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Human occupation of Rwanda is thought to have begun shortly after the last ice age. By the 16th century, the inhabitants had organized into a number of kingdoms. In the 19th century, ''Mwami'' (king) Rwabugiri of the Kingdom of Rwanda conducted a decades-long process of military conquest and administrative consolidation that resulted in the kingdom coming to control most of what is now Rwanda. The colonial powers, Germany and Belgium, allied with the Rwandan court, allowing it to conquer the remaining autonomous kingdoms along its borders and racializing the system of minority Tutsi dominance created under Rwabugiri. A convergence of anti-colonial, and anti-Tutsi sentiment resulted in Belgium granting national independence in 1961. Direct elections resulted in a representative government dominated by the majority Hutu under President Grégoire Kayibanda. Unsettled ethnic and political tensions were worsened when Juvénal Habyarimana, who was also Hutu, seized power in 1973. In 1991, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a rebel group composed of 10,000 Tutsi refugees from previous decades of unrest, invaded the country, starting the Rwandan Civil War. The war ground on, worsening ethnic tensions, as the Hutu feared losing their gains. The assassination of Habyarimana was the catalyst for the eruption of the 1994 genocide, in which hundreds of thousands of Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed. The Tutsi RPF conquered Rwanda, and there was a counter-genocide of Hutus by Tutsis. Millions of Hutu fled as refugees, contributing to large refugee camps of Hutu in the neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo, where there were already refugees from other countries. These were disbanded by an RPF-sponsored invasion in 1996 that replaced the new Congolese president as the result of the First Congo War. A second invasion to replace the new Congolese president initiated the Second Congo War, the deadliest war since World War II and one involving many African nations including Rwanda. == Neolithic to the Middle Ages == The territory of present-day Rwanda has been green and fertile for many thousands of years, even during the last ice age, when part of Nyungwe Forest was above the ice sheet. It is not known when the country was first inhabited, but it is thought that humans moved into the area shortly after that ice age, either in the Neolithic period, around ten thousand years ago, or in the long humid period which followed, up to around 3000 BC.〔Chrétien p44〕 The earliest inhabitants of the region are generally thought to have been the Twa, a group of Pygmy forest hunters and gatherers, whose descendants still live in Rwanda today.〔〔(Richburg, Keith B. (1998) ''Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa'' ), San Diego, CA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, p. 102, ISBN 0-15-600583-2〕 Archaeological excavations conducted from the 1950s onwards have revealed evidence of sparse settlement by hunter gatherers in the late stone age, followed by a larger population of early iron age settlers.〔 These later groups were found to have manufactured artifacts, including a type of dimpled pottery, iron tools and implements.〔Chrétien p45〕 Hundreds of years ago, the Twa were partially supplanted by the immigration of a Bantu group, the ancestors of the agriculturalist ethnic group, today known as the Hutus.〔 The Hutu began to clear forests for their permanent settlements. The exact nature of the third major immigration, that of a predominantly pastoralist people known as Tutsi, is highly contested.〔Much Rwanda scholarship revolves around arguments as to the origin of Tutsi, Hutu and Twa as distinct racial groups. For example, David Newbury rejects the migration thesis outright, but allows for "mobility" in which people of different physical stock arrived in the region, but without "an interpretation that relies on racial determinism or ethnic reification." In contrast, Gérard Prunier accepts the theory that the Tutsi came from outside the Great Lakes region and were at the time of their arrival a distinct racial group. (Mamdani, fn #38, p. 292)〕 Oral histories of the Kingdom of Rwanda often trace the origins of the Rwandan people back nearly 10,000 ago to a legendary king named Gihanga, to whom metalworking and other modernizing technologies are also commonly attributed. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「History of Rwanda」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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