Anointed by the Belgians as their administrators and collaborators in Rwanda and Burundi, the Tutsis, who never constituted more than 18 percent of the population, were presented with a poisoned chalice combining ethnic elitism with economic favoritism. In educating their chosen elites, the Belgians were relentlessly racist. Starting in 1928, all primary schools in Rwanda were segregated, while at the secondary-school level Rwandan (and later Burundian) Tutsis were three to four times better represented than Hutus.
Not surprisingly, the majority Hutu population chafed at this discrimination, and in the late 1950s a Hutu counter-elite began calling for the end of "Tutsi feudalism." On the eve of independence, the growing Hutu rebellion was backed, in a catastrophic reversal, by the Roman Catholic Church and the colonial administration, which now claimed that the Hutu majority represented "democratic values." The outcome, as Chretien shows, was that "the new Rwanda declared its national past `Tutsi' and thus despicable."
The post-colonial period was marked by a zero-sum ethnic fundamentalism that destroyed the social fabric. Chretien argues that "the generation catapulted to the top of the former kingdoms thus squandered the opportunity offered by independence." The deep ethnic insecurities created by European rewriting of African history made the competing ethnic groups far more concerned about their own survival than about the task of nation-building. As a result, he writes, the elites were "haunted by a passion -- which some admitted and others covered up -- about the supremacy of their ethnic group." In Rwanda, the Hutu revolution led to a series of pogroms against the Tutsi minority, culminating in the 1994 genocide.
Thus, modern hatreds, not ancient ones, destroyed Rwanda. Far from being inbred in the country's ancient social structures, these destructive animosities were created during its recent colonial past.
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