MAPS OF HISTORY · HISTORY OF · Rwanda

ONE LAND · 3 ATLASES

Rwanda, on the map of history

What was Rwanda before it was Rwanda? Below, every era of this land in the Maps of History collection — who ruled it, what it was called, and when control changed — each line linked to the dated map that shows it. Modern borders stand in as an honest approximation; every atlas says so on the map itself.

Ruanda (German East Africa) · The Great War, 1914–1918

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Rwanda · The Cold War, 1945–1991

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Rwanda · The Decolonization of Africa, 1945–1994

A German, then Belgian, mandate ruled through the Tutsi monarchy — until Belgium abruptly switched patronage to the Hutu majority in the 1959 revolution, so that independence in July 1962 arrived already scarred by pogroms and mass flight. Three decades of exclusion later, the exiled Tutsi diaspora’s RPF invaded from Uganda in 1990, and a besieged regime answered with the genocide of April–July 1994: some 800,000 people murdered in a hundred days while the world stood aside. The identity cards Belgium had used to classify Hutu from Tutsi became instruments of the killing. On this map Rwanda is a memorial. Remember them.

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