IN 1884 European powers gathered in Berlin for a conference under Chancellor Otto von Bismarck that historians depict as setting the rules for the scramble for Africa among outside powers that soon fractured it into a jigsaw of new nations.
However, decades after the so-called ‘winds of change’ blew away colonial rule, the impact of this colonial cartography lingers on.
This week, Rwanda commemorates 21 years of a genocide that killed over 800 000 people.
This year’s event is organised under the theme; ‘Fight against genocide denial and revisionism’.
Although this horrific genocide is categorised along tribal and ethnic lines, Belgium is responsible for fermenting genocide ideology in Rwanda that resulted in the decimation of about one million Tutsis and Hutus in Rwanda in 1994.
Prior to Rwanda’s colonisation, Rwanda was a single society in which Hutu and Tutsi lived together, spoke the same language, shared religious beliefs and intermarried.
Although a distinction was made between the Hutu and Tutsi, these were neither tribes nor ethnic groups.
Rather, the distinction between the Hutu and Tutsi was a fluid one, based on a combination of ancestry and socio-economic status, including the ownership of cattle.
The Tutsi, comprising 15 percent of the population, were politically and economically dominant. 
The Hutus were mainly cultivators and known as the ‘masses’ in comparison to the Tutsis who were predominantly herdsmen and therefore considered the ‘elite’.
Despite the Hutus being subservient, their relationship with the Tutsi was relatively comfortable.
The Tutsi are much taller and thinner in physique than the Hutu.
Of course there were disagreements between the majority Hutus and minority Tutsis, but the animosity between them grew substantially since the colonial period.
However, the arrival of the German colonialist in the late 1800s did a lot to engender the future tensions between the two races.
The arrival of the Belgians in 1916 after the First World War following the defeat of German, served to add to the problem, as they endorsed the Tutsi’s power over the Hutus as a means of controlling the country.
The Belgians considered the Tutsis to be superior to the Hutus.
They considered the Tutsi as more like themselves; therefore, they took them under their wing and educated them and brought them up to be the upper-class of society.
Identity cards that distinguished Hutu from Tutsi became mandatory, thus requiring everyone to be classified according to their ethnicity and making these categories official.
Their worst contribution was racial science.
The Belgians further increased the divide between the Hutus and Tutsis through the use of the eugenics.
Skull measurements showing larger brain size, greater height, and lighter skin tones all reaffirmed the Tutsis’ superiority over the Hutus, by providing proof of their apparent greater purity and closer ancestry to Europeans.
British Indian army officer, John Hanning Speke was the creator of the racialist hypothesis known as the ‘Hamitic Theory’.
In his writings, Speke suggests that the Tutsis are more European than the Hutus.
Their caucasoid facial features, combined with their smoother personalities was proof enough for him that they were more cultured than the Hutus.
This theory was basis for all racial and cultural division between the Hutu and Tutsi in later years.
It made specific definition as to how one race was superior to the other, therefore giving said superior race much power and influence.
In it, Speke declared “that all culture and civilisation in central Africa had been introduced by the taller, sharper-featured people, Hain whom he considered to be a caucasoid tribe of Ethiopian origin, descended from the biblical King David, and therefore a superior race to the native Negroids.
“Because Europeans thought that the Tutsi looked more like themselves than did other Rwandans, they found it reasonable to suppose them closer to Europeans in the evolutionary hierarchy and hence closer to them in ability.”
European authors classified the Hamitic race as a sub-group of the Caucasian race, along with the Semitic race – thus grouping the non-Semitic populations native to North Africa, the Horn of Africa and South Arabia, including the Ancient Egyptians.
According to the Hamitic Theory, this ‘Hamitic race’ was superior to or more advanced than Negroid populations of Sub-Saharan Africa.
In its most extreme form, in the writings of Charles Gabriel Seligman, this theory asserted that virtually all significant achievements in African history were the work of ‘Hamites’ who migrated into central Africa as pastoralists, bringing new customs, languages, technologies and administrative skills with them.
The final step that Belgium took was implementing a corvée rule system.
Peasant farmers, for the large part Hutus, were obligated to grow coffee beans on their land for Tutsi officials.
Corvée is a semantic that is one step higher than slavery.
The only difference is that in corvée rule, the ruler does not own the servant outright.
Many Hutu farmers were subjected to a standard 10 lashes daily, before work, so as to remind them to maintain a solid work ethic.
Essentially, by the time of Rwandan independence in 1962, the Hutu were an oppressed race, facing cruelty from Tutsi elite, who were manipulated by imperialists.
When Belgium relinquished power and granted Rwanda independence in 1962, the Hutus took their place.
With a Hutu-led government in place, after hundreds of years of Tutsi rule, the roles reversed.
The once oppressed Hutus decided to take revenge.
During Grégoire Kayibanda’s tenure as leader, there was an increasing exodus of Tutsi from Rwanda into neighbouring nations.
Anti-Tutsi legislature was passed, such as the 10 percent quota for Tutsis, which applied to school and university seats, and the civil service.
Hutu power quickly became centralised and all Tutsis were removed from positions of power.
At this point, Tutsi rebellions occurred, which all failed, and Tutsi killings began.
Hence it is more accurate and succinct to conclude that the Rwandan Genocide was the direct result of the negative influences of European colonists on Rwanda.
The Europeans manipulated the Tutsi elite into the oppression of the Hutu, and thus created a lingering resentment within the Hutu.
They then helped the Hutu usurp power from the Tutsi, and conveniently left the scene, permitting the establishment of a regime of Hutu power, in which there would be frequent massacres of Tutsi.
This combined with Tutsi rebellions, culminated in the 1994 Rwandan Genocide that left nearly one million people dead.