Hutus And Tutsis In Rwanda

The European missionaries contributed in forming racial grouping between the Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda that led to genocide. Furthermore, from the beginning the missionaries did not unite the two races in Rwanda; in fact, Roman Catholic missionaries were seen as experts in the field of the complicated social relations of the Rwandan population. The Christians were observing everything as the Catholic churches built separate schools for Hutus and for Tutsis following the Hamitic theory of race origins, which taught that the Tutsi were a superior race. When the genocide started the church could not be set apart since some leaders of the church contributed in encouraging the Hutus to kill the Tutsis as they deliver the Tutsis who took refuge

The social division of the population was interpreted by Europeans as being based on racial differences between Hutu and Tutsi, thus introducing fundamental discord between the two that had never existed before. The Belgian regime emphasized the excellence of the so­ called Tutsi race even more than their German predecessors and took them into service in order to oppress the Hutu. The Concept of Colonizers and Missionaries of Hutu and Tutsi Identity the missionaries who have been active in Rwanda, the Roman Catholics White Fathers from 1900 and the Protestants from 1907 onwards, have followed the concepts of race developed by Western social sciences in the course of the nineteenth century. With reference to a famous study by Edith Sanders, it be may state that the word ‘race’ was a favorite term in the language of the enlightenment. The presupposition was that the European race was to be considered superior to the rest of humankind. On the basis of these observations, the missionaries, who first arrived in 1900, formed their ideas about the Rwandan population, developed their missionary strategy, and inspired the political colonial regime that created the administrative structures in the twentieth century. This interpretation of Rwandan society by explorers and missionaries corresponds remarkably well to the popular local mythology found by missionaries, in whom the Tutsi are pictured as excellent, clever, and brilliant, the Hutu as lazy and inattentive, and the Twa as the official jokers. The Hutu majority were seen as native Rwandans, and the Tutsi minority were seen as nonnatives, and thus as intruders. This thinking has also been decisive in identifying Hutu and Tutsi over the course of time in the 1950s, extremist political parties, both Hutu and Tutsi, have explicitly referred to this historical ‘origin’ of Rwandan society. Because the use of racial