Origins of Hutu, Tutsi, and Twa

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The origins of the Hutu, Tutsi, and Twa people is a major issue of controversy in the histories of Rwanda and Burundi, as well as the Great Lakes region of Africa. The relationship among the three modern populations is thus, in many ways, derived from the perceived origins and claim to "Rwandan-ness". The largest conflicts related to this question were the Rwandan genocide, the Burundian genocide (Hutu and Tutsi), and the First and Second Congo Wars.

Ugandan scholar

When Europeans arrived in Rwanda to begin documenting traditions, Rwandan society consisted of three ethnicities that also serve as social castes. The largest group is the Hutu, consisting mostly of farmers. The second largest group is the Tutsi, mostly pastoralists, warriors and aristocrats. The smallest group is the Twa, which is a group of pygmy that hunt game to trade for agricultural products from the farmers. All three groups speak Kinyarwanda, which is a Bantu language.

There is disagreement as to when and how each group appeared in Rwanda. Some suggest the three groups diverged from each other while others suggest each group arriving in separate migration waves, first Twa, then Hutu, and finally Tutsi. In the separate arrival story, there is dispute in where the groups came from, when and how they arrived, and whether the arrival of some groups brought with them certain social development.

Hamitic hypothesis of Tutsi origin

The colonial scholars who found complex societies in sub-Saharan Africa developed the

However, in light of recent genetic studies, Hiernaux's theory on the origin of Tutsis in East Africa appears doubtful.[3]^[4] It has also been demonstrated that the Tutsis harbor little to no Northeastern African genetic influence on their paternal line.^[5] On the other hand, there is currently no mtDNA data available for the Tutsi, which might help shed light on their background.

One school of thought noted that the influx of pastoralists around the fifteenth century may have taken place over an extended period of time and been gradual and peaceful, rather than sudden and violent. The key distinction made was that migration was not the same as conquest. Other scholars delinked the arrival of Tutsi from the development of pastoralism and the beginning of the period of statebuilding. It appears clear that pastoralism was practiced in Rwanda prior to the fifteenth century immigration, while the dates of state formation and pastoralist influx do not entirely match. This argument thus attempts to downplay the importance of the pastoralist migrations.

Local divergence

Still other studies point out that cultural transmission can occur without actual human migration. This raises the question of how much of the changes around the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was the result of an influx of people as opposed to the existing population being exposed to new ideas. Studies that approach the subject of racial purity are among the most controversial. These studies point out that the pastoralist migrants and pre-migration Rwandans lived side by side for centuries and practiced extensive intermarriage. The notion that current Rwandans can claim exclusively Tutsi or Hutu bloodlines is thus questioned.^{[2]: 48–49}

The Rwandan myth of the Tutsi and Hutu difference was perpetuated by the Belgian Colonial Administration, helped by filmmaker Armand Denis during the 1930s.^[6]

Roger Blench has proposed that Twa originated as a

Another study concluded that, while the sickle cell trait among the Rwandan Hutu was comparable to that of neighboring people, it was almost non-existent among Rwandan Tutsi. Presence of the sickle cell trait is evidence of survival in the presence of malaria over many centuries, suggesting differing origins. Regional studies of the ability to digest lactose are also supportive. The ability to digest lactose among African adults is widespread only among desert-dwelling nomadic groups that have depended upon milk for millennia. Three quarters of the adult Tutsi of Rwanda and Burundi have a high ability to digest lactose, while only 5% of the adults of the neighboring Shi people of eastern Congo can. Among Hutu, one in three adults has a high capacity for lactose digestion, a surprisingly high number for an agrarian people, which Mamdani suggests may be the result of centuries of intermarriage with Tutsi.^[2]

In the 1988

In general, the Tutsi appear to share a close genetic kinship with neighboring Nilotic populations, particularly the Maasai. It is unclear whether this similarity is primarily due to extensive genetic exchanges between these communities through intermarriage or whether it ultimately stems from common origins.

... generations of gene flow obliterated whatever clear-cut physical distinctions may have once existed between these two Bantu peoples – renowned to be height, body build, and facial features. With a spectrum of physical variation in the peoples, Belgian authorities legally mandated ethnic affiliation in the 1920s, based on economic criteria. Formal and discrete social divisions were consequently imposed upon ambiguous biological distinctions. To some extent, the permeability of these categories in the intervening decades helped to reify the biological distinctions, generating a taller elite and a shorter underclass, but with little relation to the gene pools that had existed a few centuries ago. The social categories are thus real, but there is little if any detectable genetic differentiation between Hutu and Tutsi.^[12]

Tishkoff et al. (2009) found their mixed Hutu and Tutsi samples from Rwanda to be predominately of Bantu origin, with minor gene flow from