RWANDA – WHAT TO DO, WHEN TO DO, QUICK FACTS, RWANDA TRAVEL GUIDE

Known as ‘the land of a thousand hills’, Rwanda is a landlocked country full of lovely and a variety of landscapes. The spectacular Virunga volcanic mountains have high altitude forests, world-famous mountain gorillas, and Lake Kivu offers beautiful beaches, jutting peninsulas and an archipelago of islands.

Many visitors have been mesmerized by the Rwandese sense of humor and their way of living together its only 14 years after the genocide that threatened to shatter the social fabric of the country. Reconciliation has not been easy but its at landslide scale showing assign of  fruitfulness to the Natives . Upon assuming office, the Government of National Unity inherited a deeply scarred nation.

To set Rwanda’s recent history in a context, you need to go as far back as the late 13th century when pastoral Tutsi tribes arrived from the south and conquered the agricultural Hutu and hunter-gatherer Twa inhabitants of Rwanda, establishing a feudal kingdom. A unified state was established by King Kigeri Rwabuguri during the 19th century, but this lasted only until 1890 when Rwanda was annexed as a province of German East Africa.

As part of the post- settlement, Belgium was granted the right to govern Rwanda-Burundi. The Belgians sponsored the continued dominance of the Tutsi minority at the expense of the Hutu but were forced, in the 1960s, to concede independence under majority Hutu rule. Intercommunal violence between Hutus and Tutsis continued.

In 1973, Major-General Juvénal Habyarimana led a bloodless coup and established a Hutu-dominated military government. A few years later, the country’s sole political party was founded, dominated by Hutus. Sporadic fighting resumed in the early 1990s. Hutu extremist armed militias set about the systematic murder of Tutsis. It’s estimated that approximately 800,000 people were killed.

Nevertheless, the Rwandese are not only living together today but they are striving to be recognized as one people one nation . Rwanda is a country of unimaginable beauty and such beauty defies its violent past: may it continue to defy it forever.
Currently Rwanda is are publican after the expelled of the French and this has lead to a change in the daily lives among the natives