Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

There is more to Rwanda and Burundi than the arcane histories of two overpopulated (7 million each), poverty-stricken micro-states in the heart of the African continent: their minute size belies the magnitude of the tragedies they have suffered. The first will go down in history as the site of one of the biggest genocides of the last century, resulting in the systematic killing of an estimated 800,000 people, mostly Tutsi, in a hundred days from April to July 1994. The second lives on in the collective memory of the survivors as a forgotten genocide: who today remembers that in 1972, between 200,000 and 300,000 Hutu were massacred at the hands of a predominantly Tutsi army? Behind these horror stories lies a sociological puzzle: although Rwanda and Burundi have more in common than any other two states in the continent, in terms of size, traditional institutions, ethnic maps, language, and culture, they have followed radically different trajectories, one (Rwanda) ending up as a republic under Hutu control at the time of independence (1962), the other (Burundi) as a constitutional monarchy under Tutsi rule. Not until 1965 did the army abolish the monarchy. And while both experienced genocide, the victims in each state belonged to different communities – predominantly Tutsi in Rwanda and overwhelmingly Hutu in Burundi. Today Rwanda has emerged as a thinly disguised Tutsi dictatorship, ... log in or subscribe to read full text