Belgium wanted to get the most profit out of Rwanda while expending the least amount of men and effort. The new colonizers looked at the social rift between our leaders and farmers and saw an easy way to rule by proxy. It was a version of the old divide-and-conquer tactics used so effectively by colonizers throughout history. The Aztec empire in Mexico was finished the moment that Hernán Cortés realized he could exploit minor resentments between tribes to his own advantage, making friends with one tribe to beat the more powerful rival and thus subdue the entire region for the Spanish Crown. And so the Belgians adopted the bizarre race theories of John Hanning Speke to turn the Tutsi aristocracy into something like junior managers. It was no longer enough to simply co-opt the royal court as the Germans had. There was now an explicitly racial way of separating the haves from the have-nots.

Here’s how crazy it became. Belgian scientists were sent down to Rwanda with little measuring tapes. They determined that a typical Tutsi nose was at least two and a half millimeters longer than a Hutu nose. This brand of “scientific” race theory led directly to a particularly dark bead on our necklace: the year 1933, when all people in Rwanda received identity cards known as books that specified their ethnic class. Years later these cards would become virtual death warrants for thousands of people, as we will see. But the immediate effect of these cards was to crystallize the racism into a Jim Crow system. Almost all the colonial administrative jobs were reserved for Tutsis. When categories were written down, it became harder for Hutu to pass as Tutsi, even after they had accumulated many cows.