When Belgium succeeded Germany as the colonial controller of Ruanda–Urundi, now Rwanda and Burundi, after World War I, it viewed the imposingly tall, statuesque, cattle-herding Tutsi as a ruling class, with Hutu—the large majority of the populations of both small countries—as subservient. The Belgians provided better schooling and business opportunities to Tutsi, hindered Hutu uplift, and established an unfortunate twentieth-century platform for the genocidal tragedies that would later propel major exoduses and exterminations. When the full history of discrimination and displacement in this special corner of Central Africa comes to be written, Wrong’s powerful book will feature prominently in the evidentiary trail that has been recently overwritten by the successes of President Paul Kagame’s developmentally effective Rwandan regime.
Although Wrong does not completely re-examine the story of how Belgian administrators in the League of Nations mandatory territory of Ruanda–Urundi distorted its pre-colonial past, she hints appropriately at how administrators’ decisions—including...