What it means to be Rwandan when using a general explanation is when you are born in Rwanda and fall under one of the three ethnic groups namely the Twa which was the first group to exist when tracing back their origins, the Hutu’s and the Tutsi’s. If one belonged to any of these groups they were seen as being Rwanda. Considering Rwanda’s history and the central concern being violence in terms of identity-based conflicts has played a central role between the controversies facing the Hutu’s and the Tutsi’s (Des Forge, 1999). Rwanda pre-colonial was under the rulers-hip of the Tutsi kingdom prior colonisation (with the Tutsi seeing themselves as being superior).
The controversies related to the Hutu and Tutsi identities can be linked back to the Hamitic hypothesis of Ham which involved the ‘ethnic cleansing’ of a certain group, which started off with the Hutu’s assimilating into being Tutsi because of their social and financial standing but changed when the genocide began which saw the brutal killings of many Tutsi’s as a result of them oppressing the Hutu’s. When the scramble for Africa took place in 1884-1885 Rwanda was under Belgian colonial rule, this later saw the beginning of ethnic divisions between the two groups (Hutu and Tutsi) (Mamdani, 1996). The theory states that the Bantu which included groups such as Nande, Nyanga and Hutu were autochthonous (indigenous individuals who belong to a particular place) inhabitants of Central Africa and that the Nilotes being the Tutsi were historical ‘invaders’ of the area (Mamdani, 1996). In addition to the theory, ethnicity defined the social memories that have produced different historical myths and conceptual frameworks between the region’s Hutu and Tutsi (Deforges, 1999). This later became increasingly politicised especially after the colonial government issued ethnic identity cards in 1933 to distinguish who was a Hutu, Tutsi or Twa (Mamdani, 1996).
For Shyaka (2008:6) colonial political aspects contributed to the identity-based controversies that happened in Rwanda, not disputing the fact that there were existing tensions between the Hutu and Tutsi’s but colonial powers used this as a tool to further oppress the two groups through the indirect rule of “divide and rule/conquer”, which increased the identity conflict of Rwandans born of parents from different ethnic groups (Shyaka, 2008). This led to the de-legitimization of traditional structures breaking down any confidence of peace building as a result of the politicising ethnic identities of the Hutu and Tutsi, making it difficult to define what it means to be Rwandan (Shyaka, 2008).