This should have given the lie once and for all to Speke’s idiotic racial ideas-as if they had not been discredited already. Belgium and the United Nations handed the nation over to a Hutu government and left the nation after a brief ceremony on July 1, 1962, at 10 o’clock in the morning. A new flag was hastily designed and raised: a tricolor banner with a plain letter R in the middle. These events, taken as a whole, came to be called the “Hutu Revolution.”And there was to be no sharing of power.

Tens of thousands of persecuted Tutsis fled the country to the safety of Uganda and other neighboring nations. One of the refugees was a small child named Paul Kagame, who was said to have been carried on his mother’s back.

Rwanda had not seen the last of him.

The exiled Tutsis would eventually number more than a quarter million. The angriest young men among them began launching guerrilla raids into Rwanda from their hiding places across the border. They were called “cockroaches” because they came out at night and were hard to kill. This military slang would soon be applied to the Tutsi people as a whole, a term as pernicious and dehumanizing as the American word nigger.

The raids were mostly amateur affairs, but they gave a pretext for our new government of President Grégoire Kayibanda to wrap itself in the flag of the Hutu Revolution and begin a purge of the Tutsis who remained inside Rwanda. There is no greater gift to an insecure leader that quite matches a vague “enemy” who can be used to whip up fear and hatred among the population. It is a cheap way to consolidate one’s hold on power. And this is just what the new regime did.

The persecution was made all the eaiser because Rwanda is a meticulously organized country.