NATIONAL MOVEMENTS AND THE NEW STATES IN AFRICA
Preface
CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION TO AFRICAN NATIONALISM
CHAPTER 2: THE ITALO-ETHIOPIAN WAR
CHAPTER 3: THE IMPACT OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR ON AFRICA
CHAPTER FOUR:THE EGYPTIAN REVOLUTION
CHAPTER FIVE:THE GHANAIAN REVOLUTION
CHAPTER SIX:THE DECOLONIZATION OF AFRICA: UNITY OR BALKANIZATION
CHAPTER SEVEN:PAN AFRICANISM
CHAPTER NINE:NEO-COLONIALISM
CHAPTER TEN:AFRICAN POLITICAL PARTIES: THEIR ROLE IN THE REGAINING OF INDEPENDENCE
CHAPTER ELEVEN:NATIONALISM IN NIGERIA
CHAPTER TWELVE: NATIONALISM IN CONGO
CHAPTER THIRTEEN:NATIONALISM IN TANGANYIKA
CHAPTER FOURTEEN:NATIONALISM IN KENYA: THE DEFEAT OF REGIONALISM
CHAPTER FIFTEEN:MAU- MAU IN KENYA (1952-1956)
CHAPTER SIXTEEN:THE ALGERIAN WAR OF INDEPENDENCE.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN:THE ARMED STRUGGLE: THE 1960S AND 1970S
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: THE WAR OF INDEPENDENCE IN MOZAMBIQUE
CHAPTER NINETEEN:THE WAR OF INDEPENDENCE IN ZIMBABWE
CHAPTER TWENTY:THE POLISARIO WAR IN WESTERN SAHARA
CHAPTER TWENTY ONE:THE LIBERATION WAR IN NAMIBIA
CHAPTER TWENTY TWO:AFRIKANER AND AFRICAN NATIONALISM IN SOUTH AFRICA
CHAPTER TWENTY THREE:NATIONALISM IN UGANDA
CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR:UGANDA NATIONAL LIBERATION FRONT (UNLF) (1979-1980)
CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE:PROBLEMS OF DISUNITY: CIVIL WAR IN SUDAN
CHAPTER TWENTY SIX:THE ERITREAN SECESSION WAR FROM 1961-1993
CHAPTER TWENTY SIX:POLITICAL INSTABILITIES IN THE HORN OF AFRICA.
CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN:SECESSIONISM IN ZAIRE, 1960-
CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT:THE NIGERIAN CIVIL/ SECESSION WAR, 1967-70
CHAPTER TWENTY NINE:THE CIVIL WAR IN CHAD FROM 1965-1982
CHAPTER THIRTY:THE ANGOLAN CIVIL WAR, 1975-6
CHAPTER THIRTY ONE:MOZAMBICAN CIVIL WAR 1977-1994
CHAPTER THIRTY TWO:THE RWANDA REVOLUTION- 1959-1994
Introduction
Causes of the Rwanda revolution of 1959.
Effects of the Rwanda revolution 1959
The 1990 invasion and genocide in Rwanda.
How the 1994 genocide took place in Rwanda
Effects of the 1990-1994 civil war in Rwanda
CHAPTER THIRTY THREE:THE ZANZIBAR REVOLUTION OF 1964
CHAPTER THIRTY FOUR:MILITARY COUP D'ETATS
CHAPTER THIRTY FIVE:THE LIBYAN REVOLUTION- 1969
CHAPTER THIRTY SIX:THE ONE-PARTY SYSTEM
CHAPTER THIRTY SEVEN:MULTIPARTY SYSTEM
CHAPTER THIRTY EIGHT:NATIONAL UNITY AND SOCIALISM
CHAPTER THIRTY NINE:AFRICAN CULTURE
CHAPTER FOURTY:REGIONAL AFRICAN ECONOMIC ORGANIZATIONS
CHAPTER FOURTY ONE:POPULATION EXPLOSION IN AFRICA
CHAPTER FOURTY TWO:WARS BETWEEN INDEPENDENT AFRICAN STATES
CHAPTER FOURTY THREE:NON-ALIGNED MOVEMENT (NAM)
CHAPTER FOURTY FOUR:MAJOR PROBLEMS OF AFRICA
CHAPTER FOURTY FIVE:THE BEST TECHNIQUES TO PASSING A' LEVEL HISTORY PAPER 1
REFERENCES

In Rwanda, the Tutsi and Hutu share a language, a religion, and other aspects of culture. They too had intermarried. They too had : difficulty quite often in drawing a line between where a Hutu ancestry ended and a Tutsi descent began. The two communities had experienced bio-cultural assimilation.

Yet in 1959 in Rwanda an uprising of the Hutu occurred with devastating consequences for the Tutsi. This was before independence which was finally granted in July 1962. In January 1964 several thousand Tutsi were massacred by the Hutu in Rwanda, and an exodus began of thousands more, who joined the ranks of the 150 000 Tutsi refugees already scattered among Rwanda's neighbours.

 

 

What were the political, economic and social factors which divided these two communities and caused, the revolution?
In pre-colonial times and throughout German and Belgian colonial rule the minority Tutsi formed a ruling aristocracy over the majority Hutu who in 1959 formed 85 per cent of the population. The Tutsi ruled as feudal overlords over the Hutu: Tutsi chiefs controlled the allocation of land and exacted rents in the form of forced Hutu labour - as servants or tillers.
This system of servitude was abolished by the Belgians as late as 1954. The Hutu peasants suffered from severe land shortage in a densely populated country and suffered six famines in the colonial period while Tutsi cattle grazed on their fields. Social segregation took on ritual forms, with the Tutsi maintaining they came from another world and refusing to cat the same 'profane' food as the Hutu.

 

Under the Germans and Belgians the Tutsi were given a monopoly of administrative jobs and of the educational system set up by Catholic missionaries.

Fertile land seen in the above photo was dominated by the Tutsi making the Hutu serfs in Rwanda and Burundi.

 

Hutu political assertion began in 1967 when the small Hutu Catholic elite called for an end to Tutsi domination and for radical reforms and produced the Hutu Manifesto. The Tutsi reaction to Hutu political activity was a determined reactionary stance to protect their supremacy. In July 1959 the Tutsi Mwami Matara died without an heir. The Belgians decided to establish a republic. But they were foiled by the Tutsi aristocracy in an extraordinary manoeuvre at the burial ceremony.

 

The Belgian Resident-General was quite literally jostled by Tutsi spears to the very edge of the open grave and was forced there and then to approve the accession of Matara's half-brother. Kigeri. Spurred on by this success over the Belgians, a ruthless Tutsi clan embarked on a plan to crush the upstart Hutu leadership in a wave of killings and intimidation.

 

On 1 November an attack on a Hutu chief provoked a widespread and spontaneous Hutu peasant uprising involving some bloodshed and much looting and burning of Tutsi homes. The Tutsi responded with the killing of various leaders. Belgian troops arrived to restore order, but persistent Hutu-Tutsi fighting continued.

 

Before the end of 1959 Mwami Kigeri had fled the country and there were 22 000 internal Tutsi refugees; the Belgian administration had begun to prepare for a Hutu government after independence and many Tutsi chiefs had been replaced by Hutu chiefs.

 

Some writers have suggested that a circular letter by Archbishop Perraudin of Rwanda, describing Tutsi-Hutu inequalities as incompatible with Christian morality, had an impact on the outbreak of the Hutu uprising; it is probably also true that the Hutu were inspired by their long heritage of traditional resistance to Tutsi rule which went back to the Nyabingi religio- political protest movement of early colonial times, memories of which were still strong in northern Rwanda.

 

Elections in October I960 led to the formation of a provisional government with the Hutu leaders Juvenal Habyarimana as President and Gregoire Kayibanda (a Catholic journalist) as Prime Minister. A UN-supervised referendum in September 1961 led to the adoption of a republican constitution.

 

In the pre-independence elections the Hutu majority party, Parmehutu, won another overwhelming majority and Kayibanda became President of independent Rwanda on l July 1962. The Hutu victory was unacceptable to Tutsi supremacists, who formed a guerilla organization known as Cockroach, based in Tutsi-dominated Burundi.

 

In December 1963 Cockroach invaded Rwanda in an attempt to carry out a coup. The invaders were defeated by a Belgian officer and one platoon. The government proclaimed a state of emergency, rounded up and shot Tutsi leaders suspected of complicity with the raiders and appealed to the people throughout the country to look to their own defence.

 

The appeal was, in effect, a licence to slaughter the Tutsis, many of whom had not concealed their excitement at the news of the rebel column's advance on the capital. At the end of 1963 and early in 1964 Hutu reprisals (the second Hutu revolution) led to the deaths of thousands of Tutsis and drove tens of thousands into exile, mostly in Burundi and Uganda.

 

GREGORY KAYIBANDA, his overt favouritism of his home area of Gitarama accelerated his overthrow by the military.

 

In the early 1970s there was a resurgence of anti-Tutsi feeling in Rwanda, following the 1972 killings of Hutu by Tutsi soldiers in neighbouring Burundi.

 

Disorder all over the country prompted the head of the army, General Juvenal Habyarimana, to oust Kayibanda in a military coup in 1973 and to ban Parmehutu. Habyarimana's government has discouraged ethnicism and has concentrated on economic and social development.

National Movements and New States in Africa