The colonial
Like the Germans before them, the Belgian government continued to rely on the Tutsi power structure for administering the country. It also consistently favoured the Tutsis where education was concerned, leading to a situation where many Tutsis were literate, while the majority of Hutus were not. For Rwanda, independence in 1962 was not a ‘clean’ change of power. Many political opponents were killed. The new Hutu elite were not elected by the people they claimed to represent. For most Hutu peasants, life did not improve. 1884 - In November 14 European nations (Austria-Hungary, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Great Britain, Holland, Italy, Norway, Portugal, Russia, Spain, Sweden and Turkey) and the US meet at the Conference of Berlin, called to carve up central Africa among them. The former colonial power, Germany, lost possession of Rwanda during the First World War and the territory was then placed under Belgian administration. In the late 1950’s during the great wave of decolonization, tensions increased in Rwanda. Attended by the colonial powers of Great Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, Germany, and Belgium, among others, the Conference created artificial state boundaries as well as a colonial system that was in effect for the next sixty years. Among these territories, the Congo was a unique case. In 1959, the Belgian government decided to hold an election that would give Congolese puppets formal power over the governance of the Congo. The Belgian intention was to take the relevance from the radicals’ lips by appeasing the people with a moderate puppet government, and erase the calls for independence. DESTABILISATION: After World War II ended, the Ruanda-Urundi region became a UN trust territory with Belgium as the administrative authority.. Belgians made reforms in the 1950s that encouraged the growth of democratic political institutions. Adam Hochschild's study of King Leopold II of Belgium's creation of the Congo Free State goes to the essence of the economic and political systems established in colonial Africa. The Belgians [also] gave political power to the Tutsis. Due to the eugenics movement in Europe and the United States, the colonial government became concerned with the differences between Hutu and Tutsi. Scientists arrived to measure skull-and thus, they believed brain-size. Unlike other early twentieth-century colonial powers in Africa, Belgium did not directly oversee the education of the Congo’s indigenous population. Rather, it turned the responsibility for education over to missionaries.
http://emileelime.tripod.com/id4.html http://rwandanstories.org/origins/power_shift.html http://www.moreorless.net.au/killers/leopold.html http://www.un.org/en/preventgenocide/rwanda/education/rwandagenocide.shtml http://www.ultimatehistoryproject.com/belgian-congo.html http://nvdatabase.swarthmore.edu/content/congolese-win-independence-belgian-empire-1959-60 http://emileelime.tripod.com/id4.html http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/1999/09/king-s06.html http://emileelime.tripod.com/id4.html http://www.ultimatehistoryproject.com/belgian-congo.html
who did belgium give power over in