Rwanda is located in the sub-Sahara Africa region and is bordered on the west by the Democratic Republic of Congo, to the east by Tanzania, to the north by Uganda, and by Burundi to the south. It is known as the Great Lakes region because of its numerous lakes and rolling terrain. Rwanda has been the fighting grounds of intense ethnic violence between the Tutsi and Hutu tribal groups for the past forty years.
After Rwanda became a Belgium mandate in 1919, a cash crop economy was introduced and little has changed since. Today Rwanda is mainly a rural country with roughly 90 percent of the population participating in (mostly subsistence) agriculture. The main crops are beans, peas, bananas, cassava, sweet potatoes, sorghum, millet, and Irish potatoes. Rwanda lacks many natural resources and industry is minimal.

Since its independence from Belgium on July 1, 1962, Rwanda has had a very troubled political life. Since pre-colonial times, a Tutsi elite who made up about 15 percent of the population ruled Rwanda's government. The ethnic groups that developed from regional tribes were the Tutsi (15%) who were mainly cattle herders, the Hutu (84%), who mainly dealt in farming, and the Twa (1%). In pre-colonial times there existed a hierarchy. The ruling regime (king and chiefs) was mainly Tutsi who held the Hutu in servitude; however, at this time a clientele system existed and these groups mutually exchanged labor and existed in relative peace.

In 1935 Belgium introduced a discriminatory national identification based on ethnicity. The Belgian colonizers sought to maintain what they saw as traditional structures of power and thus reinforced the power of the Tutsi "natural rulers." Hutus collectively became classified as second-class citizens. The Tutsi's demanded independence, so the Belgians shifted their support to the Hutus (about 85 percent of the population) and formed the PARMEHUTU party, which began massacres of the Tutsi in 1959. It must be kept in mind, however, that this conception of history is debated between the Hutu and Tutsi depending on who wishes to use it to legitimize their power (I will explore this later). After independence, this party was democratically elected to power (with support of the majority Hutu) and Rwanda became a one-party state (PARMEHUTU/MDR). A series of military dictatorships continued the killing in the 1960s and 1970s. Also, a strict quota system was in place to restrict the access of Tutsis to education and government jobs. Tensions calmed down throughout the 1980s, but were revived again when on October 1, 1990, the Rwandese Patriotic Front (RPF, a rebel army of Tutsi exiles mainly from Uganda), with goals of unity, equality, and democracy, began a civil war against the dictatorship.

In the wake of this civil war the Hutu government used a steady stream of hate propaganda and hate crimes went purposely unpunished. In 1994, after several broken peace agreements, the Hutu dictatorship got desperate and carried out deliberate genocide resulting in the deaths of 1 million Tutsi (and some opposition Hutu) between April and July. The government classified all Tutsi as "evil" agents of the RPF and enemies of all Hutu. Since the 1930s the government required every citizen to carry an ethnic identity card and in 1994 these were essentially used as a Hutu license to kill. The genocide was carried out not only by the army and extremist militias (such as the Interahamwe), but Hutu civilians murdered their own Tutsi wives and neighbors. Thus, although ethnic inequalities existed throughout Rwandan history, they never reached the genocidal proportions that were brought on by the politicization of these ethnicities in the mid to late 20th century. "And while assassination of individuals was part of the political process (though exaggerated in the drama of court poetry), mass murders of people on the grounds of ethnic category did not occur in precolonial Rwanda." On July 4, 1994 the capital, Kigali, fell to the Rwandese Patriotic Front and the Tutsi-led government of today began to take shape.