Rwanda

A densely populated kingdom whose social categories were hardened into race by colonial administration, with consequences that reached 1994. Precolonial Rwanda was a centralised monarchy in which Tutsi, Hutu and Twa named categories that were partly occupational and partly permeable. German and then Belgian rule adopted the Hamitic hypothesis, held that Tutsi were a superior race of foreign origin fit to rule, staffed the chieftaincies almost entirely with them, and in the 1930s issued identity cards recording ethnicity - fixing by paperwork what had been able to shift. Belgium then changed sides as independence approached; the revolution of 1959 to 1961 overthrew the monarchy and drove over a hundred thousand Tutsi into exile. Their children formed the Rwandan Patriotic Front, which invaded in 1990. After the president's plane was shot down on 6 April 1994, an organised campaign killed around eight hundred thousand Tutsi and moderate Hutu in about a hundred days, with the identity cards used at roadblocks and a UN force withdrawn as it began. The RPF took the country that July. Paul Kagame has led it since, presiding over rapid growth and a closed politics. Kigali is the capital. Rwanda is the most densely populated mainland African country. The country has about fourteen million people in twenty-six thousand square kilometres. Kinyarwanda, French, English and Swahili are all official, with English added in 2008. It is called the land of a thousand hills. Plastic bags were banned in 2008, among the earliest such bans. Gacaca community courts tried over a million genocide cases.

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