Colonial Reforms and Their Consequences on African Societies
Senior 3 · History and Citizenship
Colonial Reforms and Their Consequences on African Societies
Lesson 3 of 4
25 min
Look closely at Source A. It was made as a lantern slide, a photograph printed on glass and projected on a screen, probably to show audiences in Europe or America the work of missions in Africa. A European woman sits with two young Congolese girls, both dressed in European clothes, in front of a house with a veranda.
Analysing the source. The photographer wanted to show "progress": African children in European clothes, cared for by a mission. A historian asks other questions. What did the girls' families think? What did they gain, in schooling and health care, and what did they lose of their own language, dress and beliefs? Colonial socio-cultural reforms changed how Africans worshipped, learned, dressed, lived and even how they were officially identified. Some of these changes brought real benefits; others did lasting harm. This lesson weighs both.
Definition
Socio-cultural: to do with society (how people live together, their families, classes and towns) and culture (their beliefs, languages, customs and arts).
Mission: a religious station, usually with a church, a school and a dispensary, set up by missionaries to spread their faith.
Catechist: a local Christian trained to teach the faith, often the first teacher in a village.
Census: an official count of a population, recording information about each person.
Ideology: a set of ideas that a group uses to explain and justify what it does. A racial ideology wrongly divides people into "races" and ranks them.
Social category: a group in society defined by status, wealth or occupation, not by birth into a separate "race".
| Area | Colonial reform | In Africa generally | In Rwanda |
|---|---|---|---|
| Religion | Christian missions, protected and often paid by the state | Catholic and Protestant missions spread across the continent; Islam also spread in West and East Africa | The White Fathers founded the first Catholic mission at Save in 1900; Protestant missions followed |
| Education | Schools run mostly by missions, teaching reading, religion and a European language | Mission schools educated many future nationalist leaders | The Groupe Scolaire of Astrida, founded in 1929, trained clerks and assistants, mostly the sons of chiefs |
| Health | Campaigns against epidemics; hospitals and dispensaries | Campaigns against sleeping sickness and smallpox | Mission and government dispensaries; famine-relief crops (Lesson 2) |
| Towns and classes | New towns and new social groups: clerks, teachers, catechists, traders | Racial segregation in towns; the évolués ("evolved ones") in the Belgian Congo | Small administrative centres such as Kigali and Astrida (Huye); new educated elites |
| Identity | Population registers and identity documents | Pass laws in South Africa controlled Africans' movement | The census of 1933 to 1934 put every adult's category on an identity card |
Table 1. Socio-cultural reforms. Sources: the Wikipedia articles in the credits and Senior 2, Unit 7.
The Catholic White Fathers opened their first mission at Save in 1900, and Protestant missions arrived soon after. At first the missions gained converts mostly among ordinary farmers. Under the Belgians, Monsignor Léon Classe, head of the Catholic Church in Rwanda from 1922, aimed to convert the chiefs first, believing the people would follow them, and he supported the administration's choice of Tutsi chiefs. When the chiefs were baptised in the early 1930s, so many Rwandans followed that the period was called the "tornado" of conversions. Mwami Mutara III Rudahigwa was baptised in 1943.
The missions built most of Rwanda's schools, dispensaries and churches, taught reading and writing in Kinyarwanda and French, and published newspapers in Kinyarwanda. They also condemned traditional religious practices such as kubandwa, and their schools gave the best places to the sons of chiefs. In the 1950s some missionaries began to support the demands of educated Hutu for equal rights. The Church therefore helped to build the colonial order and, later, to bring it to an end.
Before colonial rule, Hutu, Tutsi and Twa were social categories within one people. Rwandans spoke one language, Kinyarwanda, shared the same religion and culture, belonged to the same clans and lived side by side on the same hills. The categories were linked to wealth, cattle, occupation and closeness to power, and they were not fixed: a Hutu family that gained cattle and influence could, over time, come to be counted as Tutsi, and a Tutsi family that lost them could come to be counted as Hutu.
European explorers, missionaries and officials arrived with a racial ideology from nineteenth-century Europe, often called the "Hamitic hypothesis". It claimed that the Tutsi were a separate race of newcomers from north-east Africa, "superior" to the Hutu and Twa. This theory was false. It had no basis in evidence, and historians have shown that Europeans used it to explain African achievements away and to justify colonial rule and their choice of allies. It was also deeply harmful: it taught Rwandans to see their neighbours as foreign.
The Belgian administration built its reforms on this false theory. It gave almost all chiefships to Tutsi (Lesson 1), and the missions' best schools did the same. Then, in the census of 1933 to 1934, it registered every adult and wrote each person's category on an identity card. The category was now fixed by the state and passed from father to child; it could no longer change.
Figure 1. What the identity cards changed. The colours are for reading the diagram only; the categories were social, not physical.
Consequences. A changeable social position became a fixed, official, inherited identity. It decided who could become a chief or enter the best schools under Belgian rule. After independence the category stayed on identity cards and was used to discriminate in schools and jobs. In 1994 it was used at roadblocks to identify Tutsi during the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi. After the genocide, the categories were removed from Rwandan identity cards, and unity became a founding principle of the state (Senior 2).
Important
Use the right words. Hutu, Tutsi and Twa are social categories, not races or tribes. The "Hamitic hypothesis" is a false and harmful colonial ideology; if you mention it in an answer, say so, and never present it as fact.
Worked example: explaining the effect of a reform
Question: Explain how the identity cards introduced by the Belgian administration in the 1930s changed Rwandan society. (6 marks)
Point 1. Fixed categories. Before, Hutu, Tutsi and Twa were social categories that a family could move between. After the census of 1933 to 1934, each person's category was written on an identity card, inherited from the father and could not change.
Point 2. Unequal access. The administration used the cards, and the false racial ideology behind them, to give chiefships and the best school places mainly to Tutsi, and to exclude most Hutu and Twa.
Point 3. Long-term harm. The cards outlived colonial rule; they were used for discrimination after independence and at roadblocks during the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi. They were removed after 1994.
Tip
The five Cs of socio-cultural reform: Church, Classroom, Clinic, City and Card. For each C, give one benefit and one cost.
Warning
Don't call every change "civilisation". That was the colonisers' word. Write what actually changed (literacy, new beliefs, new diseases treated, new divisions) and for whom. And don't blame the missions or the administration alone: they worked together, and some Rwandans gained from the new order while most lost.
Rwandans today carry an identity card that records no category, and the national motto is "Unity, Work, Patriotism". Why does it matter what a state writes on its citizens' documents? Can a label created by officials become, over time, a real division between people? How can it be undone?
Practice
Sources and credits
This lesson adapts CC BY-SA material and is shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.
