Hutu And The Tutsi
Hutu and the Tutsi
The Hutus and the Tutsis go back to almost two thousand years ago. They began as small organized groups based on loyalty to an outstanding leader. They worked together to start building the country of Rwanda. They created a highly sophisticated language of Kinyarwanda. They also agreed on a certain religious belief that they would all follow, and their culture was based off of song, dance, and poetry. Most of the people were farmers of small stock. (“The Hutu Revolution”)
Rwanda became a major state in the early eighteenth century. There were two main types of people in Rwanda, the cultivators and the pastoralists. The pastoralists who lived in the northeast were called Bogogwes, and the people in the southeast were called Bahimas. Both the cultivators and the pastoralists sought out to expand Rwanda by attacking neighboring people. (“The Hutu Revolution”)
The rulers decided the people’s power by the number of cattle they owned and by the number of soldiers they owned. The rulers would sometimes give out cattle in order to win the support of people. By the end of the nineteenth century, the ruler governed the central regions closely through multiple hierarchies of competing officials who administered men, cattle, pasturage, and agricultural land. He also began to allow small states within Rwanda. (“The Hutu Revolution”)
As the Rwandan state grew in sophistication and power, many people in the government and people wealthy in cattle began to view themselves as more superior than ordinary people. The word “Tutsi” means a person that is very wealthy in cattle and is in the elite social group. The word “Hutu” originally meant a subordinate or follower of a more powerful person, but soon came to be known as the large group of ordinary people. (“The Hutu Revolution”)
Near the end of the nineteenth century, Europeans began to live in Rwanda. The Germans began to set up a colonial...
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