| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立交通大學 === 客家文化學院客家社會與文化學程 === 104 === Rwanda, land of a thousand hills, suffered genocide in the late twentieth century when the Hutu majority claimed to kill all the Tutsi. The current research aimed to discover how ethnic consciousness emerged as well as the source of the ethnic conflict.
This study is based on the theoretical model of Wei-der Shu’s “Three-phase development theory on the construction of ethnic groups.” Through reviewing literature and analyzing the ethnic groups in Rwanda with the theory, the researcher distinguished the three phases of the development of the ethnic groups and found the significant factors contributing the construction of ethnicity in each phase. The first phase, starting from the pre-colonial period to 1958, could be described as “blur stage” because the ethnic consciousness was not formed yet during this period. In this phase, though the Belgium used identity cards to solidify the distinction between the Hutu and the Tutsi, the society was still divided by classes but not ethnicity. It was the time the ethnic consciousness was low and Tutsi noble consciousness was high.
The second phase, “formation” of the ethnic consciousness, is from the “Rwanda Revolution”(also known as the “Social Revolution” or “wind of Destruction”) in 1959 to the establishment of the Rwanda Patriotic Front in 1987. The “Rwanda Revolution” saw the Tutsi as feudal lords and the Hutu as victims of enslavement and oppression, which was never seen before in Rwanda history. Grégoire Kayibanda’s first Republic adopted the Belgium identity cards and used them to discriminate against the Tutsi in terms of the employment of educators and public workers, which worsened the ethnic conflict. Later, Juvénal Habyarimana first classified the Tutsi as an “ethnic group,” which further raised the Hutu’s ethnic consciousness. Meanwhile, descendants of the Tutsi who fled to neighbor countries began to form the Rwanda Patriotic Front, which sought to return to their homeland. The third phase, “embodiment” of the ethnic consciousness, is from 1988 to the genocide in 1994. The invasion of the Rwanda Patriotic Front as well as the surge of the “Hutu Power” could be understood as the events leading the embodiment of ethnic consciousness in this stage.
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