Understand the event

The genocide of the Tutsi is rooted in colonial politics and racist ideology developed by Western countries during the nineteenth century.^e century. Based on a grammar of subjugation through classificatory tools (the map and the census in particular), the deployment of colonialism was based on totalizing hierarchies allowing to submit and monitor both people and space. The Hutu and Tutsi "ethnic groups" thus proceed from the imagination of the Belgian colonizers establishing the myth of a superior Tutsi race.
In the early 1960s, the colonial liberation movement, based largely on a Hutu ethno-nationalism, implanted durably in Rwandan society the rejection of the "dominant class" Tutsi. Exploited and exalted ethnic antagonism becomes an essential component of the new Rwandese Republic, which is gradually reducing all forms of political opposition, particularly the Rwandan Patriotic Front (the Inkotanyi), to a racial struggle.