Causes Of The Rwandan Genocide

Genocide is the deliberate and systematic killing of a racial, cultural or religious group. The Rwandan Genocide, which resulted in the mass murdering of over 800 000 Tutsi people, was one of the shortest but largest civil wars in earths history. Its cause, which is still debated about by historians today, has been a controversial topic since its occurrence. While it was sparked directly by the death of the Rwandan president Juvenal Habyarimana (a Hutu) when his plane was shot down, many believe that it was the build up of events leading up to this that primarily caused the genocide.

The Tutsi and Hutu division began much before the colonisation of Rwanda. Historical records of the area begin when Rwabugiri came to power in 1860, and ruled
Abraham believes that the Hamite Hypothesis, which first emerged in the bible, was integral in causing the Rwandan genocide, some 3500 years later. The meaning behind the myth was greatly misinterpreted after Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798, allowing many of the European scholars who visited Egypt to claim that “everything of value ever found in Africa was brought there by Hamites”, and that well-developed civilisations like Egypt were in fact created or inspired by people of the Caucasian race, rather than by people with dark skin. According to Abraham, In Rwanda, the Hamite Myth was essential in the creation of the ideology of ethnicity, which under the Belgian rule, claimed that the Tutsi minority were vastly superior to the Hutus. It inflated the Tutsi’s cultural ego, whilst it crushed the Hutus until they were so resentful that they decided to fight back. Gerard Prunier, a French historian who specialised in Africa, supports Abraham’s theory on the matter. He believes that “if we combine the subjective feelings with the objective political and administrative decisions of the colonial authorities, favouring one group over the other, we can begin to see how a very dangerous social bomb was almost absentmindedly manufactured”. This is another fairly credible theory that accounts for the genocide in Rwanda, which provides reasoning and explanation for the way in which the European officials enforced rule in Rwanda through the method of divide and conquer. This method of ruling may have been brought about because of the way in which the Europeans viewed the Hamite Hypothesis, or just as a way of enforcement, which has later been deconstructed as taking a twist on the myth, but either way, it was a major factor in causing the tension between the Hutu and Tutsi to build to boiling