People may have had different ideas about what it means to be “Hutu” or “Tutsi,” depending on the time and place. In Rwanda, social systems were not stable, even when the country was a colony and Belgium was in charge. Tutsi commoners were different from Tutsi aristocracy or elite, and rich Hutu people were often hard to tell apart from upper-class Tutsi.
When the Belgian colonists did surveys, they wanted to use a simple classification system to find out who lived in Rwanda and Burundi. They called someone a “Tutsi” if they had more than ten cows, which is a sign of wealth, or if they had a longer nose or neck, which is a physical trait often associated with Tutsis.
People used to say that Tutsis came to the Great Lakes area from the Horn of Africa.
Some researchers think that Tutsis are of Cushitic descent, even though they don’t speak a Cushitic language. They have lived in the places they are now for at least 400 years, which has caused a lot of marriages between them and Hutu people in the area. Ethnographers and scholars have recently agreed that Hutus and Tutsis, having mixed and married each other over the years, cannot truly be considered two separate ethnic groups.
A lot of experts and people who live in the Great Lakes Region think that the Tutsi are “Cushitics,” who are against Bantu groups like the Hutu and other groups in Uganda and the Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. It does, however, refer to a group of languages. For example, the Bantu lemma and the lemma on “Bantu people” both say that Bantu people speak Bantu languages. The Tutsi and the Hutu both speak the same Bantu language, so they are both Bantu people.
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