Rwanda's Struggle for Independence

So today is my last post for this project and tomorrow our group is giving a brief presentation on how Rwanda gained it’s independence. I found a few good websites and learned a lot about Rwanda’s struggle for independence. By 1957 Rwanda was struggling towards colonial independence. That year the Hutu formed political parties and issued a proposal as an attempt to change Rwanda’s power structure. Hutu political parties won the election of 1960 making Grégoire Kayibanda the prime minister. Since the Hutu always had conflicts with the Tutsi, they finally decided to get revenge. This is believed to have been one of the main causes of the genocide. In early1961 Rwanda became a republic and on July 1^st 1962 the Belgians finally renounced their power and granted Rwanda its independence. Rwanda’s independence changed everything. The Hutu took over Rwanda and the Tutsi dominated the Burundi’s post-independence governments. From then on, racial fighting between the two countries began and lasted for few decades. 

http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/war/rwanda.htm

http://www.unitedhumanrights.org/Genocide/genocide_in_rwanda.htm

General Information and Pictures

Today I was looking around for some more information on Rwanda and I came across the following website (http://www.gov.rw/). This website has just about everything there is to know about Rwanda. It has information on the genocide, government, president, general facts ect. This website also has a certain section that covers all current news in Rwanda so I think we should use it to better our script because it’s reliable and it’s up to date. You can also find quotes and survivor's perspectives and I think those would be great to add into our documentary as well. I also found a couple of more websites with pictures from the genocide and I think they would be great to use in our documentary.

http://www.rudyfoto.com/RwandaImagePage.html

http://www.travelblog.org/Photos/2473041.html

Rwanda Genocide Photo Galleries

One of my partners for this project is Michio Papers (http://michiosblog.blogspot.com/) Today I was looking at some of Michio’s posts and I realized that he’s been working ahead and looking to find some pictures for our documentary. It looks like he found some really good photographs that we are probably gonna end up using in our documentary. Anyways so I decided to do the same thing  and try to find some good pictures today, since powerful photographs are the main bases of a good documentary. Getting a head start on story-boarding can help us in the long run. These are a few great websites I found that have tons of high quality images of the Genocide in Rwanda. I also think they would be great sources for us to use for the rest of this project.

http://ttt.pugetsoundcenter.org/projects/2003/ttt03008/rwanda/pictures.htm

http://hrw.org/photos/2003/rwanda/ 

http://www.flickr.com/photos/camera_rwanda/sets/1269698

General History of Rwanda

After getting my paper peer edited on Friday and reading other research papers, I realized I had a lot of work to do in order to improve my paper. So today I started doing a lot more research for my paper so I could add more statistics to it since lack of statistics was the main weakness of my paper. During my research I came across a few really good websites all reliable and full of great information. These websites gave me a better understanding of the history of Rwanda and they are all up to date and have a lot of interesting statistics.

Today was definitely a very productive research day for me. I learned about all the different conflicts between the Hutu and Tutsi throughout history that lead up to the genocide in Rwanda. The conflicts began when the Belgians colonized Rwanda, they treated the Tutsis better than Hutus and they considered them more superior. So the Tutsis started leading better lives and considered themselves better than the Hutus and they were soon higher in Rwanda’s social status than the Hutus. This caused major conflicts between the two races along with a few other major events that caused a great deal of tension and hostility in Rwanda leading up to the genocide. I definitely recommend that you guys visit and browse through these websites since Rwanda’s history is rather eventful and interesting.

 

1.http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/war/rwanda.htm

2. http://www.cnn.com/EVENTS/1996/year.in.review/topten/hutu/history.html

3. http://www.religioustolerance.org/genocide4.htm

4. http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/war/rwanda.htm

5. http://www.american.edu/ted/ice/rwanda.htm

Interview Reflection

The person we interviewed for this project was Pablo Colin. One of my partners, Michio, found him through his dad, who used to work with Pablo at an architectural firm. Originally we were aiming to conduct our interview with him in person but he was unavailable so we had no choice but to carry out the interview over emails. This was quite unfortunate because I think we could have gotten a lot more out of this interview if we were meeting him in person. However, I think our questions were really good because he answered each one of them with very elaborate answers and taught us a lot.

Pablo Colin was a 39-year-old architect who moved to Del Mar from Zimbabwe along with his two sons with nothing but a few suitcases and very little money. He had been debating whether he should leave Zimbabwe for a while and in 2000 he finally made his final decision of leaving his friends, family, job and his whole life in Zimbabwe behind to take his two kids and move to Del Mar. He made this decision in order to open up more opportunities for his kids and their future. It’s amazing to think how much this family sacrificed by leaving Zimbabwe. Starting a whole new life in an entirely new and unfamiliar place had to be very difficult for them. However, emigrating from Zimbabwe changed their lives for the better. Around the time they moved, situations in Zimbabwe were worst than ever. “The government in Zimbabwe was starting to fight for its life, as there was the first civic movement that formed a powerful opposition in 1999. They cracked down on civil liberties and had started to close all avenues for freedom of expression years earlier, so the people had been made powerless almost without noticing it, until it was too late.” The government was extremely corrupt and was power sharing with the opposition, which resulted in oppressing the people. 

Although life in Zimbabwe was very difficult they still believed that they would go back home in a few years. It wasn’t until about five years later that they began feeling comfortable with the idea that this was their new home. After finally experiencing freedom and rights for the first time and making a whole new life for themselves, going back to Zimbabwe was just not an option anymore. “To survive there I would have had to deal with more and more corruption, shortages, repression, and desperation.” Now Pablo is leading a great life in Del Mar, not having to deal with any of this, the only regret in his mind being why he didn’t leave Zimbabwe earlier.

I feel that this interview helped us with this project a lot because by talking to someone that actually went through everything we are learning about. We got a clear understanding of what the living conditions are like and we began to distinguish all the hardships in the African peoples everyday life. I believe that this interview taught us more about Africa than any amount of reading and researching could have taught us about this topic because we had a chance to get a primary perspective. He was an amazing source for us and we are most likely going to email him with some more follow up questions so we can learn more about life in Zimbabwe.  

Hutu and Tutsi Conflict

This past week my partners and I have been researching our topic and composing our mini movie. I learned so much about the history of Rwanda while making this movie. In the 1780’s, one of the most important events that took place in Rwanda at that time was the Hutu and Tutsi conflict. Around 600 years ago before the colonization by the Germans, one of the major tribes that lived in Rwanda were the Hutu. However the Tutsi a warrior race from Ethiopia invaded their native soil and took over. The Hutu, running out of options, arranged a deal with the Tutsi to raise crops for them in return for their protection. The two groups ended up living mutually in harmony for the time being. They spoke the same language as one another and intermarried. For more information about this topic visit this great websites I found (http://orvillejenkins.com/peoples/tutsiandhutu.html). Not only did I learn about the history of Rwanda I also got to learn a little more about their culture by picking out the song for our movie. It was interesting to find how different the music they listen to in Africa is than what our interpretation of music is. The song we picked out for our mini movie is from an ethnic African tribe and it’s mostly just some drum beats and random chants but it seems to work well with our movie. 

Sunday, September 7th, 2008

Today I started doing further research on Rwanda and I learned a lot of interesting things about it. I also downloaded Adobe Premiere on my laptop so it would make it easier for our group to work on our project. But I’m actually not very sure if we should use my laptop for our project because if I get sick one day and I don’t come to school then our group would end up stuck with nothing to do and none of us want that. But I think we would be able to use it if we just find another way to back up our files, like on a flash drive or maybe a hardrive to leave it at school just in case. So far in this project I believe our group is doing especially well because we were the only group in our class to meet the first deadline of having our interview scheduled and I also think we work fairly well together. Today I also started writing our research paper, it was a slightly difficult at first since I haven’t written a research paper for a while but once I got started I got really into it and I ended up completing nearly a page of the paper. I think today was quite productive, I feel like I finally have decent understanding of our topic and currently feel like it’s going to be a lot easier than I thought it was going to be. Our interview is scheduled for tomorrow so I’m probably going to post about it soon.