Hutu chauvinism initially pursued status reversal and exclusion rather than extermination
Evidence
Tensions between the political parties precipitated violent riots that toppled the Tutsi monarchy in 1959 – an event extolled by Hutu supre macists as the ‘Social Revolution of 1959’. Kayibanda eventually became the president of the First Republic when Rwanda officially gained independence from Belgium on 1 July 1962. The new Hutu supremacist imaginary ‘equated democracy with Hutu majority rule’ (McDoom 2021, 29). During the Social Revolution and the installation of Kayibanda— an ethnic Hutu—as president, many Tutsis fled the country and became refugees in neighbouring Burundi, Congo, and Uganda. However, there was no systematic attempt to eliminate, much less exterminate, the Tutsi people in the immediate postindependence period. Mayersen (2014, 133) noted that ‘[t]he violence that occurred during the decolonisation process had a significant element of reciprocity’. Both Hutu and Tutsi instigated attacks at political and communal levels, but both groups had sufficient capacity to coordinate reprisals in response to the other’s attacks’. — Erin K. Jenne and Promise Frank Ejiofor, Ethnopopulism and genocidal…, 56
Categorization
- ADDENDUM: Directly extends the enemy-within reading: offers the crucial contrast case to ‘On Sacrifice’ and to the reader’s genocide question that a constructed Tutsi enemy was not yet an extermination target — the escalation to eliminationism belonged to a later phase, driven by political instrumentalism rather than fixed ethnopopulist identity.
- XREF: connects to: Belief in a transnational Tutsi extermination conspiracy was manufactured to justify Hutu massacres — Erin K. Jenne and Promise Frank Ejiofor, Ethnopopulism and genocidal…, 76
Related
Broader Connections
- Belief in a transnational Tutsi extermination conspiracy was manufactured to justify Hutu massacres
#expands(0.80) — Erin K. Jenne and Promise Frank Ejiofor, Ethnopopulism and genocidal…, 76