A Discourse on the Developmental Path of Rwanda

Résumé

The overarching issue this essay will be analyzing is surrounding the topic of politics of identity. Generally spea-king, the term politics of identity was coined as a result of the colonial imposition of identity on the local community. This led the local community to question their background and existence. Politics of identity is the result of a settler-native binary which was initiated by colonial powers and forced onto the local community, causing an identity crisis. As scholar Mahmood Mamdani detailed in his academic article entitled “Indirect Rule, Civil Society, and Ethnicity: The African Dilemma”, a creation and imagination of the so-called “native” is then formed as a direct result of the settler-native binary. This paper will look at the specific example of Rwanda by analyzing the historical, cultural and social back-ground that, inevitably, led to the Rwandan Civil War and, more speci-fically, the Rwandan Genocide in 1994. This paper will demonstrate the crucial role post-colonial nationalism, media, and fictions of ethnicity played in the development of Rwanda as a country, and how these factors led to the horrific genocide of the Tutsi population. In order to fully comprehend these micro factors, a detailed account of the pre-colonial context of Rwanda will be provided, followed by an outline of the Belgian colonial era in Rwanda, demons-trating the disruption this caused to the course of Rwandan development. Ultimately, this paper will display how the colonial disruption was the leading factor to the modern-day fragmented political, social and cultural state of Rwanda.