The 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda was driven by decades of systematically developed ideological propaganda. Extremist leaders used state-sponsored media, including newspapers such as Kangura and radio stations such as RTLM, to dehumanise the Tutsi, portray them as an existential threat to the Hutu majority, and incite mass extermination.

ALSO READ: Kayibanda, Mugesera and Bagosora: The Tropical Nazis

Léon Mugesera’s speech contributed to the genocidal project by promoting a so-called security solution intended to ensure the survival of the Hutu population. Death threats against one’s identity emerge through the rejection of the "other,” who is portrayed as fundamentally different and inherently bad. Assigning animal names to human beings is part of a broader process of dehumanisation. The animalisation of the "other” is a psychological, social, and political mechanism that reduces a human being to the status of an animal. Used as a tool of dehumanisation, this form of symbolic violence has historically justified all forms of domination, racism, and mass violence. A pre-genocide publication in Kangura serves as a key example of extreme propaganda and hate speech.

ALSO READ: Kangura's 8th Hutu commandment re-examined

This type of mobilisation produces a powerful emotional shock. The evocation of an impending enslavement of the Hutu by the "Hima-Tutsi” minority, rooted in narratives of genocide and the extermination of the Hutu majority, overcame the inertia of much of the Hutu population. To gain total adherence, these narratives framed genocide as a pre-emptive survival strategy, convincing the Hutu that their annihilation was imminent at the hands of the Tutsi. Valérie Bemeriki, a journalist at RTLM, stated:

ALSO READ: Ngeze and his role in inciting the 1994 Genocide

"We were told how the Inyenzi took pregnant women, knocked them out with a club, and opened their bellies to extract the foetus, which was then laid on the ground and killed after its own abdomen was opened; you had also heard that they threw mothers carrying babies on their backs into Lake Muhazi, and that even today it is said that their bodies are still floating on the water, such that some bodies must have continued via the Nile River, and that even Europeans may have seen some of these corpses washing up in the Mediterranean Sea. You therefore understand that the cruelty of the Inyenzi is irreversible. The cruelty of the Inyenzi can only be cured by their total extermination—by putting all of them to death, hence extinction.”

ALSO READ: Killing many in a short period; how civilians were prepared for the Genocide

The mass participation in the 1994 Genocide was driven by ideological propaganda. Extremist leaders used state institutions and the media to promote pervasive fear, falsely framing the entire Tutsi population as a hostile threat intent on exterminating the Hutu. The situation appears as an extreme security dilemma: those who prepared to become perpetrators presented themselves as victims, and their campaign of destruction was framed as an act of prevention and survival for their own group.

ALSO READ: Rwanda’s commemorations in the shadow of indifference

The driving forces of this propaganda consisted of a set of representations that led to the Tutsi being perceived as a threat to be eliminated. Since Rwanda’s independence, the regimes of Presidents Grégoire Kayibanda and Juvénal Habyarimana institutionalised deep-rooted ethnic and regional divisions. They reinforced exclusionary practices and underpinned systematic discrimination. Post-independence governments institutionalised divisive colonial narratives to marginalise minorities and consolidate political control through segregationist policies, quotas, and state-linked violence. The regimes’ guiding principle was rooted in revenge against the Tutsi and in the idea that the Hutu embodied democracy.

ALSO READ: Why genocide ideology doesn’t dissolve three decades after dispersion of genocidaires

In this way, deeply entrenched and biased ideas about the Tutsi were weaponised into a hateful ideology. Following the RPF invasion, these stereotypes formed the basis of propaganda that actively incited mass extermination of the Tutsi.

The writer is a historian based in Kigali.