To understand how colonial divide-and-rule tactics took root in the Great Lakes region, and why the current leaderships of the DR Congo and Burundi still keep them alive, I start with a simple question: which societies and kingdoms existed in this region, present-day northwest Tanzania, southern Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, and eastern Congo before colonization?
Before European colonization, five kingdoms dominated the region: Buganda, Rwanda, Bunyoro-Kitara, Burundi, and Karagwe with Tooro, Ankole, and Mpororo part of Bunyoro-Kitara, and Bugesera, Gisaka, Bwisha, Bukumu, and Buhunde as part of Rwanda.
According to George Sandrart’s Court de droit coutumier, the Portuguese first heard, through Giovanni Botero’s 1589 accounts, of a vast empire stretching between Abyssinia, Monomatapa, and the Congo, likely the Empire of the Batembuzi, which some evidence suggests later split into these five kingdoms.
Modern borders in the Great Lakes region are colonial constructs. They arbitrarily fragmented ethnically and culturally integrated populations across Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, Tanzania, and eastern DR Congo.
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In 1589, during Botero’s time, people in the region were not called Bantu, Nilote, Tutsi, or Hutu; these labels did not yet exist. Even in 1858, when the first colonial agents, Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke, arrived, they found no one using such terms.
“Bantu” was coined in the late 1850s by German linguist Wilhelm Bleek and popularized in his 1862 work, A Comparative Grammar of South African Languages; like “Bantu,” “Nilotic” denotes a linguistic classification, not an ethnicity.
“Hamitic,” first used as a linguistic term in 1862, was later weaponized by colonial powers to divide African societies along ethnic lines. In Rwanda, the colonial administration saw the ruling elite as an obstacle to resource exploitation and framed them as Hamitic, or Tutsi, and foreign outsiders, to undermine their authority.
This strategy began with Germany’s first colonial resident, Richard Kandt, who targeted the Tutsi in 1899, declaring: “Rouanda is a country full of hope if we can destroy the power of the Watusi.” The resulting campaign against the Tutsi reached its peak in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.
Recognizing the impact of these artificial classifications, the post-genocide government, led by the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), replaced the colonial labels with a unified national identity: Ndi Umunyarwanda, “I am Rwandan.”
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Burundi and the DR Congo, by contrast, retain colonial ethnic structures, evident in Burundi’s constitutional ethnic quotas, and in the DR Congo, where the government recognizes Hutu as citizens but denies ancestral land and citizenship rights to the Tutsi.
Critics argue that Belgian authorities behind these divisions still foster regional friction through ongoing support for the Burundian and Congolese governments, whose alignment with the FDLR continues historical anti-Tutsi policy.
Belgium not only backs Burundi and the DR Congo in using the FDLR against Rwanda; it also funds genocide-denial groups, CLIIR, led by Joseph Matata, and JAMBO ASBL, an FDLR financier, both advocating Hutu supremacy in the region.
The France-based family of former President Juvénal Habyarimana, notably Jean-Luc Habyarimana and Agathe Kanziga Habyarimana, maintains close ties with the Tshisekedi family and Burundi’s Évariste Ndayishimiye, aiming to unseat the RPF government and restore a Hutu administration in Rwanda.
Belgium also harbors the Havila Institute, a Tutsi supremacist group, even as it backs Hutu supremacists elsewhere. The institute claims Hutu and other Bantu peoples are merely migrants brought by Catholic missionaries, reviving the colonial idea that Tutsi were culturally superior to Hutu.
A critical question remains: which forces can guide both countries toward decolonization, when their elites use ethnic polarization to hold power?
The writer is a media specialist, historian, and playwright
