Mandates: Ruanda-Urundi under Belgium

1A trust or a colony?

Article 119 of the Treaty of Versailles took Germany's colonies away; the League of Nations decided what should become of them. The victors were not allowed simply to annex them. Instead each territory was entrusted to a "mandatory" power, which promised in writing to govern in the interest of the inhabitants and to report every year to the League. Ruanda-Urundi became a Belgian mandate in 1922. Read two articles of that mandate, then test them against what Belgium actually did in Rwanda.

2How the mandate system worked

The mandates were the League's answer to a contradiction: the Allies had promised self-determination, yet they had no intention of giving up the colonies they had conquered. Every mandatory sent an annual report to the Permanent Mandates Commission, whose members questioned its representatives in Geneva. Inhabitants could petition the League, but petitions had to be sent through the mandatory power itself, and the Commission never visited the territories. Its only weapon was publicity. The historian Susan Pedersen, in The Guardians (2015), argues that this oversight did not change colonial rule much, but it forced the powers to justify themselves in public, and the language of "trust" it created was later used by African nationalists against them.

3Case study: Ruanda-Urundi under the Belgian mandate

Borders decided in Europe

Under the Orts–Milner agreement of 1919 Belgium agreed that Gisaka, in eastern Rwanda, should pass to British Tanganyika, where Britain hoped to build a Cape-to-Cairo railway. It was handed over in 1921. Mwami Yuhi V Musinga refused to accept the loss, and the Catholic mission supported him. In 1923 Belgium and Britain, with the League Council's approval, agreed to return Gisaka, and from 1 January 1924 the border ran along the Kagera River. Bugufi, part of Urundi, stayed in Tanganyika. The episode shows both how lightly Europeans redrew African kingdoms and how African rulers could use the new international system to resist.

Indirect rule, made more direct

Belgium governed through the Mwami and the chiefs, but from 1926, under Governor Charles Voisin, it reshaped the system. The old arrangement in which a district might have separate chiefs for land, cattle and men was abolished, chiefdoms were merged, and most Hutu chiefs were removed and replaced by Tutsi ones. Belgian officials and Catholic missionaries justified this with racial theories, invented in Europe and false, that ranked Rwandans by supposed origin. Those theories were never true, but the policies built on them gave a small Tutsi elite administrative power, while ordinary Tutsi, Hutu and Twa alike carried the burden of the colonial demands.

Labour, crops and famine

Rwandans had to provide unpaid labour (akazi), pay a head tax, and grow compulsory crops: food crops such as cassava and sweet potatoes against famine and, from the early 1930s, coffee for export. Despite the anti-famine crops, the Rwakayihura famine of 1928–29 struck hard, and thousands of Rwandans left to work in British Uganda or in the mines of Katanga in the Belgian Congo. Compare this with Article 5 of the mandate: the labour was neither limited to essential works nor adequately paid.

Deposing a king, fixing identities

Musinga resisted Christian conversion and Belgian control; in November 1931 the administration deposed him and installed his son, Mutara III Rudahigwa, who became a Christian. Catholic conversions then rose rapidly in the 1930s. In 1933–34 a census recorded every Rwandan as Hutu, Tutsi or Twa, and the identity cards that followed fixed this category on each person and passed it to their children. Hutu, Tutsi and Twa had been social categories, and a person's position could change with wealth, marriage or service; the cards turned them into fixed, inherited labels. Historians regard these colonial policies as part of the long background to the divisions later exploited by the planners of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi. Unit 8 returns to this history.