Autistic Dimensions

Everyone knows what happened in Rwanda in 1994, but almost no one knows the story of the fallen king and the foreign social science that lit the fuse nearly 60 years earlier.

For centuries, the Kingdom of Rwanda was a centralized monarchy where the Mwami, or King, ruled over a complex society of cattle herders and farmers. The Nyiginya dynasty established a system of mutual obligations that held the hills together long before Europeans ever set foot in East-Central Africa.

Everything changed in 1933 when Belgian administrators introduced ethnic identity cards. They took a fluid social structure and froze it into rigid categories of Hutu and Tutsi based on cattle ownership and physical measurements. This man-made classification replaced traditional unity with a permanent legal divide.

By 1959, these tensions boiled over into the Hutu Revolution, leading to the overthrow of the ancient monarchy and the flight of the royal family. The kingdom was formally abolished in 1961, and Rwanda became a republic the following year, forever altering the destiny of the nation.


Sources: Sciences Po Research, National Museum of Rwanda

The rest of the country: ❄️ Florida today: 🍹 National Florida Day hits different when it’s 80° and the rest of the country is freezing 🥶