2017).
  7. [7]Caroline Elkins, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya (Henry Holt, 2005).
  8. [8]Alfred W. McCoy, Policing America's Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State (Wisconsin, 2009).
  9. [9]Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019).
  10. [10]Jürgen Zimmerer, "The birth of the Ostland out of the spirit of colonialism", Patterns of Prejudice 39:2 (2005), on the German South-West Africa → Holocaust lineage.
  11. [11]Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Bogle-L'Ouverture, 1972).
  12. [12]Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I (1867), Chapter 31 ("Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist").

All works cited in good faith for documentary, educational and critical use. Errors and omissions: contact the archive.