Understanding the event

The genocide of the Tutsi draws its foundations from the colonial policy and racist ideology developed by the Western countries during the XIX^e century. Based on a grammar of subjection through classificatory tools (the map and the census in particular), the deployment of colonialism relied on totalizing hierarchies allowing to subjugate and monitor both people and space. The "ethnic groups" of Hutu and Tutsi thus come from the imagination of the Belgian colonizers establishing the myth of a superior Tutsi race.
In the early 1960s, the colonial liberation movement, largely based on a Hutu ethno-nationalism, permanently implanted in Rwandan society the rejection of the "ruling class" Tutsi. Exploited and exalted ethnic antagonism becomes an essential component of the new Rwandese Republic which gradually reduces all forms of political opposition, notably the Rwandan Patriotic Front (the Inkotanyi), to a racial struggle.