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Chapter 13: The Roots of Hate III: The Betrayal and the Bell: The "Hutu Revolution" of 1959

In Brussels, the wind had changed. The old colonial administrators, who saw the map of Africa turning from imperial pink to independent green, made a pragmatic calculation. Their decades-long policy of ruling through a Tutsi minority was no longer tenable. If they were to maintain their influence in the Rwanda that was to come, they would have to anoint a new king. And the king, this time, would come from the Hutu majority.

In a Catholic seminary in Rwanda, a Hutu intellectual named Grégoire Kayibanda could feel this same wind at his back. Filled with a sense of historic mission, he and his colleagues drafted their great work: the Hutu Manifesto. They took the racial science of their Belgian masters and repurposed it, twisting the language of democratic liberation and Christian justice. The Tutsi, the Manifesto argued, were not just a ruling class; they were a foreign race of oppressors, alien invaders from Ethiopia. Rwandan history was not a story of a single people, but a moral struggle of the oppressed native against the foreign master.

For Chief Mutara, whose family had served the Belgian administration loyally for a generation, the wind felt like a coming storm. He was summoned to a meeting with the local colonial administrator, a man who had once been a fawning partner. Now, the Belgian was cold, distant. "Times are changing, Chief," he said. Mutara was being replaced. His position, his authority, was being handed over to a newly appointed Hutu administrator. The betrayal was absolute, the abandonment total.

The signal for the violence to begin was the ringing of a church bell. The sound that once called the village to prayer was now a pre-arranged call to arms. The youth wing of Kayibanda’s new PARMEHUTU party gathered with clubs and machetes. That night, Mutara and his family fled their home as the flames licked the roof. They took only what they could carry and joined a long, sad procession of thousands on the road, heading towards the border with Uganda. They were no longer citizens; they were refugees. On the road, a young boy in that procession looked back at the fires lighting up the hills of his home, a silent, burning vow of return in his eyes.

The Discourse 13: The Cynical Transfer of Power

13.1 The Belgian Pivot: A Strategy of Self-Preservation
The "Hutu Revolution" of 1959 was not a spontaneous popular uprising, but a political revolution carefully orchestrated by a Hutu counter-elite and cynically enabled by the Belgian colonial administration. The Belgians, in a strategic pivot to maintain post-independence influence, betrayed their former Tutsi allies and threw their support behind the Hutu majority, sanctioning a violent transfer of power that enshrined racist ideology at the heart of the new Rwandan state and created the Tutsi refugee crisis. As the winds of decolonization swept Africa, the Belgian administration recognized that its long-standing policy of minority Tutsi rule was unsustainable. In a pragmatic move to maintain influence after independence, the colonial power and the powerful Catholic Church switched their allegiance to the emerging Hutu elite, whom they now recast as the legitimate "democratic majority." [CITATION 1] This was not an act of moral correction, but a cynical political calculation designed to preserve Belgian interests.

13.2 The Hutu Manifesto: An Ideology of Liberation and Hate
The ideological fuel for this revolution was the 1957 "Hutu Manifesto" (Note sur l’aspect social du problème racial indigène au Rwanda), authored by Grégoire Kayibanda and other Hutu intellectuals. [CITATION 2] This document masterfully reframed the colonial racial narrative for a new purpose. It accepted the Belgians' premise that the Tutsi were a foreign "Hamitic" race, but recast them not as civilizers, but as foreign invaders and oppressors. Using the language of democratic self-determination, it argued for Hutu liberation not just from the Belgians, but from the "colonialist" Tutsi. This officially codified the Hutu-Tutsi relationship as an ethnic, and not a class, struggle. [CITATION 3]

13.3 The "Wind of Destruction" and the Birth of the Diaspora
In November 1959, following rumors of an attack on a Hutu leader, organized anti-Tutsi violence erupted, with the tacit approval of the Belgian authorities who did little to stop it. [CITATION 4] Hundreds of Tutsis were killed, and thousands of homes were burned in what became known as mu-yaga (the wind of destruction). This led to the overthrow of the Tutsi monarchy and the flight of more than 150,000 Tutsi refugees to neighboring countries like Uganda, Burundi, and Congo. This was not a side effect of the revolution; it was a central goal. This mass exodus created the Tutsi diaspora, a large and resentful refugee community whose children would, a generation later, form the core of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF).

References

1. Prunier, Gérard. The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide. Columbia University Press, 1995.

2. Kayibanda, Grégoire, et al. "Note sur l’aspect social du problème racial indigène au Rwanda" (The Hutu Manifesto). March 24, 1957. https://www.un.org/en/preventgenocide/rwanda/assets/pdf/the_hutu_manifesto.pdf

3. Mamdani, Mahmood. When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda. Princeton University Press, 2001.

4. Newbury, Catharine. The Cohesion of Oppression: Clientship and Ethnicity in Rwanda, 1860-1960. Columbia University Press, 1988.