The Rwandan Identity Card
1933 · Colonial Registration Booklets · Work 700 of 1,871
A registration table of the colonial administration in Rwanda in 1933, under the shaded porch roof of a low mud-brick building, on a folding wooden camp table a large register volume lying open at a slant and soft in focus, its pages a grid of fine ruled lines, beside it an open wooden crate fifty centimetres long filled with closed booklets of plain unmarked pale card seen from the fore-edge, a dip pen on the table, hard midday light on the red earth outside, green hills in haze, waiting people in plain cotton wraps seen from behind against the light, bare mud-plastered walls.
- What it was used for
- This was the card every adult in Rwanda had to carry, with the holder's group entered on it: Hutu, Tutsi or Twa. The Belgian colonial administration introduced it. Human Rights Watch writes that the system was put into effect in the 1930s, with each Rwandan asked to declare his group identity. The declarations were collected by local authorities and noted on the cards, and newborns were registered at birth. Around 15 per cent declared themselves Tutsi, 84 per cent Hutu and one per cent Twa. After the revolution and the founding of the republic the entry remained. Human Rights Watch writes that the cards which had once secured privileges for Tutsi now kept them out of employment and education.
- What was new
- What was new was not the card but what it fixed. A mobile social category became a fixed administrative entry. Human Rights Watch describes how this came about: physical features helped only in part, descent was the best indicator but laborious and sometimes inaccurate. So each person was asked to declare his group once, and the result was written down. Thereafter children inherited the father's entry, illegitimate children the mother's. Changing groups became harder, though not impossible. The widespread story that anyone owning ten or more cattle was registered as Tutsi is rejected by Human Rights Watch: tax rules in the 1930s did distinguish by cattle, the registration procedure did not. In 1994 militiamen at roadblocks had these cards shown in order to pick out Tutsi and kill them.
What the sources leave open: Human Rights Watch dates the introduction only to "the 1930s", not to 1933 as the work's title does. This chapter says nothing about use in 1994. The roadblocks are documented by the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, which expressly gives the number of Tutsi killed as an estimate of 800,000 to one million.