The history of Rwanda

Rwanda, a small, densely populated country of steep green hills in the Great Lakes region of central Africa, was for centuries the core of a powerful kingdom ruled by a sacred king, the mwami. Its people, the Banyarwanda, share one language and culture but were divided into the categories Hutu, Tutsi and Twa, distinctions that the German and above all the Belgian colonial rulers hardened into fixed racial identities. Independence in 1962 brought a Hutu-led republic and waves of violence against Tutsi, culminating in 1994 in the genocide against the Tutsi, in which hundreds of thousands of people were murdered in about a hundred days. Since then the Rwandan Patriotic Front, under Paul Kagame, has rebuilt the country, with rapid economic growth, tight political control and a heavy involvement in the wars of the neighbouring Congo.

People are thought to have lived in Rwanda since soon after the last ice age, when its highlands and forests offered rich hunting. The earliest known inhabitants were the ancestors of the Twa, forest hunter-gatherers and later potters, whose descendants remain a small and marginalised minority. Over the last millennium BCE, Bantu-speaking farmers, part of the Bantu expansion, settled the fertile hills between Lake Kivu and Lake Victoria, absorbing earlier herding and farming communities. They cleared forest for crops, made the dimpled pottery that archaeologists call Urewe ware, and smelted iron in clay furnaces, among the earliest iron-working sites in the region. Over the following centuries the hills filled with farming households growing sorghum, beans and later bananas, while cattle became the most prized form of wealth.

The origins of the Hutu and Tutsi distinction are contested. Colonial writers claimed that the Tutsi were a separate race of conquering herders from the north, the so-called Hamitic hypothesis, which modern historians reject as without real evidence. Most scholars now see the categories as social and political ones that developed over centuries, with Tutsi associated with cattle and power and Hutu with farming, and with some movement between them, though people disagree about how fluid the boundary was.

By the fifteenth century the region was divided among a number of small kingdoms, among them Gisaka in the south-east, Bugesera in the south and Ndorwa in the north. One of them, ruled by the Nyiginya dynasty, grew from a small state in the centre into the dominant power. Court traditions trace the line back to a legendary founder, Gihanga, but the historian Jan Vansina regarded Ruganzu Ndori, in the seventeenth century, as the true founder of the kingdom, while other historians give an earlier king that role. The kingdom expanded by war and by the settlement of its people on new hills, building military camps along its frontiers.

The mwami was a sacred ruler whose wellbeing was bound up with the prosperity of the land. His power was symbolised by the royal drum Kalinga, and ritual specialists called the abiru kept the secret code of royal rituals and the dynastic traditions. Beneath him, chiefs of land, of cattle and of the armies governed the provinces, and military companies, to which every man belonged, also managed herds. Ties of clientage, known as ubuhake, bound clients to patrons who gave them cattle in exchange for service and loyalty.

The kingdom reached its greatest size and its most centralised form under Kigeli IV Rwabugiri, who reigned in the second half of the nineteenth century and died in 1895. Rwabugiri fought constant campaigns against neighbours, extended royal control over the semi-independent lineages of the north and west, and replaced old local powers with chiefs appointed by the court. He introduced uburetwa, forced labour that Hutu farmers had to give to chiefs in return for access to land. Historians see his reign as the moment when the line between Hutu and Tutsi became sharper and more unequal, as the court's power reached into ordinary lives. His death was followed in 1896 by a violent succession struggle at Rucunshu, after which a faction of the court placed the young Yuhi V Musinga on the throne.

During the Scramble for Africa, Rwanda and Burundi were assigned to the German Empire as part of German East Africa. The German officer Gustav Adolf von Götzen crossed the kingdom in 1894, and German posts were set up from 1897. German rule was indirect: the Germans backed Musinga against his rivals and helped the court conquer the independent principalities of the north. Catholic missionaries, the White Fathers, arrived in 1900, and in 1907 the German resident Richard Kandt founded Kigali as an administrative post.

In 1916, during World War I, troops from the Belgian Congo occupied Rwanda, and after the war Belgium governed it together with Burundi as the League of Nations mandate of Ruanda-Urundi, later a UN trust territory. Belgium ruled through the monarchy and an almost entirely Tutsi class of chiefs, removing Hutu chiefs in the reforms of the late 1920s and 1930s. In 1931 it deposed Musinga, who resisted conversion, and installed his son Mutara III Rudahigwa, who became a Catholic. A mass conversion to Christianity followed, and the Catholic Church became the most powerful institution in the country, running nearly all its schools, which favoured the sons of Tutsi chiefs.

In the early 1930s the Belgians carried out a census and issued identity cards recording each person as Hutu, Tutsi or Twa, inherited through the father. The cards turned flexible social categories into fixed ethnic ones, and they would later be used to identify victims. Colonial rule also brought forced labour, compulsory coffee growing and heavy taxes. The famine of 1943 and 1944, known as Ruzagayura, during World War II, killed a large part of the population in the worst-affected regions, and many Rwandans emigrated to work in the Congo and in British-ruled Uganda.

In the 1950s a Hutu elite educated in the Catholic seminaries began to demand an end to Tutsi privilege. In 1957 nine Hutu intellectuals, among them Grégoire Kayibanda, issued the Bahutu Manifesto, which described the problem as one of Tutsi domination over the Hutu. Tutsi leaders in turn pressed for rapid independence under the monarchy. The Belgian administration and the Catholic hierarchy, which had once favoured the Tutsi, now shifted their support to the Hutu majority. Mutara III died suddenly in July 1959, and in November an attack on a Hutu politician set off a wave of violence in which Hutu crowds burned Tutsi homes and killed hundreds, and Tutsi chiefs struck back. The Belgians replaced most Tutsi chiefs with Hutu ones, and tens of thousands of Tutsi fled to Uganda, Burundi, the Congo and Tanzania.

Kayibanda's Parmehutu party won communal elections in 1960, proclaimed a republic in January 1961 and abolished the monarchy, a decision confirmed by a UN-supervised referendum later that year. Rwanda became independent on 1 July 1962, part of the wider decolonisation of Africa, with Kayibanda as president. Armed Tutsi exiles, called inyenzi or cockroaches by their enemies, launched raids from neighbouring countries; after an incursion in December 1963, the authorities and local militias massacred thousands of Tutsi civilians, and many more fled.

Kayibanda's rule favoured Hutu from his own central and southern region. Amid a fresh wave of attacks on Tutsi in schools and workplaces in 1973, the army commander, Juvénal Habyarimana, a Hutu from the north-west, seized power in July 1973. His Second Republic was a one-party state built around his movement, the MRND, with quotas limiting Tutsi in education and jobs. Rwanda was praised by Western donors for order and development, but by the late 1980s it faced falling coffee prices, land shortage and a refugee question that it refused to solve, declaring the country too full to take the exiles back.

Many of the hundreds of thousands of Tutsi refugees in Uganda had fought in Yoweri Museveni's rebel army, which took power there in 1986. Some of them, led by Fred Rwigyema and Paul Kagame, founded the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), and on 1 October 1990 it invaded northern Rwanda. Rwigyema was killed within days, and the invasion was halted with help from French and Zairean troops, but Kagame rebuilt the RPF into a disciplined guerrilla force. Habyarimana allowed opposition parties in 1991, while extremists around him, known as Hutu Power, spread propaganda against Tutsi through the newspaper Kangura and from 1993 the radio station RTLM, armed and trained the Interahamwe militia, and organised local massacres of Tutsi. The Arusha Accords of August 1993 promised power-sharing and the integration of the two armies, and a UN peacekeeping force, UNAMIR, arrived under the Canadian general Roméo Dallaire. In October 1993 the assassination of the first Hutu president of neighbouring Burundi by Tutsi army officers inflamed fears in Rwanda.

On the evening of 6 April 1994 the plane carrying Habyarimana and Burundi's president, Cyprien Ntaryamira, was shot down as it approached Kigali, killing everyone on board. Who fired the missiles has never been established, and both Hutu extremists and the RPF have been accused. Within hours, soldiers of the presidential guard and militias set up roadblocks in Kigali and began killing Tutsi and Hutu opposition politicians, including the prime minister, Agathe Uwilingiyimana. Ten Belgian peacekeepers sent to escort her were taken to an army camp and killed, and Belgium soon withdrew its contingent. Whether the genocide had been planned long in advance remains debated, as the international tribunal did not find proof of a conspiracy before 7 April, but its speed and organisation showed extensive preparation.

From Kigali the killing spread across the country, directed by an interim government, officials, army officers and militia leaders, and broadcast over RTLM, which named victims and urged listeners to kill. Tutsi were identified by their identity cards at roadblocks or by neighbours who knew them, and killed with machetes, clubs and guns. Many who took refuge in churches, schools and stadiums, as at Nyarubuye, Ntarama, Nyamata and Murambi, were massacred there in their thousands. Ordinary Hutu men were mobilised, often under threat, to take part, and those who refused or sheltered Tutsi were sometimes killed themselves. Rape and sexual mutilation were used on a vast scale. Over roughly a hundred days, scholarly estimates put the number of Tutsi killed at between about 500,000 and 660,000, a large majority of the Tutsi in the country, while the Rwandan government gives a total of more than a million victims. Moderate Hutu and Twa were also killed.

The outside world failed to stop the slaughter. The UN Security Council cut UNAMIR to a few hundred troops in April, Western countries evacuated their own citizens, and governments including the United States avoided the word genocide for weeks. In June France launched Operation Turquoise, which created a protected zone in the south-west that saved some lives but also allowed many perpetrators to escape. The RPF resumed its war and captured Kigali on 4 July, now marked as Liberation Day, and by mid-July it controlled the country. RPF soldiers also killed many civilians during and after their advance, a matter on which estimates differ widely. As the RPF advanced, the defeated army and militias led around two million Hutu into exile, most of them into Zaire.

The RPF formed a government of national unity with a Hutu president, Pasteur Bizimungu, and Kagame as vice-president and defence minister; in 2000 Bizimungu resigned and Kagame became president. In 1996 Rwandan forces invaded Zaire to break up the refugee camps, where the former army and militias were regrouping, and backed the rebellion that overthrew Mobutu Sese Seko in 1997. When the new Congolese president, Laurent Kabila, turned against his backers, Rwanda and Uganda supported a new rebellion, opening the Second Congo War of 1998 to 2003, the deadliest conflict in Africa's modern history. A UN report in 2010 accused the Rwandan army of grave crimes against Hutu refugees and Congolese civilians, which Rwanda rejected.

At home, the government faced the task of judging hundreds of thousands of suspects. The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, sitting at Arusha in Tanzania, tried leading organisers until 2015, and between 2004 and 2012 community courts based on a traditional model, gacaca, tried vast numbers of lower-level suspects in their own villages, mixing punishment with confession and reconciliation. Ethnic identity cards were abolished, and the state promotes a single Rwandan identity, with laws against "genocide ideology" and "divisionism" that critics say are also used to silence dissent. The genocide is remembered each year from 7 April in a period of mourning called Kwibuka.

A new constitution was adopted in 2003, and Kagame has won every presidential election since, in 2003, 2010, 2017 and 2024, with more than 90 percent of the vote; a referendum in 2015 allowed him to stand again. International observers and human rights groups have criticised these elections and the repression of opponents and journalists, while the government points to stability and development. Rwanda has had some of the fastest economic growth in Africa, sharp falls in poverty and child mortality a high share of women in parliament and a reputation for efficient government. It joined the East African Community in 2007, made English a main language of education and in 2009 joined the Commonwealth. Relations with France, Habyarimana's chief foreign backer, have been strained over its role in 1994; they were broken off in 2006 after a French judge indicted Rwandan officials, and restored in 2010.

Conflict with the Democratic Republic of the Congo has persisted. Kinshasa and UN experts have accused Rwanda of backing the M23 rebellion in the eastern Congo, which Rwanda denies, while Rwanda accuses the Congo of supporting the FDLR, an armed group founded by perpetrators of the genocide. After M23 took the city of Goma in January 2025, the Congo broke off relations. Under United States mediation, the two countries' foreign ministers signed a peace agreement in Washington on 27 June 2025, and Kagame and the Congolese president, Félix Tshisekedi, signed the Washington Accords there on 4 December 2025, though fighting in the eastern Congo continued. Rwandan troops have also been deployed since 2021 against an insurgency in northern Mozambique. In July 2024 Kagame was elected to a fourth elected term with 99 percent of the vote, and three decades after the genocide Rwanda remains a country defined both by its recovery and by the memory of 1994.