What Was The Hutu Tribe

Rwanda is a small mountainous country in central Africa with a population around 7,954,000. Rwanda was occupied by Germans during the colonial era, it was also a part of German east Africa up until world war 1. Rwanda was occupied by three main tribes called the twa, Hutu, and the Tutsi. The twa were known as the original tribe to settle in Rwanda. They were forest dwellers/ hunters around the Virunga mountain range, in the west of Africa. Their tribe numbers started decreasing immensely during the 5th century, when bantu-speaking Hutu started appearing. The Hutu tribe was based around animals and small cultivation; they were governed by a clan system known as bahinza. They believed that bahinza had the power to cure livestock from disease,
The Hutu tribe also had a beneficial relationship with the Twa people. They provided farmers with honey in exchange for crops such as bananas and corn. The Tutsi arrived in the area during the fifteenth century, and according to encyclopedia of African history “The Lwo were earlier migrants to the interlacustrine, or Great Lakes, region, formerly from southern Sudan” (Gearon, Eamonn). The Tutsi as well as the Hutu believed in the principle of divine kingship and the powers over climate and agricultural production that were attributed to him. They also believed in the use of drums, allowing the king to make announcements across the land. Cattle was also very important to these tribes. Cattle was a symbol of wealth and your social
Germans and Belgians had a huge influence on the lives of the people in Rwanda. In 1885 Ruanda-Urundi, (an East African territory that was divided into Rwanda and Burundi) became a German protectorate because of the Berlin Conference. The encyclopedia of race and racism tells us that in 1923 Ruanda-Urundi became territory of the League of Nations and was placed under the supervision of Belgium (Totten, S, Ubadolo, R). The Belgians took over the leadership of Rwanda with the aim of profiting from the colony. In the 1920s, the Belgians created a system of “chiefdoms” and “sub chiefdoms,” which the Belgians controlled by placing Rwandans they trusted (the Tutsi) in leadership positions while overseeing the entire administrative apparatus themselves. The Belgians let them serve as officials in the colonial government. To the Europeans, the Tutsi, more than the Hutu or Twa, were more like them. They thought that the Tutsi were closer to Europeans in intelligence and ability than other Rwandans. in 1933 the Belgians enforced that every Rwandan carry an identity card that denoted whether he or she was a Hutu, Tutsi, or Twa. This started the beginning of the formal division between the tribes. This also caused the Hutu tribe to have great resentment towards the